[Valodim]

Here is the short version from someone who took part in this process: while serving as the editor of the draft, Werner did not let anything into the draft that wasn't his own idea. But for his own ideas, there were cases where a new feature was committed to spec master and released in gnupg within the week. He was impossible to work with over many years, to the point that everyone agreed that the only way forward was to leave gnupg behind. This is a bonkers decision for OpenPGP as an ecosystem, but it was not made in ignorance of the consequences. And as far as I'm aware, even with today's hindsight, noone involved in the process regrets making the decision.

[upofadown]

Yes, the OpenPGP standards schism was all about personality conflicts. Those conflicts still came from a fundamental difference of philosophy. Who's idea was it to have Koch lead the most recent attempt at a process? Why was that supposed to make a deadlocked process somehow work?

None of this matters now. Everyone is cheerfully walking into an interoperability disaster that will cause much harm. There isn't any real chance GnuPG will lose this war, it is pretty much infrastructure at this point. But the war will cause a lot of harm to the PGP ecosystem, possibly even to the point that it becomes unusable in practice. This is an actual crisis.

Either faction can stop this. But at this point both factions are completely unreasonable and are worthy of criticism.

[Valodim]

Sorry, but no. This is not a 50/50 situation where a bonkers position is inexplicably backed by half the populace. There is one faction that is a single person on a large lever, and another who are everybody else. Werner made it clear he will accept nothing less than an unquestioning BDFL hierarchy, but has over many years demonstrated no competence to actually fill that role (TFA being a small example of this).