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I did not get that at all. To me it sounds like she is coming clean with what she sees as the issues surrounding the project, including poor communication. I read that as, 'another problem we've seen is that people are unclear what it means to become a member of our organisation so we are working towards improving that.'

I initially read her apology and thought it was likely a response to an overblown situation that occurs because it's on the Internet and it's much easier to assume the worst of people's intentions.

I can imagine merging a PR I made that I imagined to be obvious and fine. I probably would have just said, 'oh yeah, sorry. I'll try not to do it again. My bad.'

But then again, that's probably why I'm not the leader of the .Net foundation :-)

> I read that as, 'another problem we've seen is that people are unclear what it means to become a member of our organisation so we are working towards improving that.'

The implication though is that becoming a member of the organization allows for actions like the one she took. I do think owning up to "maybe these agreements aren't clear enough" is good, but that then seems inextricably linked to "I was allowed to do this".

The reader then needs to figure out "is she apologizing because of what she did, or is she apologizing for not being clear that she was allowed to do what she did?"

If you're one of the maintainers, the latter falls flat, regardless of intent/genuineness.

I hope your more charitable take is closer to reality.

I don't know why there would be confusion about what she's apologizing for. She explicitly stated what the mistake was.

> 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.

But when that is followed by an explanation outlining why they’re allowed to do what they did, and going forward they’ll try to make that more clear, how is one supposed to interpret the original apology and its intent?

The apology and the legal overview do not coexist well.

Aren’t people conflating two different things? Merging a PR when repeatedly asked not to until it got approved, and Microsoft moving repos?

Merging the PR is a personal failure for which she explicitly apologized for.

Microsoft moving repos is something that the organization has always said was possible. There’s not much to apologize there for. That has always been explicitly stated the rules.

Wasn’t just opening a pr and merging it, it was opening a pr, having a maintainer ask her to clarify/follow process, close pr, her reopen it, TWICE and then finally just merge it dismissing the maintainer

https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778

Thanks! Coming in to this cold: Starting with reading the apology and the first few comments on that page, then back here down to yours. This paints a totally different picture to the impressions I got from the preceding steps; I can fully understand the upset.

(It's weird.. I just came from that link, and was feeling exactly the same way, and then read your comment. Yes. I try not to chime in with "me too," but that PR really puts into perspective that the merge was problematic in addition to them transferring entire GitHub repositories without warning, which is generating an equal amount of outrage. I see now why it's equal.)

> 'oh yeah, sorry. I'll try not to do it again. My bad.'

This definitely should be sufficient. But hey, we are not living in that time anymore.

Public condemnation is the new normal. And a response with public self-condemnation is expected from the mob. "I'm sorry" and "I apologize" is no longer sufficient. You need to go deeper and expose the evil in your soul, and condemn your self and your conspirators, and devote you will be a new person. You might get a chance.

The promise is "apologize and this will all go away". That's a lie. Never does. Depending on where you work, you may or may not be totally screwed, but apologizing when you have done nothing wrong changes bupkis.

Why give the bullies what they want? Stand your ground:

- You can cordially invite the mob to go fuck itself.

Or, for a less confrontational approach:

- You can ignore the mob and proceed as normal for a few months until they find somebody else to hate.

It's going to be a ride either way, but these bullying tactics work only because people cave. It's a trial by fire. The people that don't tend to end up more successful afterwards, and with the added benefit of knowing who their true friends really are.

A couple of important points:

- You need to commit. If you later on back down, you are done like a cheap steak. The bullies know they own you at that point. Yes, this means you might be fired, or kicked out of your university. Might get your house torched. You're going to lose "friends". Improvise, adapt, and overcome.

- These bullies want to provoke you to violence on their terms. Don't. Especially if you're the fighting type: don't take that bait. Pretty sure Sun Tzu didn't write, "Fight precisely when the enemy wants to battle."

People do something shitty all the time, like literally all the time. But public condemnation is the new normal. But nothing you do will prevent that from happening. Mob is just being mob. The mob mentality is spreading like a disease.

You know what? You're right. Deleted that bullet point.

The problem is that an apology should not contain a ‘but…’

A self-condemnation should not contain a ‘but…’.

Unless the situation is nuanced. Which is pretty much all the time.

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”

> 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.

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.

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.

(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.)

Microsoft doesn't contribute to open source software because open source software is good for the world. Microsoft contributes to open source software because Microsoft wants to sell more proprietary software and services to the open source world, as more and more developers live in that world.

They realized that without significant service lock-in, people would begin to abandon things like Windows (and continue to ignore things like Azure).

This is why WSL exists (so even open source people will keep buying Windows licenses), this is why VS Code exists (and, despite being open source, the most popular plugins for it are proprietary) (to provide a privileged position for GitHub integration), this is why they bought GitHub, this is why they bought NPM, this is why they paid Docker to make dockerd run on Windows, and this is why they're trying very hard to get as many people locked in to proprietary services like GitHub Actions and GitHub Issues.

This is also why they run little shell nonprofits like the .NET Foundation.

You might be right about that. But that doesn’t change the fact that good software now exists, which wouldn’t otherwise exist, and that the software is now open source, which otherwise wouldn’t be open source. In my opinion, that counts for something.

I’ve long hoped that gamedev would make a similar transition. And although Unreal Engine et al are open source, it’s still not the default. So in other words, if gamedev as a whole behaved as Microsoft behaves now, I would be gleefully happy. But you would also be correct in saying that they are doing it “just to sell more proprietary software and services to the open source world.”

I don’t know. The reason I’m trying to take a neutral stance is because I empathize with your point of view, but also can’t shake the feeling that the hard line open source idealism of 1980’s has not achieved all the goals that it set out to achieve (to phrase it diplomatically). And so in 2021, the movement is in danger of being totally ineffective, because all of the teenagers from 1980 are old now, and the teenagers from 2021 aren’t buying into the dogma.

>> can’t shake the feeling that the hard line open source idealism of 1980’s has not achieved all the goals that it set out to achieve...

Actually it has done quite well. Not as widespread as some would like, but I think Free Software is doing spectacularly well. I would say nobody needs Microsoft for anything these day because there are great alternative, but they are creating some decent enterprise tools that may not have free equivalents.

Windows and Office though? I haven't needed those in 15 years, and that's because Free Software has achieved most of its goals.

There is no replacement for Excel. Those who think there is are either ignorant of Excel's capability, or are fooling themselves.

(Just wanted to say, it was a delightful surprise to hear you make a defense of Microsoft in this particular area. Thanks for being impartial.)

> I’ve long hoped that gamedev would make a similar transition.

Reminder: Microsoft is one of the biggest game platforms, too, and have not even flirted with the idea of open source there.

open source is open source, it is good that they are embracing open source community and contributing A LOT of resources to that. We have a lot of good softwares, framework, open code to learn and communities build by them and they're not allowed to make money from it?

You're basically saying that people who wants to make money are bad. That is just a weird judgement, laravel is building a whole ecosystem to make money, spring is building training and support around , nestjs is building enterprise support. If there is no way to make money around doing something that we love, then open source will be dead. If we are grateful as a community towards what they did, we should support them. not judge them that they want to make money :/

Reading the parent post, I found the monetary aspect less as some kind of anti-capitalist moralism, but more an observation regarding incentives:

There's nothing wrong with making money. However, when your historical business model relies on leveraging monopolistic positions to make said money, any contribution you make is tainted by your ultimate goals of embracing, extending and extinguishing competition to those monopolistic, proprietary offerings. I simply don't trust Microsoft: anything they present isn't a Trojan horse of one flavor or another; proprietary addons in vsc, all the Github nonsense, poisoned "foundation" governance structures - all of it has the effect of luring developers into doing work that benefits the Microsoft ecosystem over open ecosystems. It is naive in the extreme to assert that just because a benefit exists in any form, all harms associated with that benefit must be ignored.

Nothing wrong with making money from software. Lots is wrong with Microsoft attempting to bamboozle developers out of the rights to their work in a transparent attempt to extend corporate lock-in. When Microsoft GPLs their codebase, I'll take their contributions to open source at face value. They can take donations like everyone else.