On the 12th of April, 2022 I was "temporally suspended" by Andrew Poelstra from being a maintainer of rust-bitcoin repository. I was notified about this action by a letter from him without any prior discussion. The cause of the decision was my public expression of the statement that cases of plagiarism must not be tolerated and must be acted upon (thread starting from https://twitter.com/dr_orlovsky/status/1513555717218873355?s=21).
Andrew referenced to the fact that while rust-bitcoin is an anti-CoC community, he still considered my words as those which can't be acceptable for a maintainer of rust-bitcoin, since they may be read as a threat of physical violence. We had a mailing after, where I clarified that there were no threats of physical violence. I was surprised that ethic compatibility was a part of requirements for being rust-bitcoin maintainer, which was not what I expected from "anti-CoC" policy of the repo. Andrew agreed that this "anti-CoC" policy and requirements for maintainer conduct are in contradiction, but he still will be applying criteria for a maintainer conduct outside of rust-bitcoin project when will be making decisions on adding/removing mantainers. Specifically, he said:
It is true that maintainership of this project comes with expectations of conduct outside of the project (and also true that these are not made explicit, which I apologize for). I can see the conflict here with being "anti-CoC" but I stand by it ...
What I can say in this regard: when I was joining rust-bitcoin, I knew that (1) it was an anti-CoC (code of conduct) community and (2) Andrew is the creator of the project and he has all the rights to decide who should be a maintainer and who is not in a way he liked. I expected that (1) and (2) taken together will still mean that the only criteria for the maintainer role is the level of technical contribution, and do not include judgement on personal conduct outside of the project. I was wrong.
Over last four years I invested significant amount of my time into developing parts of the library and reviewing PR to it. Some of this time was supported by LNP/BP Standards Association, but most of it was unpaid. It is hard to judge on the technical value of my contributions, but at least by the amount of the commits and code in the accepted PRs I've been the leading contributor during the most of the time throuthout these years (proof: https://github.com/rust-bitcoin/rust-bitcoin/graphs/contributors?from=2018-12-31&to=2022-04-12&type=c).
From now on, I have to state that I can't spend any more of my time on contributing to the project from which I can be expelled at any moment even without previous discussion, -- but just because someone misunderstood my public statements, especially in a situation when I am the victim of bad behaviour (plagiarism) and refered to personal responsibility/accountability for those who violate such principles. Thus, I am withdrawing from a position of rust-bitcoin maintainer on a permanent basis, instead of "temporaly suspension", since I consider this repository has "an implicit" code of conduct, which terms are inaceptable for me and are not aligned with my values.