I'm not trying to be lazy (ok maybe a little bit), but can someone please provide like a 3-4 sentence summary of what happened? Everything I've seen on this either assumes you already know, or is very long and rambly, or both.
The .NET Foundation asked for owner access on the author's repository (for a CLA bot). The author declined and a workaround was organized.
Years later the .NET Foundation asked for "owner access" on the author's repository (to allow them enforce Code of Conduct across all repositories). The author declined.
The CLA bot stopped working. The author was told it would work if he gave it owner access. The author was annoyed because they previously had a workaround. They gave in and gave @dnfadmin owner access (temporarily, it was later revoked after the CLA bot was set up, thanks /u/ethbr0 for the correction).
Some time later the author realized that the project had now been silently moved to GitHub Enterprise (likely in the short window @dnfadmin had owner access). The author states that projects in GitHub Enterprise can be entirely controlled by the owner of the account (the .NET Foundation). This transfer happened silently.
Independently, this happened to another project (who had coincidentally had an issue with a Microsoft employee and former contributor force a pull-request into their project: https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778). The change itself seems innocuous, but the approach bothered people.
People are upset because of how tone-deaf all of this is. They would like the .NET Foundation to stop trying to gain complete control over the member projects. They would especially like for their projects not to have their ownership changed silently.
Edit: For the record, I do not believe this is part of some embrace, extend, extinguish plan on behalf of Microsoft. I think these accusations actually cheapen what has happened here. I suspect this was more of a "can we make this process easier and more convenient for the .NET Foundation"-type thing.
The people involved with this will have to do some soul searching. The .NET Foundation should operate in service of its member projects, not the other way around.
Temporarily gave @dnfadmin access, is my read.
> "The .NET Foundation had admin access to the WiX Toolset organization for a week, not more than a week ago"
So, the proper, open-source-if-a-bit-dickish way to go about this would have been...
1) Microsoft forks the primary git repository and declares theirs to be "Microsoft-blessed".
2) Microsoft puts a skeleton team in charge of maintaining the Microsoft-blessed version, but mostly they just pull the original maintainer's patches.
3) People slowly migrate to the Microsoft blessed version.
NOT: We flipped this hidden switch under the table and now your repository in GitHub is controlled by us.
Of course from the issues that came up the last few days it seems that there is literally no point in joining the .Net Foundation and kicking a project out is essentially doing the maintainers a favor.
Apache and Eclipse and others all mandate that they control a lot of minutia of source control like what .NET Foundation seems to want to be doing with their GitHub Enterprise account, but their transparency policies mean all of the discussions of that are open and no one is surprised when changes happen.
I suspect there was also just a different picture on what the .NET Foundation even meant inside and outside of MS. It's different people working on it inside MS than the ones who originally set things up, and the new people may not have even seen their actions as trying to take control of anything because they were under the impression that everyone considered them in charge already.
The leadership of the .NET Foundation changed twice since my project joined it. So it is very possible (likely?) norms and expectations did not have flowed from one set of leaders to the next. I don't know. I'm still waiting to hear.
Microsoft and orgs like it are too big, you cannot trust a massive machine to be efficient, there's little incentive for proper management.
https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/39#dis...
Microsoft is the "Founding Member" of the .NET Foundation. They are entitled to appoint an Exec. Director (ED) and the board has no say in this matter (The current ED is the person who forced a commit on a member project). The ED's tenure has no expiry other than when Microsoft feels the need to change (or they leave). All other board members are elected for a set term.
Lastly, the ED can block any board resolution; aka, the elected board needs Microsoft's blessing to do literally anything.
Source: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/39#dis...
But this is what Rodney Littles is quoted as having said in his interview with The Register
> From Littles' perspective, though, the .NET Foundation is insufficiently independent from Microsoft, does too little to help its member projects, and lacks a strong sense of mission or purpose.
> does too little to help its member projects, and lacks a strong sense of mission or purpose.
That's on the .NET Foundation, not Microsoft.
This had a huge impact on us. With thousands of employees and citizens calling our IT support staff of 5 people every day.
When I used our OSM official “City off X” account to fix it, I was an utter idiot and submitted both a real life picture I took myself as well as a Google maps and a krak maps (Danish map service) screenshots. I didn’t know this wasn’t legal, because I was an idiot, but it resulted in our fix getting reversed and a week long discussion with the OSM community members about fixing the damn street.
We made the street one way. But we couldn’t fix it in an OSS map service because the community wouldn’t let us because we made a stupid mistake.
We’ve now switched our services to Krak. But I can promise you that if we had, had the admin power to force our chance through during those days, we wouldn’t have given any regards to the OSS community.
If an popular tool wasn’t working within the .Net framework CLA I imagine the process would be somewhat similar inside Microsoft.
It’s just one of those things where the OSS community processes and Enterprise process of “get this fixed right now, at any cost by any means, ignoring every standard we may have, just get it fixed, now. Then make sure it never happens again.” that happens every now and then when the beast awakens, clashes. I’m not sure how you can avoid it, as Enterprise will never want to comply with OSS processes when it’s in a hurry.
But yes, it may seem a little confusing that even though you can do X, it may not be appropriate.
I think that's also why people are upset in this case. They actually did try to protect themselves from power grabs, only to find themselves cheated.
By the way, there's a Danish mailing list for OSM. I don't know if you explained the issue there, but if you did, I think it's likely someone would have made the correction for you relatively quickly.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/welcome
"Unless you have special permission, don't copy from online or paper maps."
I mean, we own the map rights. Google had to seek permission from us to map our area and publish it.
What was the problem? Why isn't that legal?
At best it's a breach of GMaps ToS by that user. And in this case the user attached a photo they took. The screenshots are just noise.
And since its a community consensus thing, people will wait a few days to reintroduce a change once it has been challenged unless the challenge is obviously unreasonable. It's not like a change being delayed a few days is some unreasonable big punishment, it's just part of QA process to run. Maybe wasn't strictly necessary here, but it's a really obvious warning signal to trip.
(To make a (admittedly stretched) software analogy, if you submit a PR somewhere and show disassembly from the Windows kernel as evidence that it's a good algorithm others also use, it'll also cause some concern, and you would've been better of just showing your solution on its own)
I get that the OSM community is trying to practice something equivalent to a clean room reimplementation, but that's equivalent to a person in the "cleanroom" being shown a public domain code library and then a file from that same library, but taken out of a ROM dump. Yes, they saw the copyrighted file, but they also saw the public domain file so they're entirely within their right to base their reimplementation either partially or fully on it.
Otherwise, reasonable summary without as much flair and color commentary as the original. ;)
It was the head of the .NET Foundation
[1] https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38
That's the change.
Writing the whole entry was challenging because there is a lot of detail I wanted to provide to being everyone along the journey. I've seen some people drop in at any isolated point and say, "Why is this a big deal?"
Also I'll be the first to admit that when in story telling mode, I am not particularly terse. :)