22 ms·

I'm sorry

345 points by wfox 5y ago

Aeolun 5y ago
This whole thing just screams clusterfuck to me. Don’t trust Microsoft or give anyone admin access to your repos if you won’t want them to do bad shit. I guess they technically own Github, so don’t use that if you don’t trust them either.
- oaiey 5y ago
  I think there is very little intent on Microsoft behalf in this. This is a OSS foundation which enforce their (understanding of) ownership. What is horrible is the absolute lack of transparency, communication and community in this foundation. What they have done happens also in the Apache, Eclipse or whatever foundation as well. Just that these are communities which are mature and composed of experienced open source people which know how to address and communicate with other maintainers/egos/people. Open Source Communities are about people. Not the tech. You are only successful if you are good with people. What they did there multiple times was pulling nuclear options without telling people. The .NET Foundation is run by Microsoft MVP program (Claire, Ben, others) which live in their own dimension which is different from the rest of the community. They are supported by lawyers/managers of Microsoft trying to protect the brand and the core of .NET. That is a setup for failure without any malicious intent. Disclosure: .NET Fanboy + (successful) open source maintainer (not .NET foundation related)
bmy78 5y ago
Actions speak louder than words. If she were truly sorry, she would’ve reverted the PR and have it go through the normal process. Instead she wrote a really long message about how the .NET Foundation owns your project.
- wk_end 5y ago
  The commit was reverted (see https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779)
  - kylemh 5y ago
    Yes, but the author wasn't the one that reverted it.
    - wk_end 5y ago
      It was (rightly) reverted almost immediately after it was first committed, a week ago. I wouldn't expect the author of this apology - posted today - to have instantaneously realized the error of their ways and ever had the chance to do the revert themselves, and I don't think that reflects on whether the apology is sincere or not.
zb 5y ago
I don't know anything about the .NET Foundation or much about this particular situation, but I know a little about open source governance. It appears that Novotny believed she was acting in her capacity as a (long-dormant) maintainer of the project when she merged the PR in question. It was clearly wrong to do so without following the process set down by the other maintainers, and she was right to apologise. However, as the Executive Director of the Foundation, she also had the power (perhaps indirectly) to force a merge of a patch in any project controlled by the Foundation. All Foundations must reserve this power to themselves (you can't take on legal liability for something you have no control over), but they also must never use it. To do so is the nuclear option, to be invoked only after all trust and goodwill has been irretrievably lost anyway, because it certainly will be once you use it. When you wear multiple hats and one of those hats is very powerful, it is critically important to make clear when you are doing stuff but not wearing that hat. Sometimes even that doesn't help, and it's better to just refrain from doing that stuff until you have handed the hat on to someone else. In this case she failed to make it clear that she was wearing her maintainer hat and not her ED hat. In fact, she accidentally invited speculation that she was wearing the ED hat by referring to the change as a requirement of the Foundation. I'd imagine this is why things blew up. Note that this probably indicates a problem with the structure of the Foundation. It's more or less inevitable that at the board level these things are pay-for-play, and that the ED's continued employment is at the discretion of the board. But technical decisions should be delegated to a neutral body, preferably elected by the project maintainers. It doesn't sound like that exists, but had it done this situation might have been avoided. The other issue seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the Foundation and the maintainers of various projects in it about the purpose of the Foundation. For example, I saw one where a maintainer politely declined to give the Foundation access privileges required to enforce the Code of Conduct, instead saying that the maintainers would enforce it themselves. Sorry, but I don't think any foundation could accept that. One of many reasons for joining a foundation is that it gives contributors confidence that there is a CoC backed up by an independent organisation, and that can be enforced even (especially) against powerful members of the community such as project maintainers - potentially even all of a project's maintainers. This is one of many ways that Foundations help build contributor confidence, which is one of the major benefits for a project of joining a foundation, and all of them rest on the credibility of the foundation to act as a circuit breaker and assert some kind of control should dire circumstances crop up. To allow individual projects - even historically well-behaved ones - to opt out of that control would be to effectively render those guarantees meaningless, and in fact reduce the foundation to what would be effectively just a giant fraud against contributors. It appears that many projects signed up without being made aware of this, and that is an absolute disaster for which only the Foundation can be responsible, and again they are right to apologise for failing to communicate it. However, what many people wanted was an apology for having technical measures in place that would allow them to exert control over projects, which the Foundation cannot really apologise for because it would effectively be an apology for existing. Inevitably people who wanted that will see this response as a non-apology apology. It looks like a long, hard road back from here to rebuild trust. I'd suggest that the board needs to work collaboratively with the community to clearly document the rights and responsibilities of both the Foundation and the individual projects, that they consider establishing an independent governance body for technical oversight, and that any project that feels this isn't what they signed up for be given the opportunity to leave on good terms.
herpderperator 5y ago
Anyone have a link to the PR in question?
- llacb47 5y ago
  https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778
  - SandB0x 5y ago
    The diff https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files
  - bingohbangoh 5y ago
    Wow. That’s very brazen to force a PR in like that. The apology made it sound like a small change that didn’t follow protocol. I didn’t realize it got called out as it happened and she pushed it through anyway.
    - booleandilemma 5y ago
      Yeah I cringed when I saw how she kept re-opening the PR the maintainer had closed. No respect.
    - oaiey 5y ago
      What especially strange is, when you are one of multiple maintainers ... how the hack you are not communicating with them. Multiple maintainers = they need to have shared principles on the projects = they need to talk. Ignoring this, is the strangest thing I have seen in this PR ... and a clear indicator, that this is not only about this project. This was a nuclear action by the .NET Foundation.
  - tonymet 5y ago
    That extra whitespace is horrible
    - 5y ago
copperx 5y ago
Some context would be awesome. Is anybody here privy to the events surrounding this apology?
- Aaronontheweb 5y ago
  https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
  - sph 5y ago
    Sorry, but tl;dr? The link you posted is deep into some drama I don't know what it's referring to.
    - genewitch 5y ago
      Allegedly some actions required .net foundation to have admin access to projects under their umbrella. The foundation then changed the copyright notices to dotnetfoundation instead of the actual owners. I didn't understand the drama above the comments entirely, though.
      - rectang 5y ago
        I don't see any copyright notices being changed in the PR in question: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files Legally, copyright notices can only be changed by the copyright holder or their authorized agent. If someone from the DNF were to make an unauthorized, illegal change, it would be very surprising.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      TL;DR; .NET Foundation moved all member projects to be a suborg of .NET Foundation without asking maintainers. For example, I am a maintainer of https://github.com/pythonnet/ https://github.com/pythonnet/. If you follow that link, you will see "Part of .NET Foundation" which is a GitHub Enterprise Organization. AFAIU, They could do that because when joining projects needed to add dnfadmin@github bot, that was supposed to perform some utility tasks such as enforcing CLAs.
Afforess 5y ago
I'm confused why the correct course of action isn't to revert the commit, ask the author to re-open the PR for comment, and follow the process. Why the tortious apology?
- umeshunni 5y ago
  Because attention seeking...
  - Afforess 5y ago
    I'm trying to assume good faith
    - bombcar 5y ago
      This reads like someone who has the ability and power to just steamroll over everything trying to pretend they don’t have that power.
  - da_big_ghey 5y ago
    Maybe since this person has a prominent place there is an attempt to set a better example for others? Not a cool move by Oren but maybe a "teachable moment".
    - chusk3 5y ago
      Please use the appropriate name for the person in question. Claire is her name.
- Zababa 5y ago
  If I wanted to interpret this in a paranoiac way, I would say that's because the author of the PR isn't apologetic at all, and in fact is quite fine with forcing a PR through the maintainers without their consent.
  - bovermyer 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
holy fuck, does every little mistake need a solemn 4000 word apology these days? that’s already not a world i want to live in, but then even the apology gets shit on and invalidated. people need to take everything much less seriously, especially shit that happens on the internet. this whole thing should have been able to be a new PR with “sorry about the merge before, i screwed up and it won’t happen again” at the end, and everyone should have been fine with it and moved on.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  > people need to take everything much less seriously I am starting to think there is a part of (some?) people's brains that needs to take something seriously. When all basic needs are met: food, warmth, security etc., problems are invented to give that part of the brain something to do.
- kgraves 5y ago
  It is now an expected requirement nowadays to write a 4000+ essay to apply for redemption from the public. Saying "sorry" just isn't enough to absolve your "misdeeds", whatever they might be.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I think the apology is here because the author of the PR doesn't want to revert it. As you can see, it's still merged: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/blob/b930a34badfb2164f3830f47aaf8aae1568a1578/src/Directory.build.props https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/blob/b930a34badfb2164f38... Edit: as lots of people said, I was on an older version of the file. I'm not sure how I did this, but I should have double-checked, especially since there was some base64 stuff in the URL.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I can still cut it down to three words: Sorry not sorry.
  - markphip 5y ago
    I did not see any indication that she was asked to revert the PR. It seemed like it was more just about that she felt it was OK to bypass the policy.
nazgulsenpai 5y ago
I would guess it's somehow related to this earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630
TedShiller 5y ago
Why is this person even involved?
oh_sigh 5y ago
Is there a tl;dr of what happened? I read the apology and I have no idea if she is sorry or what she is supposed to be sorry for.
- Aaronontheweb 5y ago
  https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
Aaronontheweb 5y ago
Context: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
- sneak 5y ago
  It's so ridiculously annoying when an apology or PR statement assumes complete and total familiarity with the existing goings-on. There's even a whole language of euphemism around it. "Recent events involving the community", et c. So lame!
  - remexre 5y ago
    I think the goal of that language is to avoid an increase in drama from random people outside the community (e.g. us!) reacting to the apology without actually being an affected party. If you don't know what the apology's referring to, it's probably not directed to you!
    - samhw 5y ago
      And also, I strongly suspect, because any description of the events is likely to be considered tendentious by some of the upset parties. Much easier to avoid the issues that come with having to write a balanced history of it.
  - carrolldunham 5y ago
    Well, except why someone be reading it if they were not?
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Umm the people who she is apologizing to know why she is apologizing... I don't think it is super important to educate the peanut gallery on the issue... if you don't know what the apology is for, the apology doesn't really matter to you.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  The GitHub Enterprise organization thing poses a request to GitHub: is there an audit trail for this kind of operations (moving organization to be a part of another org)? If there's none yet, the need is apparent.
rvz 5y ago
Is there any point in saying sorry anymore? One commenter in the thread already described it as a non-apology. For them, there is no '𝘴ₒᵣᵣy' or '...please, I can explain...' or 'it's not what you think it is'. Once it has already been admitted, the road already looks like it is heading to no redemption.
- nickff 5y ago
  The top comment on the apology is also an accusation of insufficient prostration. I agree that internet culture seems antithetical to forgiveness, and have no idea what can be done about it.
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    What the heck are you two talking about? You're making it out as if the two top-level comments are just that OP didn't apologize enough. In reality they're responding specifically to the OP's individual claims and pointing out they're not accurate. You think that "Our projects were moved to GitHub Enterprise to consolidate billing but we never had a bill in the first place." and "You're telling us we don't have copyright over our projects but the contract we signed doesn't say that." is "an accusation of insufficient prostration" ?
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    You might want to consider that the forced pull request has still not been reverted by this person. So an apology but no intention to undo a mistake? Does not sound very genuine in any way. Also, an apology about a PR isn't this long. This is a wall of text with a few meek words inbetween.
    - bingo-bongo 5y ago
      The forced PR was reverted shortly after by another maintainer. And I agree, a “sorry my bad” type of comment would have looked nice in the PR, but the attitude and actions in it vs the official apology, sounds like completely different people.
    - 5y ago
markphip 5y ago
I did not really dive into the details of the legalese that was shared in the comments, but on the surface none of what the .NET Foundation doing seems that odd. How is it any different really from how Apache or Eclipse or many other foundations operate? I think it is less about the Foundation trying to seize the projects from the founders then it is the Foundation doing what it needs to do to apply its legal value to the projects ... which is seemingly why these projects decide to move to the foundation. Maybe I just missed some nuance that was discussed in more depth elsewhere.
- Macha 5y ago
  Compare the Linux foundation's treatment of projects: Node: Neither the OpenJS foundation, nor its parent the Linux foundation claims owner ship of Node: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE Linux: No copyright assignment, just a compatible license required: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/process/1.Intro.rst?h=v5.15-rc4 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... The CNCF and the kubernetes system does do a CLA, so it's not a concept the Linux foundation has never heard of it, but clearly it's not required for every project they support. See also SPI's stance, which provides the legal support for projects like Debian and Arch Linux: https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/relationship/ https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/relationship/
  - initplus 5y ago
    Others in the space do ask for copyright assignment though, eg. FSF.
    - bingohbangoh 5y ago
      It didn’t sound like the .NET foundation did so ahead of time
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      If I recall correctly, that was because it was legally uncertain whether a copyright infringement case could be brought by an entity other than the copyright holder in the case of GPL violations. Since then, lawsuits to ensure GPL compliance haven't really materialized, since the threat of lawsuits tends to be sufficient, so assignment of copyright hasn't been necessary for other similar foundations. Intent also matters, and I would trust the FSF much more than I would trust a Microsoft-based foundation.
FriendlyNormie 5y ago
gkoberger 5y ago
My best attempt at a tl;dr: There are a number of projects under the .NET Foundation umbrella, all maintained by different teams. The .NET Foundation, supposedly for billing reasons, switched to GitHub Enterprise. People weren't aware it was happening or that a side effect of this would be that certain people would have increased access to their repos. The person writing this post, Claire Novotny, merged in something maintainers disagreed with and that she shouldn't have had GitHub permission to merge. This lead people to realize access controls had changed and become concerned about abuse of this power.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  There is also the fact that some projects were moved from their maintainers' public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise accounts without notice. If you read this discussion[1], several maintainers only found out today that their projects have moved accounts because reading the thread itself prompted them to double-check. [1] https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Thank you, now it makes much more sense.
- samhw 5y ago
  There's another, slightly confusing aspect which u/vb explained absolutely brilliantly here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28781621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28781621), namely that she wore two hats: one as the ED of the Foundation, the other as a long-dormant maintainer of that particular project. She apparently intended to merge that PR qua the latter, but didn't make that sufficiently clear, and also made some offhand remarks about Foundation rules which (accidentally?) implied she was acting qua the former. Oh what tangled webs we weave...
burnished 5y ago
What is with the comments calling this a non-appology? Do they need a hair shirt to make sure the sinners really suffer? Hyperbole aside its kind of jarring reading a frank apology and ownership of actions (what they did, how it impacted others, why it was bad) that then gets dismissed entirely. I wonder what those people would consider to be sufficient? It does not seem like there is any point to a public apology. You are going to get the same response whether you frankly admit fault or apologize because some one else didn't understand your good intentions.
- shijie 5y ago
  I was also struck with commenter’s swift label of her apology a “non-apology.” I’ve seen this on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s basically a proxy for “I don’t think you’ve suffered enough to be forgiven.” And that strikes me as honestly a little bit terrifying.
  - not2b 5y ago
    I think that this is an authentic apology. However, non-apologies are common. I think the Wikipedia page does a good job of explaining the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology
- haswell 5y ago
  If you read the entire post, it quickly becomes apparent why people are reacting poorly. The opening paragraph is an apology. Other parts of the post undo any goodwill that might have been garnered from the apology itself. One example: > There is a pattern that needs to be resolved. Projects might not fully understand what joining the .NET Foundation means. We share a checklist with project maintainers on project changes they accept as part of becoming part of the .NET Foundation. That’s obviously not sufficient. We will post a new document that describes what you can expect when your project joins the .NET Foundation... To me, this says "sooo, even though I screwed up, I'm technically allowed to do what I did and you probably should have already expected that based on the agreement you signed, but we'll make our materials even clearer so you don't make that mistake again". It turns the problem back around on the community. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with the rest of the post after the apology...if it was posted separately. When included in the same post, it's hard not to take it as "sorry, but I still wasn't technically wrong". I do think the whole culture around public apologies and the hair-splitting and analysis that comes after is concerning and often unhelpful. But I think the backlash here is understandable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
GoodJokes 5y ago
was anybody harmed here, or are egos just being egos?
f00zz 5y ago
That's a lot of words to apologize for something that could be fixed with a force push
- aae42 5y ago
  I couldn't help but think the same... You're sorry? Ok, revert it then.
  - shric 5y ago
    It was reverted: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  They'd also need to transfer the projects themselves from the DNF's GitHub to the public GitHub repositories they were transferred from.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  The PR is one tiny part of what the discussion is about.
jsd1982 5y ago
It seems to me that there is a valid apology present in two paragraphs: > [...] I made a mistake this last week when I made a PR and merged it to a project without discussion. [...] I overstepped. I failed to consider how the interaction would look through the lens of my current role. [...] this was a mistake. I sincerely apologize. > To recap, I’m sorry about the PR I made and merged on the ReactiveUI Splat repo. That was a mistake. [...] On behalf of myself as the Executive Director, past and current boards, I’m sorry that we’ve created an environment where maintainers are surprised by their relationship with the .NET Foundation. It will be my and the new board’s number one priority to fix that. How does one label this as a "non-apology"? Mistakes were acknowledged and corrected; actions were regretted and improvements are identified. Shouldn't that be enough?
- sjburt 5y ago
  > On behalf of myself as the Executive Director, past and current boards, I’m sorry that we’ve created an environment where maintainers are surprised by their relationship with the .NET Foundation. It will be my and the new board’s number one priority to fix that. This is the non apology. It's not apologizing for the nature of the relationship that was created, it's apologizing for people being surprised by the nature of the relationship. There's an implication in the statement that the maintainers failed to understand their agreements and that's the real root of the problem. In terms of the "fix", it's not clear whether the fix is to renegotiate the agreements, or just to make it more clear what the agreements meant (in which case, the harm is not really being addressed).
- nebulous1 5y ago
  If you look at the post as a whole, it reads that she's "sorry" that this happened, but the only reason that it's an issue is because the member projects don't understand their place. Literally: "It is also clear that the .NET Foundation project governance model is not well understood. Project maintainers sign an agreement that either assigns or contributes their project to the .NET Foundation. That’s the point at which project ownership changes."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
satisfice 5y ago
I don’t know enough about this to comment, except to say, gee, isn’t the social and business life of human adults complicated? Yes it is. It is complicated. How strange, then, that so many people seem to jump with both feet into complicated shared ownership arrangements with near strangers— leading to the absurdity of public messages flying around instead keeping these communications private to the specific people who understand them? Why am I even seeing this shit? That is auto-fail right there.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Because it is a public open source project?
  - cormacrelf 5y ago
    They're discussing this on a public forum, but only sharing screenshots of small sections of PDFs which remain private. The CLAs are the governing documents here, and nobody except the people who have access to those agreements in full have any business even forming an opinion as to what rights are held by whom. Posting selected parts (literally just the definitions section, the non operative part!) for public point-scoring is pretty ridiculous. Either shut up and email them privately, or post the entire thing so people can see what you've signed up for. (The outdated copy of the agreement that's available online is not good enough.)
    - cdogl 5y ago
      I'm sympathetic to this argument, but the fact that the blog posts, discussions, tweet threads etc. under issue are publicly viewable (that's the web!) doesn't imply an obligation that members of the debate perform for the public as if it were a political debate or a court room. I suspect that the intended audience of posts by aggrieved maintainers is other maintainers in the community. Oughtn't they be able to communicate and organise without putting their communications under lock and key? Here we are now discussing it privately on HN and GitHub as we're a bunch of busy-bodies, but I am not necessarily prepared to blame the maintainers for that.
armchairhacker 5y ago
This whole situation is toxic. She literally made a 1-line change in a configuration file with basically no downsides. She also repeatedly re-opened and then merged the PR despite the other guy telling her to follow the format and wait for a review. Which she shouldn't have done. But then everyone started bashing her and .NET for other (similarly small) things and extrapolating that. Then there's this 1000 legalese word apology, and then people are bashing her for the apology.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Please read this discussion[1]. The issue goes far beyond a pull request. Project maintainers had their projects moved from their public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise account without notice. Some maintainers only found out about the transfers of their projects because of this[1] discussion. [1] https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
  - dclowd9901 5y ago
    In practice, how does such a change actually affect the project owners? Because from all the kerfuffle, I haven't seen a single legitimate grievance or issue this actually caused the owners. In fact, one of them even says (paraphrased) "If you had just waited for review, there probably wouldn't have been any issue." This _does_ feel very toxic and unnecessary.
    - cvak 5y ago
      In practice, I 100% believe that everyone would have agreed, because it makes sense to have all projects under foundation in one org. But how can you move repositories, without giving a notice? Baffling honestly.
- sprkwd 5y ago
  > She literally made a 1-line change in a configuration file with basically no downsides. Yes, but did she get her t-shirt?
booleandilemma 5y ago
Is this related to, or a distraction from, this?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630
ziml77 5y ago
Does anyone have a good summary of what happened here? I'm not really following what the foundation did wrong. Did Microsoft do something underhanded? Did they get caught trying to start the extinguish phase of EEE?
- drekipus 5y ago
  >Did they get caught trying to start the extinguish phase of EEE? Effectively, yes, and a bunch of people are surprised about it.
  - ilaksh 5y ago
    It's basically a cult. No one expects their dear leader to do something wrong.
- bingo-bongo 5y ago
  The executive director of the .NET Foundation force merged a PR on a project, instead of following project guidelines. The incident snowballed into other projects discovering they have been moved to the .NET Foundations Github Enterprise account without their knowledge. And even more projects joining the snowball with “we were told the Foundation were just there to help us, not take over project ownership” And now there is a huge snowball with a lot of projects and people stuck inside.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Thanks now the apology and replies make a lot more sense.
avsteele 5y ago
I am not versed in all the details here, but it is clear there is a diverge of expectations between MS and some of the repo owners. This is just part of business. Legal agreements and projects are complicated. Not everything is going to be spelled out. In a good business relationship you acknowledge this and work in good faith to resolve differences when they occur. However, top comments make clear there is a dire need for professional communications training among these programmers. There is entirely too much emotion on display here. Stuff like this: While I appreciate that this must have been hard to write, this is a total non-apology and just about meets the incredibly low expectations I and others had for the .NET Foundation's public statement. .. and the other comments like it, are not productive. There is a difference in expectations, so resolve it by making offers to MS for proposed changes. Ultimately there is a negotiated settlement or you walk. That's it. Don't bring emotions into it.
- drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago
  Did you look at the Contribution License Agreement? It appears that the issue at hand was in fact "spelled out". Repo owners aren't unreasonable to interpret this action as bad faith. I would agree that their message would be better communicated with a more amicable tone.
  - dclowd9901 5y ago
    > I would agree that their message would be better communicated with a more amicable tone. This was entirely GP's point.
    - drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago
      Yes, I agreed with his point and disagreed with his characterization of the situation.
  - cies 5y ago
    It says: "owned or managed". It does not say "owned AND managed". MSFT has been in the business of using legal to make money. This is not the Apache Foundation. This is a non-profit arm of MSFT.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Well, if you ask me, I’d like to see an apology for the one-line whitespace change, using !=true, and closing the XML tag without a space. From the commit which started this whole brouhaha: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/commit/cd2cbb807b36dd89b6505e3e699d0784aaf7d976 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/commit/cd2cbb807b36dd89b... That’s some grade A hornet nest kicking right there. /s
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisofspades 5y ago
  Visual Studio removes that space automatically when you use it to manage dependencies. It's quite annoying.
gego 5y ago
...so that's how you get a lot of work for nothing... people, please never sign something without at least clearly stating what you think it means. A sneaky way is printing the document and sending it back together with a statement of how you interprete it - best on the page you should sign... A simple (see email 211007) below your signature often is enough... if you did not sign on paper but just by clicking some buttons, your position is even better, especially if you are in a non us legislation and there is no translation...
pabs3 5y ago
A recent article about issues in the .NET community: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/05/microsoft_net_foundation_under_fire/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/05/microsoft_net_foundat...
dusted 5y ago
Such politics and drama... over what? was the merged code bad? did it not improve the project? What was even the thing being merged? was it even code? [edit: I found the commit, the apology should probably include that the file was not beautified before the PR was made..]
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  That’s only 1 small issue of the bigger issue of projects being pulled into the DNF org with no one’s knowledge.
  - dusted 5y ago
    That's not the topic of this apology, so it's an entirely inappropriate place to have that discussion. The apology is about not following the procedure..
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      The whole post in the link is in reference to more than just the pushing of a PR. > It is also clear that the .NET Foundation project governance model is not well understood. Project maintainers sign an agreement that either assigns or contributes their project to the .NET Foundation. That’s the point at which project ownership changes. We’ll post another document on that this week as well. It's clear reading the comments on HN that the majority of people commenting have no clue what is going on.
BurnGpuBurn 5y ago
Years ago I heard Microsoft was open sourcing .Net. and I thought that was a clever idea. But with all the drama coming out of the community now for years and years I seriously question the intentions behind that move. It seems to me Microsoft just wanted a bunch of free coders on their .Net projects. And it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft set out to destroy a community of volunteers either.
- mustardo 5y ago
  I assume they want to retain "ownership" so they can execute the extend and extinguish steps unopposed
  - samhw 5y ago
    You do realise they created .NET?
    - jtdev 5y ago
      Okay, _they_ also need to build good will with developers if they want developers to use their products and services.
knorker 5y ago
"Sorry I opened a PR and merged it without discussion" is not an honest description of what happened (https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778), and therefore the apology seems very insincere. You can't apologize and at the same time minimize the thing you actually did. It's pretty much like ending your apology with a "but". And this (not really) apology is a big "but". More to the point though, this apology attempt made it worse. It starts off with a dishonest apology, and then goes into a big policy and contract debate. Why would you conflate the two? Whatever point you're then trying to make about policy and ownership is tainted by both the personal misstep (I call it that unsarcastically) and by the insincere apology. It's needlessly ineffective. 1. It makes your apology sound like "I'm sorry, but I'm the dictator here" 2. It starts you off from a position of "I was wrong, admit I was wrong, but here's how actually I'm right" It's going to be hard convincing anyone if you start from a position of being wrong. And not just wrong but also really rude. It seems to me that it would be much more effective to just apologize for the obvious process mis-step and arrogant rudeness (it happens to the best of us), and let that sink in. And then start a new conversation about policy. Whoever raises "yeah, well weren't you the one who went around PR policies?" in that thread will be the unproductive one, and it won't go anywhere. As-is the policy points can't be taken at face value.
- xwdv 5y ago
  If this is not desired behavior it should be enforced by requiring a reviewer to sign off on the changes before merging. By not requiring this it means it is okay for pull requests to be merged without discussion, even if it is a rare occurrence. This is one of those occurrences.
  - knorker 5y ago
    So, first of all I disagree. Just because something is not prevented by technical means doesn't make it allowed. That goes for all things in life, outside of a supermax prison. And after being asked twice by another maintainer (one of the two current maintainers (none of which are her), as I read it) to please follow the procedures, she tells him to fuck off and overrides him. And after all that she does actually write something intended to look like an apology. So what does that mean? Either she disagrees with you, and indeed she should have followed procedures, or all she's apologizing for is "sorry you got so upset", which more of a taunt than an apology. No, actually. Contrary to what cryptocurrency people would have you believe, there are other and more effective ways to prevent undesirable behaviour than technical means, for the vast majority of behaviour.
azarovalex 5y ago
Same vibe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
globular-toast 5y ago
I preferred open source before people like this got involved with all their bullshit and doublespeak.
jebronie 5y ago
Very toxic behaviour from this person.
bob1029 5y ago
Total waste of everyone's time. I suspect if the word "Microsoft" were not in this equation, this HN thread would not exist and no one would give a shit. A lot of people have ulterior motives and 99% of the "toxicity" I have observed to date comes from either trying to hide those motives or pretending like others couldn't possibly possess them.
- samhw 5y ago
  Yup, I'm inclined to agree. I also think the word 'toxic' is horribly overused, to mean essentially 'anything I don't like'. Though FWIW, ulterior motives are hidden by definition – as in, that's literally the meaning of the word 'ulterior' – so I'm not quite sure what the last sentence is getting at.
itoocode 5y ago
Moral to learn as developers: Follow PR rules even if you are owner or admin, senior executive dev or junior dev.
_pmf_ 5y ago
It's a Microsoft project, and Microsoft employees can and will do what they want.
smohare 5y ago
I’m not sure that thread supports your point, tbh.

345 points by wfox 5y ago

This whole thing just screams clusterfuck to me. Don’t trust Microsoft or give anyone admin access to your repos if you won’t want them to do bad shit. I guess they technically own Github, so don’t use that if you don’t trust them either.

oaiey 5y ago
I think there is very little intent on Microsoft behalf in this. This is a OSS foundation which enforce their (understanding of) ownership. What is horrible is the absolute lack of transparency, communication and community in this foundation. What they have done happens also in the Apache, Eclipse or whatever foundation as well. Just that these are communities which are mature and composed of experienced open source people which know how to address and communicate with other maintainers/egos/people. Open Source Communities are about people. Not the tech. You are only successful if you are good with people. What they did there multiple times was pulling nuclear options without telling people. The .NET Foundation is run by Microsoft MVP program (Claire, Ben, others) which live in their own dimension which is different from the rest of the community. They are supported by lawyers/managers of Microsoft trying to protect the brand and the core of .NET. That is a setup for failure without any malicious intent. Disclosure: .NET Fanboy + (successful) open source maintainer (not .NET foundation related)

bmy78 5y ago

Actions speak louder than words. If she were truly sorry, she would’ve reverted the PR and have it go through the normal process. Instead she wrote a really long message about how the .NET Foundation owns your project.

wk_end 5y ago
The commit was reverted (see https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779)
- kylemh 5y ago
  Yes, but the author wasn't the one that reverted it.
  - wk_end 5y ago
    It was (rightly) reverted almost immediately after it was first committed, a week ago. I wouldn't expect the author of this apology - posted today - to have instantaneously realized the error of their ways and ever had the chance to do the revert themselves, and I don't think that reflects on whether the apology is sincere or not.

zb 5y ago

I don't know anything about the .NET Foundation or much about this particular situation, but I know a little about open source governance. It appears that Novotny believed she was acting in her capacity as a (long-dormant) maintainer of the project when she merged the PR in question. It was clearly wrong to do so without following the process set down by the other maintainers, and she was right to apologise. However, as the Executive Director of the Foundation, she also had the power (perhaps indirectly) to force a merge of a patch in any project controlled by the Foundation. All Foundations must reserve this power to themselves (you can't take on legal liability for something you have no control over), but they also must never use it. To do so is the nuclear option, to be invoked only after all trust and goodwill has been irretrievably lost anyway, because it certainly will be once you use it. When you wear multiple hats and one of those hats is very powerful, it is critically important to make clear when you are doing stuff but not wearing that hat. Sometimes even that doesn't help, and it's better to just refrain from doing that stuff until you have handed the hat on to someone else. In this case she failed to make it clear that she was wearing her maintainer hat and not her ED hat. In fact, she accidentally invited speculation that she was wearing the ED hat by referring to the change as a requirement of the Foundation. I'd imagine this is why things blew up. Note that this probably indicates a problem with the structure of the Foundation. It's more or less inevitable that at the board level these things are pay-for-play, and that the ED's continued employment is at the discretion of the board. But technical decisions should be delegated to a neutral body, preferably elected by the project maintainers. It doesn't sound like that exists, but had it done this situation might have been avoided. The other issue seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the Foundation and the maintainers of various projects in it about the purpose of the Foundation. For example, I saw one where a maintainer politely declined to give the Foundation access privileges required to enforce the Code of Conduct, instead saying that the maintainers would enforce it themselves. Sorry, but I don't think any foundation could accept that. One of many reasons for joining a foundation is that it gives contributors confidence that there is a CoC backed up by an independent organisation, and that can be enforced even (especially) against powerful members of the community such as project maintainers - potentially even all of a project's maintainers. This is one of many ways that Foundations help build contributor confidence, which is one of the major benefits for a project of joining a foundation, and all of them rest on the credibility of the foundation to act as a circuit breaker and assert some kind of control should dire circumstances crop up. To allow individual projects - even historically well-behaved ones - to opt out of that control would be to effectively render those guarantees meaningless, and in fact reduce the foundation to what would be effectively just a giant fraud against contributors. It appears that many projects signed up without being made aware of this, and that is an absolute disaster for which only the Foundation can be responsible, and again they are right to apologise for failing to communicate it. However, what many people wanted was an apology for having technical measures in place that would allow them to exert control over projects, which the Foundation cannot really apologise for because it would effectively be an apology for existing. Inevitably people who wanted that will see this response as a non-apology apology. It looks like a long, hard road back from here to rebuild trust. I'd suggest that the board needs to work collaboratively with the community to clearly document the rights and responsibilities of both the Foundation and the individual projects, that they consider establishing an independent governance body for technical oversight, and that any project that feels this isn't what they signed up for be given the opportunity to leave on good terms.

herpderperator 5y ago

Anyone have a link to the PR in question?

llacb47 5y ago
https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778
- SandB0x 5y ago
  The diff https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files
- bingohbangoh 5y ago
  Wow. That’s very brazen to force a PR in like that. The apology made it sound like a small change that didn’t follow protocol. I didn’t realize it got called out as it happened and she pushed it through anyway.
  - booleandilemma 5y ago
    Yeah I cringed when I saw how she kept re-opening the PR the maintainer had closed. No respect.
  - oaiey 5y ago
    What especially strange is, when you are one of multiple maintainers ... how the hack you are not communicating with them. Multiple maintainers = they need to have shared principles on the projects = they need to talk. Ignoring this, is the strangest thing I have seen in this PR ... and a clear indicator, that this is not only about this project. This was a nuclear action by the .NET Foundation.
- tonymet 5y ago
  That extra whitespace is horrible
  - 5y ago

copperx 5y ago

Some context would be awesome. Is anybody here privy to the events surrounding this apology?

Aaronontheweb 5y ago
https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
- sph 5y ago
  Sorry, but tl;dr? The link you posted is deep into some drama I don't know what it's referring to.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    Allegedly some actions required .net foundation to have admin access to projects under their umbrella. The foundation then changed the copyright notices to dotnetfoundation instead of the actual owners. I didn't understand the drama above the comments entirely, though.
    - rectang 5y ago
      I don't see any copyright notices being changed in the PR in question: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778/files Legally, copyright notices can only be changed by the copyright holder or their authorized agent. If someone from the DNF were to make an unauthorized, illegal change, it would be very surprising.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    TL;DR; .NET Foundation moved all member projects to be a suborg of .NET Foundation without asking maintainers. For example, I am a maintainer of https://github.com/pythonnet/ https://github.com/pythonnet/. If you follow that link, you will see "Part of .NET Foundation" which is a GitHub Enterprise Organization. AFAIU, They could do that because when joining projects needed to add dnfadmin@github bot, that was supposed to perform some utility tasks such as enforcing CLAs.

Afforess 5y ago

I'm confused why the correct course of action isn't to revert the commit, ask the author to re-open the PR for comment, and follow the process. Why the tortious apology?

umeshunni 5y ago
Because attention seeking...
- Afforess 5y ago
  I'm trying to assume good faith
  - bombcar 5y ago
    This reads like someone who has the ability and power to just steamroll over everything trying to pretend they don’t have that power.
- da_big_ghey 5y ago
  Maybe since this person has a prominent place there is an attempt to set a better example for others? Not a cool move by Oren but maybe a "teachable moment".
  - chusk3 5y ago
    Please use the appropriate name for the person in question. Claire is her name.
Zababa 5y ago
If I wanted to interpret this in a paranoiac way, I would say that's because the author of the PR isn't apologetic at all, and in fact is quite fine with forcing a PR through the maintainers without their consent.
- bovermyer 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pwdisswordfish0 5y ago

holy fuck, does every little mistake need a solemn 4000 word apology these days? that’s already not a world i want to live in, but then even the apology gets shit on and invalidated. people need to take everything much less seriously, especially shit that happens on the internet. this whole thing should have been able to be a new PR with “sorry about the merge before, i screwed up and it won’t happen again” at the end, and everyone should have been fine with it and moved on.

globular-toast 5y ago
> people need to take everything much less seriously I am starting to think there is a part of (some?) people's brains that needs to take something seriously. When all basic needs are met: food, warmth, security etc., problems are invented to give that part of the brain something to do.
kgraves 5y ago
It is now an expected requirement nowadays to write a 4000+ essay to apply for redemption from the public. Saying "sorry" just isn't enough to absolve your "misdeeds", whatever they might be.
Zababa 5y ago
I think the apology is here because the author of the PR doesn't want to revert it. As you can see, it's still merged: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/blob/b930a34badfb2164f3830f47aaf8aae1568a1578/src/Directory.build.props https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/blob/b930a34badfb2164f38... Edit: as lots of people said, I was on an older version of the file. I'm not sure how I did this, but I should have double-checked, especially since there was some base64 stuff in the URL.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I can still cut it down to three words: Sorry not sorry.
- markphip 5y ago
  I did not see any indication that she was asked to revert the PR. It seemed like it was more just about that she felt it was OK to bypass the policy.

nazgulsenpai 5y ago

I would guess it's somehow related to this earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630

TedShiller 5y ago

Why is this person even involved?

oh_sigh 5y ago

Is there a tl;dr of what happened? I read the apology and I have no idea if she is sorry or what she is supposed to be sorry for.

Aaronontheweb 5y ago
https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38

Aaronontheweb 5y ago

Context: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38

sneak 5y ago
It's so ridiculously annoying when an apology or PR statement assumes complete and total familiarity with the existing goings-on. There's even a whole language of euphemism around it. "Recent events involving the community", et c. So lame!
- remexre 5y ago
  I think the goal of that language is to avoid an increase in drama from random people outside the community (e.g. us!) reacting to the apology without actually being an affected party. If you don't know what the apology's referring to, it's probably not directed to you!
  - samhw 5y ago
    And also, I strongly suspect, because any description of the events is likely to be considered tendentious by some of the upset parties. Much easier to avoid the issues that come with having to write a balanced history of it.
- carrolldunham 5y ago
  Well, except why someone be reading it if they were not?
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Umm the people who she is apologizing to know why she is apologizing... I don't think it is super important to educate the peanut gallery on the issue... if you don't know what the apology is for, the apology doesn't really matter to you.
lostmsu 5y ago
The GitHub Enterprise organization thing poses a request to GitHub: is there an audit trail for this kind of operations (moving organization to be a part of another org)? If there's none yet, the need is apparent.

rvz 5y ago

Is there any point in saying sorry anymore? One commenter in the thread already described it as a non-apology. For them, there is no '𝘴ₒᵣᵣy' or '...please, I can explain...' or 'it's not what you think it is'. Once it has already been admitted, the road already looks like it is heading to no redemption.

nickff 5y ago
The top comment on the apology is also an accusation of insufficient prostration. I agree that internet culture seems antithetical to forgiveness, and have no idea what can be done about it.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  What the heck are you two talking about? You're making it out as if the two top-level comments are just that OP didn't apologize enough. In reality they're responding specifically to the OP's individual claims and pointing out they're not accurate. You think that "Our projects were moved to GitHub Enterprise to consolidate billing but we never had a bill in the first place." and "You're telling us we don't have copyright over our projects but the contract we signed doesn't say that." is "an accusation of insufficient prostration" ?
- alpaca128 5y ago
  You might want to consider that the forced pull request has still not been reverted by this person. So an apology but no intention to undo a mistake? Does not sound very genuine in any way. Also, an apology about a PR isn't this long. This is a wall of text with a few meek words inbetween.
  - bingo-bongo 5y ago
    The forced PR was reverted shortly after by another maintainer. And I agree, a “sorry my bad” type of comment would have looked nice in the PR, but the attitude and actions in it vs the official apology, sounds like completely different people.
  - 5y ago

markphip 5y ago

I did not really dive into the details of the legalese that was shared in the comments, but on the surface none of what the .NET Foundation doing seems that odd. How is it any different really from how Apache or Eclipse or many other foundations operate? I think it is less about the Foundation trying to seize the projects from the founders then it is the Foundation doing what it needs to do to apply its legal value to the projects ... which is seemingly why these projects decide to move to the foundation. Maybe I just missed some nuance that was discussed in more depth elsewhere.

Macha 5y ago
Compare the Linux foundation's treatment of projects: Node: Neither the OpenJS foundation, nor its parent the Linux foundation claims owner ship of Node: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE Linux: No copyright assignment, just a compatible license required: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/process/1.Intro.rst?h=v5.15-rc4 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... The CNCF and the kubernetes system does do a CLA, so it's not a concept the Linux foundation has never heard of it, but clearly it's not required for every project they support. See also SPI's stance, which provides the legal support for projects like Debian and Arch Linux: https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/relationship/ https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/relationship/
- initplus 5y ago
  Others in the space do ask for copyright assignment though, eg. FSF.
  - bingohbangoh 5y ago
    It didn’t sound like the .NET foundation did so ahead of time
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    If I recall correctly, that was because it was legally uncertain whether a copyright infringement case could be brought by an entity other than the copyright holder in the case of GPL violations. Since then, lawsuits to ensure GPL compliance haven't really materialized, since the threat of lawsuits tends to be sufficient, so assignment of copyright hasn't been necessary for other similar foundations. Intent also matters, and I would trust the FSF much more than I would trust a Microsoft-based foundation.

FriendlyNormie 5y ago

gkoberger 5y ago

My best attempt at a tl;dr: There are a number of projects under the .NET Foundation umbrella, all maintained by different teams. The .NET Foundation, supposedly for billing reasons, switched to GitHub Enterprise. People weren't aware it was happening or that a side effect of this would be that certain people would have increased access to their repos. The person writing this post, Claire Novotny, merged in something maintainers disagreed with and that she shouldn't have had GitHub permission to merge. This lead people to realize access controls had changed and become concerned about abuse of this power.

heavyset_go 5y ago
There is also the fact that some projects were moved from their maintainers' public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise accounts without notice. If you read this discussion[1], several maintainers only found out today that their projects have moved accounts because reading the thread itself prompted them to double-check. [1] https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
neltnerb 5y ago
Thank you, now it makes much more sense.
samhw 5y ago
There's another, slightly confusing aspect which u/vb explained absolutely brilliantly here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28781621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28781621), namely that she wore two hats: one as the ED of the Foundation, the other as a long-dormant maintainer of that particular project. She apparently intended to merge that PR qua the latter, but didn't make that sufficiently clear, and also made some offhand remarks about Foundation rules which (accidentally?) implied she was acting qua the former. Oh what tangled webs we weave...

burnished 5y ago

What is with the comments calling this a non-appology? Do they need a hair shirt to make sure the sinners really suffer? Hyperbole aside its kind of jarring reading a frank apology and ownership of actions (what they did, how it impacted others, why it was bad) that then gets dismissed entirely. I wonder what those people would consider to be sufficient? It does not seem like there is any point to a public apology. You are going to get the same response whether you frankly admit fault or apologize because some one else didn't understand your good intentions.

shijie 5y ago
I was also struck with commenter’s swift label of her apology a “non-apology.” I’ve seen this on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s basically a proxy for “I don’t think you’ve suffered enough to be forgiven.” And that strikes me as honestly a little bit terrifying.
- not2b 5y ago
  I think that this is an authentic apology. However, non-apologies are common. I think the Wikipedia page does a good job of explaining the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology
haswell 5y ago
If you read the entire post, it quickly becomes apparent why people are reacting poorly. The opening paragraph is an apology. Other parts of the post undo any goodwill that might have been garnered from the apology itself. One example: > There is a pattern that needs to be resolved. Projects might not fully understand what joining the .NET Foundation means. We share a checklist with project maintainers on project changes they accept as part of becoming part of the .NET Foundation. That’s obviously not sufficient. We will post a new document that describes what you can expect when your project joins the .NET Foundation... To me, this says "sooo, even though I screwed up, I'm technically allowed to do what I did and you probably should have already expected that based on the agreement you signed, but we'll make our materials even clearer so you don't make that mistake again". It turns the problem back around on the community. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with the rest of the post after the apology...if it was posted separately. When included in the same post, it's hard not to take it as "sorry, but I still wasn't technically wrong". I do think the whole culture around public apologies and the hair-splitting and analysis that comes after is concerning and often unhelpful. But I think the backlash here is understandable.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

GoodJokes 5y ago

was anybody harmed here, or are egos just being egos?

f00zz 5y ago

That's a lot of words to apologize for something that could be fixed with a force push

aae42 5y ago
I couldn't help but think the same... You're sorry? Ok, revert it then.
- shric 5y ago
  It was reverted: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779
heavyset_go 5y ago
They'd also need to transfer the projects themselves from the DNF's GitHub to the public GitHub repositories they were transferred from.
Arnavion 5y ago
The PR is one tiny part of what the discussion is about.

jsd1982 5y ago

It seems to me that there is a valid apology present in two paragraphs: > [...] I made a mistake this last week when I made a PR and merged it to a project without discussion. [...] I overstepped. I failed to consider how the interaction would look through the lens of my current role. [...] this was a mistake. I sincerely apologize. > To recap, I’m sorry about the PR I made and merged on the ReactiveUI Splat repo. That was a mistake. [...] On behalf of myself as the Executive Director, past and current boards, I’m sorry that we’ve created an environment where maintainers are surprised by their relationship with the .NET Foundation. It will be my and the new board’s number one priority to fix that. How does one label this as a "non-apology"? Mistakes were acknowledged and corrected; actions were regretted and improvements are identified. Shouldn't that be enough?

sjburt 5y ago
> On behalf of myself as the Executive Director, past and current boards, I’m sorry that we’ve created an environment where maintainers are surprised by their relationship with the .NET Foundation. It will be my and the new board’s number one priority to fix that. This is the non apology. It's not apologizing for the nature of the relationship that was created, it's apologizing for people being surprised by the nature of the relationship. There's an implication in the statement that the maintainers failed to understand their agreements and that's the real root of the problem. In terms of the "fix", it's not clear whether the fix is to renegotiate the agreements, or just to make it more clear what the agreements meant (in which case, the harm is not really being addressed).
nebulous1 5y ago
If you look at the post as a whole, it reads that she's "sorry" that this happened, but the only reason that it's an issue is because the member projects don't understand their place. Literally: "It is also clear that the .NET Foundation project governance model is not well understood. Project maintainers sign an agreement that either assigns or contributes their project to the .NET Foundation. That’s the point at which project ownership changes."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

satisfice 5y ago

I don’t know enough about this to comment, except to say, gee, isn’t the social and business life of human adults complicated? Yes it is. It is complicated. How strange, then, that so many people seem to jump with both feet into complicated shared ownership arrangements with near strangers— leading to the absurdity of public messages flying around instead keeping these communications private to the specific people who understand them? Why am I even seeing this shit? That is auto-fail right there.

dgb23 5y ago
Because it is a public open source project?
- cormacrelf 5y ago
  They're discussing this on a public forum, but only sharing screenshots of small sections of PDFs which remain private. The CLAs are the governing documents here, and nobody except the people who have access to those agreements in full have any business even forming an opinion as to what rights are held by whom. Posting selected parts (literally just the definitions section, the non operative part!) for public point-scoring is pretty ridiculous. Either shut up and email them privately, or post the entire thing so people can see what you've signed up for. (The outdated copy of the agreement that's available online is not good enough.)
  - cdogl 5y ago
    I'm sympathetic to this argument, but the fact that the blog posts, discussions, tweet threads etc. under issue are publicly viewable (that's the web!) doesn't imply an obligation that members of the debate perform for the public as if it were a political debate or a court room. I suspect that the intended audience of posts by aggrieved maintainers is other maintainers in the community. Oughtn't they be able to communicate and organise without putting their communications under lock and key? Here we are now discussing it privately on HN and GitHub as we're a bunch of busy-bodies, but I am not necessarily prepared to blame the maintainers for that.

armchairhacker 5y ago

This whole situation is toxic. She literally made a 1-line change in a configuration file with basically no downsides. She also repeatedly re-opened and then merged the PR despite the other guy telling her to follow the format and wait for a review. Which she shouldn't have done. But then everyone started bashing her and .NET for other (similarly small) things and extrapolating that. Then there's this 1000 legalese word apology, and then people are bashing her for the apology.

heavyset_go 5y ago
Please read this discussion[1]. The issue goes far beyond a pull request. Project maintainers had their projects moved from their public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise account without notice. Some maintainers only found out about the transfers of their projects because of this[1] discussion. [1] https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
- dclowd9901 5y ago
  In practice, how does such a change actually affect the project owners? Because from all the kerfuffle, I haven't seen a single legitimate grievance or issue this actually caused the owners. In fact, one of them even says (paraphrased) "If you had just waited for review, there probably wouldn't have been any issue." This _does_ feel very toxic and unnecessary.
  - cvak 5y ago
    In practice, I 100% believe that everyone would have agreed, because it makes sense to have all projects under foundation in one org. But how can you move repositories, without giving a notice? Baffling honestly.
sprkwd 5y ago
> She literally made a 1-line change in a configuration file with basically no downsides. Yes, but did she get her t-shirt?

booleandilemma 5y ago

Is this related to, or a distraction from, this?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630

ziml77 5y ago

Does anyone have a good summary of what happened here? I'm not really following what the foundation did wrong. Did Microsoft do something underhanded? Did they get caught trying to start the extinguish phase of EEE?

drekipus 5y ago
>Did they get caught trying to start the extinguish phase of EEE? Effectively, yes, and a bunch of people are surprised about it.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  It's basically a cult. No one expects their dear leader to do something wrong.
bingo-bongo 5y ago
The executive director of the .NET Foundation force merged a PR on a project, instead of following project guidelines. The incident snowballed into other projects discovering they have been moved to the .NET Foundations Github Enterprise account without their knowledge. And even more projects joining the snowball with “we were told the Foundation were just there to help us, not take over project ownership” And now there is a huge snowball with a lot of projects and people stuck inside.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Thanks now the apology and replies make a lot more sense.

avsteele 5y ago

I am not versed in all the details here, but it is clear there is a diverge of expectations between MS and some of the repo owners. This is just part of business. Legal agreements and projects are complicated. Not everything is going to be spelled out. In a good business relationship you acknowledge this and work in good faith to resolve differences when they occur. However, top comments make clear there is a dire need for professional communications training among these programmers. There is entirely too much emotion on display here. Stuff like this: While I appreciate that this must have been hard to write, this is a total non-apology and just about meets the incredibly low expectations I and others had for the .NET Foundation's public statement. .. and the other comments like it, are not productive. There is a difference in expectations, so resolve it by making offers to MS for proposed changes. Ultimately there is a negotiated settlement or you walk. That's it. Don't bring emotions into it.

drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago
Did you look at the Contribution License Agreement? It appears that the issue at hand was in fact "spelled out". Repo owners aren't unreasonable to interpret this action as bad faith. I would agree that their message would be better communicated with a more amicable tone.
- dclowd9901 5y ago
  > I would agree that their message would be better communicated with a more amicable tone. This was entirely GP's point.
  - drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago
    Yes, I agreed with his point and disagreed with his characterization of the situation.
- cies 5y ago
  It says: "owned or managed". It does not say "owned AND managed". MSFT has been in the business of using legal to make money. This is not the Apache Foundation. This is a non-profit arm of MSFT.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Well, if you ask me, I’d like to see an apology for the one-line whitespace change, using !=true, and closing the XML tag without a space. From the commit which started this whole brouhaha: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/commit/cd2cbb807b36dd89b6505e3e699d0784aaf7d976 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/commit/cd2cbb807b36dd89b... That’s some grade A hornet nest kicking right there. /s

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chrisofspades 5y ago
Visual Studio removes that space automatically when you use it to manage dependencies. It's quite annoying.

gego 5y ago

...so that's how you get a lot of work for nothing... people, please never sign something without at least clearly stating what you think it means. A sneaky way is printing the document and sending it back together with a statement of how you interprete it - best on the page you should sign... A simple (see email 211007) below your signature often is enough... if you did not sign on paper but just by clicking some buttons, your position is even better, especially if you are in a non us legislation and there is no translation...

pabs3 5y ago

A recent article about issues in the .NET community: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/05/microsoft_net_foundation_under_fire/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/05/microsoft_net_foundat...

dusted 5y ago

Such politics and drama... over what? was the merged code bad? did it not improve the project? What was even the thing being merged? was it even code? [edit: I found the commit, the apology should probably include that the file was not beautified before the PR was made..]

philliphaydon 5y ago
That’s only 1 small issue of the bigger issue of projects being pulled into the DNF org with no one’s knowledge.
- dusted 5y ago
  That's not the topic of this apology, so it's an entirely inappropriate place to have that discussion. The apology is about not following the procedure..
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    The whole post in the link is in reference to more than just the pushing of a PR. > It is also clear that the .NET Foundation project governance model is not well understood. Project maintainers sign an agreement that either assigns or contributes their project to the .NET Foundation. That’s the point at which project ownership changes. We’ll post another document on that this week as well. It's clear reading the comments on HN that the majority of people commenting have no clue what is going on.

BurnGpuBurn 5y ago

Years ago I heard Microsoft was open sourcing .Net. and I thought that was a clever idea. But with all the drama coming out of the community now for years and years I seriously question the intentions behind that move. It seems to me Microsoft just wanted a bunch of free coders on their .Net projects. And it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft set out to destroy a community of volunteers either.

mustardo 5y ago
I assume they want to retain "ownership" so they can execute the extend and extinguish steps unopposed
- samhw 5y ago
  You do realise they created .NET?
  - jtdev 5y ago
    Okay, _they_ also need to build good will with developers if they want developers to use their products and services.

knorker 5y ago

"Sorry I opened a PR and merged it without discussion" is not an honest description of what happened (https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778), and therefore the apology seems very insincere. You can't apologize and at the same time minimize the thing you actually did. It's pretty much like ending your apology with a "but". And this (not really) apology is a big "but". More to the point though, this apology attempt made it worse. It starts off with a dishonest apology, and then goes into a big policy and contract debate. Why would you conflate the two? Whatever point you're then trying to make about policy and ownership is tainted by both the personal misstep (I call it that unsarcastically) and by the insincere apology. It's needlessly ineffective. 1. It makes your apology sound like "I'm sorry, but I'm the dictator here" 2. It starts you off from a position of "I was wrong, admit I was wrong, but here's how actually I'm right" It's going to be hard convincing anyone if you start from a position of being wrong. And not just wrong but also really rude. It seems to me that it would be much more effective to just apologize for the obvious process mis-step and arrogant rudeness (it happens to the best of us), and let that sink in. And then start a new conversation about policy. Whoever raises "yeah, well weren't you the one who went around PR policies?" in that thread will be the unproductive one, and it won't go anywhere. As-is the policy points can't be taken at face value.

xwdv 5y ago
If this is not desired behavior it should be enforced by requiring a reviewer to sign off on the changes before merging. By not requiring this it means it is okay for pull requests to be merged without discussion, even if it is a rare occurrence. This is one of those occurrences.
- knorker 5y ago
  So, first of all I disagree. Just because something is not prevented by technical means doesn't make it allowed. That goes for all things in life, outside of a supermax prison. And after being asked twice by another maintainer (one of the two current maintainers (none of which are her), as I read it) to please follow the procedures, she tells him to fuck off and overrides him. And after all that she does actually write something intended to look like an apology. So what does that mean? Either she disagrees with you, and indeed she should have followed procedures, or all she's apologizing for is "sorry you got so upset", which more of a taunt than an apology. No, actually. Contrary to what cryptocurrency people would have you believe, there are other and more effective ways to prevent undesirable behaviour than technical means, for the vast majority of behaviour.

azarovalex 5y ago

Same vibe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

globular-toast 5y ago

I preferred open source before people like this got involved with all their bullshit and doublespeak.

jebronie 5y ago

Very toxic behaviour from this person.

bob1029 5y ago

Total waste of everyone's time. I suspect if the word "Microsoft" were not in this equation, this HN thread would not exist and no one would give a shit. A lot of people have ulterior motives and 99% of the "toxicity" I have observed to date comes from either trying to hide those motives or pretending like others couldn't possibly possess them.

samhw 5y ago
Yup, I'm inclined to agree. I also think the word 'toxic' is horribly overused, to mean essentially 'anything I don't like'. Though FWIW, ulterior motives are hidden by definition – as in, that's literally the meaning of the word 'ulterior' – so I'm not quite sure what the last sentence is getting at.

itoocode 5y ago

Moral to learn as developers: Follow PR rules even if you are owner or admin, senior executive dev or junior dev.

_pmf_ 5y ago

It's a Microsoft project, and Microsoft employees can and will do what they want.

smohare 5y ago

I’m not sure that thread supports your point, tbh.