I probably haven't been keeping up with the bitcointalk forums as much as yourself, but I haven't gotten the impression that the main bitcoin developers treat alternative implementations as threatening.
There are already several moderately-popular alternative implementations in the wild. Bitcoinj is used by pretty much every Android-based Bitcoin app. Electrum (a popular thin-client) is using a custom implementation on their backends, too.
Every time I ask or see a question from people who are working on alternative clients, the developers have always been supportive and informative.
The biggest problem, and possibly the underlying spirit of the warning you quoted, is that the current version of the protocol is not super-well documented. Some data structures are undefined and need to be reverse-engineered from other implementations (such as net_time), others are ambiguously defined.
My takeaway from the thread you linked is closer to this quote:
"Yes, please, feedback from re-implementors is very helpful."
— Gavin Andresen, lead Bitcoin developer.
> Electrum (a popular thin-client) is using a custom implementation on their backends, too.
The Electrum server doesn't do any network communication of it's own, it's a bunch of external databases that does it's communication though a standard bitcoind.
There are already several moderately-popular alternative implementations in the wild. Bitcoinj is used by pretty much every Android-based Bitcoin app. Electrum (a popular thin-client) is using a custom implementation on their backends, too.
Every time I ask or see a question from people who are working on alternative clients, the developers have always been supportive and informative.
The biggest problem, and possibly the underlying spirit of the warning you quoted, is that the current version of the protocol is not super-well documented. Some data structures are undefined and need to be reverse-engineered from other implementations (such as net_time), others are ambiguously defined.
My takeaway from the thread you linked is closer to this quote:
"Yes, please, feedback from re-implementors is very helpful." — Gavin Andresen, lead Bitcoin developer.