On a different subject, I would have a bit more respect for Gavin if he just said "My presentation, the Q&A, and any conversations I have will be public record. Period. Else go piss up a rope."
Clearly this is not how Gavin rolls as evidenced by the structure and methods of the Bitcoin Foundation, and that is a major part of the reason that I do not support Gavin or the Bitcoin Foundation.
I suspect that the entire Bitcoin project is in danger of losing what support it has among the more radical of the 'open' group of thinkers.
A preferable scenario would be for Bitcoin Foundation and the reference client to loose support while the rest of the project continues on without it.
A better way of putting it would be to retire the reference implementation as a prototype that has served its purpose, once a heterogeneous mix of two or three clean slate implantations are ready to replace it.
One one of these threads some time ago I proposed the following:
A separate
exact mirror repository be maintained by a group of devs who have the trust of a sub-set of users (i.e., Maxwell and Todd.)
It would make no different what repo was pulled from (or binaries built from) functionally, but users could sort of 'vote' in a way by choosing one distribution channel or the other.
The advantage of this, in addition to providing a way for users to express sentiment, would be that a separate distribution channel would be exercised and thus more understood and ready to go in case of a dire need (e.g., Gavin comes under pressure to introduce (or not introduce) some critical code structure.)
If such a structure were developed and proved to be popular I think it could also have the effect of discouraging evolution along paths that a majority of end-users considered to be harmful. As it stand now, a fair fraction of the userbase seems to not trust the Bitcoin Foundation and their motives for the ecosystem (with good reason in my opinion) and I don't think it is a rational argument that this body has no influence on the code-base direction.