The gossip mills in computer science :-)

I used to work with Ben Goertzel (a lot of fun, BTW) but I don't know David Hart. Sounds like personal issues.

BTW, OpenCog is an interesting system. I have spent a little time playing with it on Ubuntu. I would be more interested if it was not mostly written in C++ (with some Guile Scheme and Lua scripting). If you like working with C++ and are interested in AI, then it is worth a look.