robmen

That's unfortunate. That's not how I wrote it. The blog post is about the .NET Foundation and--ultimately--about one very consequential action they took recently.

Depends on the project.

Forking is still one way this may resolve. The .NET Foundation can decide to provide other options.

Then you and I would probably no longer be friends.

Some projects are "contribution" (like you describe) and some are "assignment" (.NET Foundation holds the copyright).

The copyright applies to the source code the copyright is written on. Lawyers then argue who owns the "project" (GitHub organization/repository). For example, the copyright is not applied to the issues in the issue tracker.

But the argument is about whether the .NET Foundation could do such a thing. The argument is whether they should. And, the .NET Foundation chooses that they should take over the projects, project maintainers can make different decisions themselves.

None of this has been decided yet.

Important to note, this extra layer was added without discussing it would be done before or after. The lack of communication eroded trust.

I think if you read the blog post, it'll be clearer.

Yeah, the (continued) lack of communication is not great. But the timing is admittedly pretty poor for the .NET Foundation as well. They just brought on new board members this week. So delays are kinda' expected... but I would have communicated differently.

Sigh. This isn't about Microsoft. It's about the .NET Foundation.

This doesn't make sense to me. My company (FireGiant) sells support contracts for the open source project for companies that want guaranteed incident response times/SLAs.

And Microsoft isn't involved. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright.

No. I was never duped. We've always had a CLA bot (a assignment agreement and later CLA was always requirement since the project's release in 2004).

What was not expected was the move to GitHub Enterprise while the CLA bot was fixed.

No, not supposedly, really.

We had a new repo where the CLA bot was not automatically working. I was busy with a deadline so to unblock the team, I granted admin access.

It wasn't social engineering. I did it. I just didn't realize what was going to happen after doing so.

I explain it all in the post.

With all due respect, this simply doesn't make any sense. The projects are all released with OSI approved licenses. To use your analogy, all the stuff is already on the front lawn with "For Free" signs.

Also, this is about the .NET Foundation not Microsoft.

There is no reason to suspect that they did. As I wrote, I granted admin access to my GitHub organization. No other special access was needed after that.

Thanks, that is good to hear. I wasn't sure I would post it because I was afraid it would actually confuse the issue. Thank you.

That didn't happen to me and there was a pretty comprehensive (IMHO) apology about that issue.

Exactly.

Technically speaking it wasn't that discussion. That discussion was opened after we started realizing what had (and had not) happened. But your summary is otherwise correct. :)

Have you interacted with the .NET Foundation much? Have you seen how the .NET Foundation interacts with Microsoft?

I don't understand your scenario. Microsoft isn't involved here. I mean Microsoft uses the WiX Toolset (my project) but they have never suggested forking it. I'm confused where you were going with this.

Nice story, dude. :)

This issue is about the .NET Foundation, not Microsoft.

This issue is really only about the .NET Foundation and not Microsoft. Otherwise, you may very well be correct.

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.

Minor nit: the admin access wasn't requested for the CLA bot but getting a non-functional CLA bot fixed was the reason I gave temporary access.

Otherwise, reasonable summary without as much flair and color commentary as the original. ;)

Maybe I should have added a tl;dr at the top?

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. :)

I remember when I first released the WiX Toolset publicly to SourceForge. I was up all night getting CVS prepped and writing my blog entry to announce it.

But this issue now really isn't about the source control hosting provider. It isn't even about Microsoft. It's about my relationship with the .NET Foundation who (now) holds the copyright of the project I released on SourceForge over 17 years ago.

GitHub actually had the tools I needed to move the project back. Not much more I could have asked for, honestly.