The Ridiculous Qrow Drama Megathread

TLDR: Qrow is attempting a hostile takeover of Zero-K and the wider engine community. Be wary of any software he publishes, such as Shiro.

I've been putting this off in favour of doing useful things, but I just put out a large update so now it is time for this thread. I don't want to write this post but it appears to have become necessary. As such, any trolls that pop in to leave their irrelevant 2¢ will be liberally moderated.

Back in June Qrow revealed to Electricboogoloo that his end goal was a hostile takeover of Zero-K (as well as BAR and the engine as a whole). Electricboogoloo was concerned and shared this chat log and given me permission to reproduce it:
[Spoiler]
Some context:

• Qrow has been around since 2014 and has been particularly active in the last two years, if the rating graphs are any guide.
• Qrow is a bit of an ideas guy, but one that can execute. E.g. he came up with the Train Factory and has shown up to many, but not all, of the tournaments he has run.
• Qrow started running the Lobster Roll tournament series in 2021 and set up the Zero-K tournament discord server as part of this.
• The tournament server took over as the semi-public place for Zero-K voice chat after running official voice channels become impossible due to abuses that we lacked the capacity to moderate.

The chat log above was concerning but not urgent. We gave Qrow space to give up on the scheme or for people to talk him out of it. With time he might realise that splitting the community in the way he was suggesting would not help anyone.

In late August Qrow released his lobby client, Shiro. This was surprising since I don't recall him ever revealing that he was making a lobby client, although he had dropped cryptic comments in the preceding weeks. Extra lobbies are by no means bad and are even somewhat of a tradition in Spring. But it was a bit concerning given the chat log we had received plus other communication. I was later told that Shiro was meant to test whether Zero-K really was open source, the logic being that if we did not add it to Zero-K it would prove that we were actually "closed". That isn't really how any of this works though, Qrow has not offered to put any parts of Shiro into the rest of Zero-K, and integration is likely impossible because Shiro runs on a different underlying system.

In early September I was told that Qrow had reported the Zero-K GitHub project for some sort of license violation, probably to do with not being properly open source, and had received an "inconclusive" assessment. He seemed to be making good on his promise to take over Zero-K, plus if any third parties take any heed of his nonsense it could waste a lot of time for everyone involved. This prompted some members of his tournament Discord server to move to a new server and they seem to have shifted everyone across. On my end I became resigned to eventually writing this post.

As a "light intermission" I think it would be useful to unpick just how badly Qrow has misunderstood open source.

quote: Qrow: additionally, steps are being taken in order to secure the github and licensing for the original spring engine which recoil relies on the licensing for Qrow: so if we can secure that, we bag zero-k and BAR at the same time Electricboogoloo: it worked out because client last time was spring speration thats far diffrent than game state dying for honestly a slew of other reasons and issues with old guard admin Qrow: because no one who works on those games now actually holds the licenses for them Electricboogoloo: so I do not see them as the same Qrow: tbf the current ones we got are actually fine compared to the other ones Qrow: but, assuming the plan goes well: Qrow: we grab the licensing and ownership of the springRTS engine, and by extension recoil, we immediately assume control over ZeroK and BAR by means of controlling their license and then (this is already done) we simply set up new file and SPADS autohosts and then badaboom

It seems to me like the fundamental confusion here is between projects and licenses. The open source GPL license that Zero-K is published under means that anyone can take the code to adapt or reuse provided they also publish it under the same license, retaining the requirement that further derivatives are able to be reused and adapted. Nobody owns or controls the code. Technically each individual contributor has copyright over their contributions, but when offering their code for inclusion they did so with a GPL license. So Qrow cannot "secure control" of the licenses for Spring, Recoil, BAR, Zero-K or any other piece of open source software. It's an incoherent concept.

Projects are a different matter. The main Zero-K project on GitHub has owners and people who ultimately control which changes get made and what gets released. Every single open source project works this way, with some set of people who manage it. Being licensed under the GLP just means anyone can fork the project and work on their own version, not that every project is obliged to integrate all changes. I don't know what German law he is referring, but if it could knock out the foundation of the entire open source software movement, then I probably would have heard of it. Sometimes projects need forks, but the first step for an active project is to try contributing to the main repository, which Qrow has not shown a great amount of interest in doing.

There is more general information in Cold Take #25 - Completely Free.

So, where do we go from here? My naive hope is that Qrow realises that nobody (apart from a few people with their own axes to grind) wants what he is doing and subsequently snaps out of it. Thus far in DMs he has denied the allegations, accused me of being systematically against him for the past six months, and besmirched the old members of his Discord server. His main talking point is that, after releasing Shiro, he asked for an API call that would let lobbies fetch the user list, even offline users. This would involve sending millions of usernames to anyone who requests them, significantly straining the server. I said it wasn't happening and if he didn't know why, then I didn't have the time to explain. His request was a bit ambiguous so I may have misunderstood what he wanted, but I also lacked the time to draw his real request out of him, not when I knew the intent behind Shiro.

Perhaps the main reason I'm writing this post is that I don't trust someone with Qrow's stated goals not to put malware in his lobby. It might be fine if he were just someone with an abandoned Discord server and an axe to grind, but he is writing software and trying to make connections to spread his nonsense. But he has done quite shady things and I don't know what he might stoop to in the future, so I can't in good conscience sit on this forever, even if I think the chance of malware is currently rather low. This post also acts as something substantive to reference for when I feel the need to explain why I am not supporting anything Qrow does from this point on, at least unless he credibly comes to his senses. Banning him may be wise, and that is certainly an option he can force, but I am not sure what it would achieve.

I have to thank Electricboogoloo for being the main one to bring this up, although he is not the only source as I have talked to others about Qrow. To me Qrow was mainly an enthusiastic community member who could be a bit unreliable and prone to melodrama, but who was otherwise trying to write guides and run events to grow Zero-K.

Final Edit: Attempting to hijack an open source project through github is unacceptable conduct. Kill it with fire.

That is 50 pounds of yikes in a 5 pound bag. I always thought the fightorder thing with its own wiki was a little odd and I have a strong policy against running anything I suspect is vibe coded so I never touched Shiro, but it's so much worse than I imagined.

Appreciate you taking the time to write this up and posting recipes.

Also goddamn I was confused as hell when you mentioned trying to steal open source projects in the discord, and this has not helped.

That's now how this works! That's not how any of this works!

Edit: there's also something kind of funny about this coming from the guy who annoyed everyone into getting magpie piledrivered into the ground and then insisted it was fine. Like, I obviously don't agree with every take y'all have on the game but the idea of Magpie man doing the balancing is horrifying.