Michael Ford, the Bitcoin core contributor, has been named as the new maintainer of the open source software project. Ford, who is famous by his handle name ‘fanquake,’ will the fifth maintainer, who will join the existing four, namely, Wladimir van Der Laan, Jonas Schnelli, Marco Falke, and Samuel Dobson.
It often presumed that a core code maintainer is a leader of the project, which is far from being true. Core code maintainers have an influence, and a big role to play across projects. Once reviewing a code change is complete, they guide the process and integrate code snippets which are sufficiently scrutinized.
In the absence of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, the responsibility of sustainably maintaining the blockchain and its open source projects is on the core code maintainers. The decision to appoint Michael Ford as the newest core code maintainer was made at the recently concluded CoreDev meeting in Amsterdam.
CoreDev meeting is an invite-only bi-annual gathering of Bitcoin Core contributors, who are spread across the globe. It gives the participants a chance to interact with other contributors face-to-face, who otherwise chat online. The latest CoreDev meeting was conducted between 5th and 7th June. Commenting on his new responsibilities, Ford said,
I’ll gain merge access and will continue with all triage/repo management work. I’ll be focusing primarily on build system development with some guidance from [Cory Fields].
