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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 wit

by 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]
ljm 5y ago
> While I’d been involved in this project as a founder and maintainer for many years [...] I failed to consider how the interaction would look through the lens of my current role. That part could have been explained better, I think. It suggests it would have been a non-issue if not for being an Executive Director, it's just concerned with 'how it looks'. In that sense I can see why people would treat it as a non-apology. > I created a PR in ReactiveUI’s Splat project and merged it with my ReactiveUI maintainer permission. I shouldn't have merged this PR without explicit sign-off from the other maintainers, because it's disrespectful and rude not to follow the project’s process. This is an improvement, as it addresses the actual problem in the PR in question. It would have been good to start with this. > Also, as the executive director for the .NET Foundation I should have been able to manage the conversation and the disagreement with the other maintainers a lot better. But then it misses the mark again, here, as I don't believe it's an accurate reflection of the issue in the PR. --- I'm not involved in any of this so I don't know if the general response to this is overly harsh or not, particularly with calls like "resign and find a new ED in 24 hours". I don't rate it as a particularly amazing apology, but I also don't think it's intentionally a non-apology. If anything, it's a mismatch of perspective: the author sees a misuse of Executive Director Power and thinks that to be the problem, but the other people involved see a maintainer ignoring their Code of Conduct. Of course, the other issue is that it conflates the incident with the pull request with a whole bunch of organizational politics, which does feel like a bit of a sucker punch. Perhaps they should have been discussed separately, e.g. with an apology on the PR relating to what happened there, and then... all that other stuff.
BigRedDog1669 5y ago
For one thing it doesn't say what she did was wrong by itself (repeatedly ignoring the maintainers rejections and not following submission guidelines), but it just looks wrong because she is the ED (but she's actually doing it as the maintainer) Edit: on 2nd thought it seems she is also claiming she should be able to make this change unilaterally as Director and the problem is that people don't understand that. Which kind of makes this a non apology for saying sorry while also saying the problem is people's misunderstanding. Which also makes the part about doing the change as a maintainer a lie if that's the argument (she clearly said that in the PR too)
GordonS 5y ago
But she doesn't even explain what the "mistake" was (moving OSS projects), and even down plays it by only mentioning merging a PR and not the intent behind the PR. She also doesn't say why she thought this change was needed, or why on earth she would even think to do such a thing without talking with the maintainers. These reads as a weak, non-apology to me - makes me wonder if the text was really written by her, or by legal. For context, I've been working in Microsoft shops and with dotnet for 2 decades, and I'm pretty much a dotnet fanboi - the actions here have burned a tonne of goodwill, both with dotnet developers and those others who are/were tempted by it. I'm not angry, I'm disappointed :(

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]

ljm 5y ago

> While I’d been involved in this project as a founder and maintainer for many years [...] I failed to consider how the interaction would look through the lens of my current role. That part could have been explained better, I think. It suggests it would have been a non-issue if not for being an Executive Director, it's just concerned with 'how it looks'. In that sense I can see why people would treat it as a non-apology. > I created a PR in ReactiveUI’s Splat project and merged it with my ReactiveUI maintainer permission. I shouldn't have merged this PR without explicit sign-off from the other maintainers, because it's disrespectful and rude not to follow the project’s process. This is an improvement, as it addresses the actual problem in the PR in question. It would have been good to start with this. > Also, as the executive director for the .NET Foundation I should have been able to manage the conversation and the disagreement with the other maintainers a lot better. But then it misses the mark again, here, as I don't believe it's an accurate reflection of the issue in the PR. --- I'm not involved in any of this so I don't know if the general response to this is overly harsh or not, particularly with calls like "resign and find a new ED in 24 hours". I don't rate it as a particularly amazing apology, but I also don't think it's intentionally a non-apology. If anything, it's a mismatch of perspective: the author sees a misuse of Executive Director Power and thinks that to be the problem, but the other people involved see a maintainer ignoring their Code of Conduct. Of course, the other issue is that it conflates the incident with the pull request with a whole bunch of organizational politics, which does feel like a bit of a sucker punch. Perhaps they should have been discussed separately, e.g. with an apology on the PR relating to what happened there, and then... all that other stuff.

BigRedDog1669 5y ago

For one thing it doesn't say what she did was wrong by itself (repeatedly ignoring the maintainers rejections and not following submission guidelines), but it just looks wrong because she is the ED (but she's actually doing it as the maintainer) Edit: on 2nd thought it seems she is also claiming she should be able to make this change unilaterally as Director and the problem is that people don't understand that. Which kind of makes this a non apology for saying sorry while also saying the problem is people's misunderstanding. Which also makes the part about doing the change as a maintainer a lie if that's the argument (she clearly said that in the PR too)

GordonS 5y ago

But she doesn't even explain what the "mistake" was (moving OSS projects), and even down plays it by only mentioning merging a PR and not the intent behind the PR. She also doesn't say why she thought this change was needed, or why on earth she would even think to do such a thing without talking with the maintainers. These reads as a weak, non-apology to me - makes me wonder if the text was really written by her, or by legal. For context, I've been working in Microsoft shops and with dotnet for 2 decades, and I'm pretty much a dotnet fanboi - the actions here have burned a tonne of goodwill, both with dotnet developers and those others who are/were tempted by it. I'm not angry, I'm disappointed :(