5 ms·

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 re

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.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > The opening paragraph is an apology. Other parts of the post undo any goodwill that might have been garnered from the apology itself. This is also recognizable as “I’m sorry, but” or “I’m sorry it made you feel that way”. Both of which have meaningful applications in very specific circumstances but neither of which belong in a public apology.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    To people who actually want to better learn to apologize: find a way to apologize sincerely, without inserting yourself into the space receiving the apology, then take your “but” and apply what you learned from the experience to it. Your “but” matters to you, it might be important, it doesn’t matter to the person or people you harmed.
- sneak 5y ago
  The .NET Foundation is just Microsoft money trying to pretend that Microsoft isn't for-profit or pro-proprietary-software. Microsoft only tolerates open source insofar as it doesn't impede any opportunities Microsoft has for increasing Microsoft revenue. When dealing with Microsoft puppets such as the .NET Foundation, one must always remember that all of this pro-open-source project stuff is pretense and subterfuge to maximize Microsoft profits, not to enrich the open source world. The person (affiliated with the .NET Foundation) giving this apology is on the Microsoft concentration-camp-money payroll. They are being paid to do things that will ultimately result in the sale of more proprietary Microsoft software and services. Don't get it twisted. These FOSS project maintainers were fools to get in bed with the enemy.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    (While I applaud your energy, I wanted to gently point out that the labels might not be too productive. You might be right, or you might not, but given Microsoft’s recent (very positive IMO) open source contributions, well… it just seemed a little unfair that your labels discounted it entirely. That said, perhaps “you’re not wrong” applies. I don’t know.)
sillysaurusx 5y ago
I was ready to agree with you. And then I read https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 And then I realized: her apology here isn’t addressing the root concerns. But it’s addressing everything she has authority to address. Therefore, it’s the best apology possible, but people may be upset because e.g. her merging a PR without discussion is perhaps less anxiety-inducing than the idea that your GitHub repo can be moved without warning to a separate enterprise account (if I’m reading this correctly). I assume she can’t address the latter, since it’s unrelated to her. But she quite thoroughly addressed the former — which is great! — but perhaps she should have distanced herself in her apology from the other happenings that people have brought up. I don’t know. It was just sort of shocking to read “they transferred my GitHub repo without warning” without an immediate “crap, sorry! We’ve reverted that” reply. I assume I’m missing lots of context though.
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  She says she is the "Executive Director for the .NET Foundation". I'd be extremely surprised if this role didn't allow her input into the decision to move projects to a separate enterprise account without informing the project maintainers.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    I was wondering about that too. If that’s the case — and that’s a big if… I don’t think we should assume it’s true — then her apology probably failed to address the root outrage of the decision to move projects to the enterprise account without warning or consent. They may be entitled to do this, but anyone with a patent is also entitled to enforce that patent. An enforcement decision needs to be made with great care. In this case, they end up sounding tone deaf (https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/39#discussioncomment-1439470 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/39#dis... has a bunch of justifications about why their decision makes sense, and all I can do is shake my head, even though it is technically correct).
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > e.g. her merging a PR without discussion is perhaps less anxiety-inducing than the idea that your GitHub repo can be moved without warning to a separate enterprise account (if I’m reading this correctly). You're reading it correctly. There are several maintainers in that discussion who only found out today that their projects were moved from their public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise accounts. They weren't notified, and some of them only found out because they read the discussion you linked and decided to check the status of their projects. As far as I'm aware, the projects haven't been transferred back to the accounts they belonged to prior to being moved to the DNF's account.
ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
I don’t understand why people get so angry about this sort of thing, when I saw on Twitter that someone was upset because they had been migrated to GitHub enterprise my immediate reaction was to think that Microsoft did it to give them a better experience rather for some nefarious secret plan. There is no law to say that people have to give their projects to the DNF, there is no law that says people have to use those projects and can’t start their own projects - join it if you want, don’t join if you don’t want.
- mithr 5y ago
  I believe the issue is that the maintainers were explicitly told that they weren't "giving" their projects to the DNF, but rather that the DNF was there to support them, while the maintainers retain complete control. So the DNF is saying "we're sorry you misunderstood", and the maintainers are saying "we didn't misunderstand, you're not allowed do that". It's an ownership issue rather than a benefits issue -- if you joined a homeowner's association in order to have a say in how things work in your neighborhood, and then got back from vacation and discovered they completely redid your yard while you were away, without telling you about it or asking your permission, you'd be pretty mad even if the yard ended up being nice.
nebulous1 5y ago
Did you read the whole post? It does start as an apology, but then it explains that she actually had every right to exert control of the project and implies the only reason people are complaining is that they didn't understand the new hierarchy they had inadvertently signed up to.
gpm 5y ago
So I'm an outsider here, but I think you're missing the point. Sure, the post starts out as an actual apology for her actions with regards to the PR, but that doesn't seem to have been the meat of the complaints. Then her post goes on to start making claims that people were upset because things "sound scary" but that the foundations unilateral decision to move projects under their github account actually somehow "gives them more control over their projects". Then she goes on to make legal claims that "project ownership changes", when that does not appear to be what the contracts actually say. At this point she is litigating in public against the project maintainers when it seems the foundations purpose in life is to represent them! There's also an implication here by putting the legal claims after the part about moving projects without the consent that the foundation was "in the right" to do this because they had a contract giving them that right. Then the email wraps up with multiple paragraphs of polite speech that can frankly be summarized as "and now you get to wait and see what we dictate". "Non-apology" doesn't seem to be quite the right term, she did apologize at the start for one thing, but the rest was anything but an apology.
Lammy 5y ago
> I wonder what those people would consider to be sufficient? The exact same apology, but coming from a male.
mithr 5y ago
I think this is actually a result of this post being a very savvy PR move. The title and beginning of the post make it seem like she's personally apologizing for merging a piece of code. That's all good and well -- I think her apology for that part is mostly fine. And at a casual read for a person who's just peeking in, and hasn't read the other post on that board for context, that's all it appears to be. But (as other folks have mentioned) most of the maintainers are commenting on the rest of the post, which sort of hides behind that apology. The rest of the post addresses the real outrage that's been growing in that community -- not due to a bad merge, which is rude but somewhat understandable as a mistake, but due to the .NET Foundation essentially overstepping what the project maintainers understand as the DNF's role and authority. That part is a complete non-apology, where the executive director of the DNF is basically saying "we're so sorry that you didn't properly understand that we could do this, we'll fix that by publishing a clearer document", and "we're so sorry that you didn't know we could just move you to our enterprise account, we'll communicate better next time". Both of these are spun as communication issues, whereas in reality they're authority issues -- the maintainers don't think the DNF should be able to just decide to do that, on its own, regardless of how well it's communicated.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
People map their mental model of others onto text as they read, which is one reason why text-based communication, while low bandwidth, is also often misunderstood due to all of the subtle information compression that is lost during the information exchange.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

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.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
> The opening paragraph is an apology. Other parts of the post undo any goodwill that might have been garnered from the apology itself. This is also recognizable as “I’m sorry, but” or “I’m sorry it made you feel that way”. Both of which have meaningful applications in very specific circumstances but neither of which belong in a public apology.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  To people who actually want to better learn to apologize: find a way to apologize sincerely, without inserting yourself into the space receiving the apology, then take your “but” and apply what you learned from the experience to it. Your “but” matters to you, it might be important, it doesn’t matter to the person or people you harmed.
sneak 5y ago
The .NET Foundation is just Microsoft money trying to pretend that Microsoft isn't for-profit or pro-proprietary-software. Microsoft only tolerates open source insofar as it doesn't impede any opportunities Microsoft has for increasing Microsoft revenue. When dealing with Microsoft puppets such as the .NET Foundation, one must always remember that all of this pro-open-source project stuff is pretense and subterfuge to maximize Microsoft profits, not to enrich the open source world. The person (affiliated with the .NET Foundation) giving this apology is on the Microsoft concentration-camp-money payroll. They are being paid to do things that will ultimately result in the sale of more proprietary Microsoft software and services. Don't get it twisted. These FOSS project maintainers were fools to get in bed with the enemy.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  (While I applaud your energy, I wanted to gently point out that the labels might not be too productive. You might be right, or you might not, but given Microsoft’s recent (very positive IMO) open source contributions, well… it just seemed a little unfair that your labels discounted it entirely. That said, perhaps “you’re not wrong” applies. I don’t know.)

sillysaurusx 5y ago

I was ready to agree with you. And then I read https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38 And then I realized: her apology here isn’t addressing the root concerns. But it’s addressing everything she has authority to address. Therefore, it’s the best apology possible, but people may be upset because e.g. her merging a PR without discussion is perhaps less anxiety-inducing than the idea that your GitHub repo can be moved without warning to a separate enterprise account (if I’m reading this correctly). I assume she can’t address the latter, since it’s unrelated to her. But she quite thoroughly addressed the former — which is great! — but perhaps she should have distanced herself in her apology from the other happenings that people have brought up. I don’t know. It was just sort of shocking to read “they transferred my GitHub repo without warning” without an immediate “crap, sorry! We’ve reverted that” reply. I assume I’m missing lots of context though.

cmeacham98 5y ago
She says she is the "Executive Director for the .NET Foundation". I'd be extremely surprised if this role didn't allow her input into the decision to move projects to a separate enterprise account without informing the project maintainers.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I was wondering about that too. If that’s the case — and that’s a big if… I don’t think we should assume it’s true — then her apology probably failed to address the root outrage of the decision to move projects to the enterprise account without warning or consent. They may be entitled to do this, but anyone with a patent is also entitled to enforce that patent. An enforcement decision needs to be made with great care. In this case, they end up sounding tone deaf (https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/39#discussioncomment-1439470 https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/39#dis... has a bunch of justifications about why their decision makes sense, and all I can do is shake my head, even though it is technically correct).
heavyset_go 5y ago
> e.g. her merging a PR without discussion is perhaps less anxiety-inducing than the idea that your GitHub repo can be moved without warning to a separate enterprise account (if I’m reading this correctly). You're reading it correctly. There are several maintainers in that discussion who only found out today that their projects were moved from their public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise accounts. They weren't notified, and some of them only found out because they read the discussion you linked and decided to check the status of their projects. As far as I'm aware, the projects haven't been transferred back to the accounts they belonged to prior to being moved to the DNF's account.

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

I don’t understand why people get so angry about this sort of thing, when I saw on Twitter that someone was upset because they had been migrated to GitHub enterprise my immediate reaction was to think that Microsoft did it to give them a better experience rather for some nefarious secret plan. There is no law to say that people have to give their projects to the DNF, there is no law that says people have to use those projects and can’t start their own projects - join it if you want, don’t join if you don’t want.

mithr 5y ago
I believe the issue is that the maintainers were explicitly told that they weren't "giving" their projects to the DNF, but rather that the DNF was there to support them, while the maintainers retain complete control. So the DNF is saying "we're sorry you misunderstood", and the maintainers are saying "we didn't misunderstand, you're not allowed do that". It's an ownership issue rather than a benefits issue -- if you joined a homeowner's association in order to have a say in how things work in your neighborhood, and then got back from vacation and discovered they completely redid your yard while you were away, without telling you about it or asking your permission, you'd be pretty mad even if the yard ended up being nice.

nebulous1 5y ago

Did you read the whole post? It does start as an apology, but then it explains that she actually had every right to exert control of the project and implies the only reason people are complaining is that they didn't understand the new hierarchy they had inadvertently signed up to.

gpm 5y ago

So I'm an outsider here, but I think you're missing the point. Sure, the post starts out as an actual apology for her actions with regards to the PR, but that doesn't seem to have been the meat of the complaints. Then her post goes on to start making claims that people were upset because things "sound scary" but that the foundations unilateral decision to move projects under their github account actually somehow "gives them more control over their projects". Then she goes on to make legal claims that "project ownership changes", when that does not appear to be what the contracts actually say. At this point she is litigating in public against the project maintainers when it seems the foundations purpose in life is to represent them! There's also an implication here by putting the legal claims after the part about moving projects without the consent that the foundation was "in the right" to do this because they had a contract giving them that right. Then the email wraps up with multiple paragraphs of polite speech that can frankly be summarized as "and now you get to wait and see what we dictate". "Non-apology" doesn't seem to be quite the right term, she did apologize at the start for one thing, but the rest was anything but an apology.

Lammy 5y ago

> I wonder what those people would consider to be sufficient? The exact same apology, but coming from a male.

mithr 5y ago

I think this is actually a result of this post being a very savvy PR move. The title and beginning of the post make it seem like she's personally apologizing for merging a piece of code. That's all good and well -- I think her apology for that part is mostly fine. And at a casual read for a person who's just peeking in, and hasn't read the other post on that board for context, that's all it appears to be. But (as other folks have mentioned) most of the maintainers are commenting on the rest of the post, which sort of hides behind that apology. The rest of the post addresses the real outrage that's been growing in that community -- not due to a bad merge, which is rude but somewhat understandable as a mistake, but due to the .NET Foundation essentially overstepping what the project maintainers understand as the DNF's role and authority. That part is a complete non-apology, where the executive director of the DNF is basically saying "we're so sorry that you didn't properly understand that we could do this, we'll fix that by publishing a clearer document", and "we're so sorry that you didn't know we could just move you to our enterprise account, we'll communicate better next time". Both of these are spun as communication issues, whereas in reality they're authority issues -- the maintainers don't think the DNF should be able to just decide to do that, on its own, regardless of how well it's communicated.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

People map their mental model of others onto text as they read, which is one reason why text-based communication, while low bandwidth, is also often misunderstood due to all of the subtle information compression that is lost during the information exchange.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]