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I'm sorry

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Re: I'm sorry

#231

Post by camkego »

rectang wrote: post #138
rectang wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth: while I'm not a lawyer, I'm a past ASF board member, VP Legal Affairs, and VP Incubator. Not that you should take my "argument from authority" as gospel, but that should give some perspective on why I'm focusing narrowly on the issue of copyright assignment. I've explained these issues many many times to many many projects, dealt with conflicts over administrative control analogous in some ways t…

> EDIT: Mea culpa. I have found additional documentation that conflicts and reveals that there is now an an additional copyright-assignment track. See my soon-to-appear reply. On https://dotnetfoundation.org/projects/submit I found the following: > Assignment and Contribution Models. The .NET Foundation uses either an assignment model or a contribution model for on-boarding new projects. Under the assignment model, a…

Here is the best part, if you dig a little deeper into the issues and pull requests, you will find out that the .NET Foundation people have been removing the contribution option from the blank agreements, leaving only the assignment option. Lol! Unsurprisingly, this upset some of the developers on the projects, as they were unclear about how this affected them.

Re: I'm sorry

#232

Post by bovermyer »

nimvlaj30 wrote: post #37
bovermyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the old adage - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was. And here, by "stupidity," I just mean the author didn't think about that. Too often people are willing to attribute sinister meaning to what, in reality, was just a mistake.

Hanlon's Razor is just a heuristic. What is the reasoning for following it? Or do we just blindly follow an age-old adage because it sounds philosophical?

For my part, I'm going off of my life experiences.

In the vast majority of cases, the logic behind Hanlon's Razor held. Many times I assumed malicious intent and was proved wrong. As I've gotten older, I've assumed malicious intent less frequently.

Re: I'm sorry

#233

Post by edandersen »

armchairhacker wrote: post #99

This whole situation is toxic. She literally made a 1-line change in a configuration file with basically no downsides. She also repeatedly re-opened and then merged the PR despite the other guy telling her to follow the format and wait for a review. Which she shouldn't have done. But then everyone started bashing her and .NET for other (similarly small) things and extrapolating that. Then there's this 1000 legalese w…

> She literally made a 1-line change in a configuration file with basically no downsides.

It was a change to a .csproj file, changing the project dependencies. Not a configuration file.

Re: I'm sorry

#234

Post by RNCTX »

avsteele wrote: post #152

I am not versed in all the details here, but it is clear there is a diverge of expectations between MS and some of the repo owners. This is just part of business. Legal agreements and projects are complicated. Not everything is going to be spelled out. In a good business relationship you acknowledge this and work in good faith to resolve differences when they occur. However, top comments make clear there is a dire ne…

> There is a difference in expectations, so resolve it by making offers to MS for proposed changes.

Here's some more rude commentary for you: you are showing your hand, and it's a very poor / weak one.

You seemingly operate under the assumption that corporate-speak is some sort of invisibility cloak that gives the denizens of said corporations free reign to exploit whoever they like, and those exploited should politely ask for their soylent green in return.

Well, if I were giving my humanities-grad opinion to those developers in terms of dealing with people like you, I'd tell them to immediately recognize and refuse to deal with people like you, and more specifically to tell you that "if you want me to participate in your HR-speak, you can pay me a salary, until then the discourse is not on your terms. Maybe you should tell your boss to send someone else."

Re: I'm sorry

#235

Post by bovermyer »

jeffparsons wrote: post #73
bovermyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the old adage - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was. And here, by "stupidity," I just mean the author didn't think about that. Too often people are willing to attribute sinister meaning to what, in reality, was just a mistake.

Sometimes Hanlon's razor is in tension with Occam's. If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, maybe it is actually a bad actor. Or something like that. Either way, I think the idea of "the banality of evil" is more useful here than Hanlon's Razor. Claire Novotny may well have simply not thought about her actions. Is she still responsible for them? Should we care that she meant well if she continued her bad…

I would hardly equate drunk driving to Novotny's actions.

But to address your analogy, I simply do not have enough information to tell whether Ms. Novotny is a bad actor or not. In the absence of such information, I can only assess a situation based on my prior life experiences.

Re: I'm sorry

#236

Post by pnut »

knorker wrote: post #216
xwdv wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is not desired behavior it should be enforced by requiring a reviewer to sign off on the changes before merging. By not requiring this it means it is okay for pull requests to be merged without discussion, even if it is a rare occurrence. This is one of those occurrences.

So, first of all I disagree. Just because something is not prevented by technical means doesn't make it allowed. That goes for all things in life, outside of a supermax prison. And after being asked twice by another maintainer (one of the two current maintainers (none of which are her), as I read it) to please follow the procedures, she tells him to fuck off and overrides him. And after all that she does actually wri…

Isn't this situation a counterexample though? Nontechnical ways to prevent behaviour were attempted, and failed.

For distributed software development processes, the only thing that works are hard boundaries. No hard boundary -> implicitly tolerated.

For instance, "the vast majority of behaviour" includes every line of code in a repo. The only viable way of preventing undesirable behaviour of a software system is to enforce passing tests before merging. A mandatory technological safety net baked into the developer's workflow.

All of these boundaries are to prevent human error propagating to production. Merging changes without review shouldn't be possible.

Re: I'm sorry

#237

Post by xwdv »

knorker wrote: post #216
xwdv wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is not desired behavior it should be enforced by requiring a reviewer to sign off on the changes before merging. By not requiring this it means it is okay for pull requests to be merged without discussion, even if it is a rare occurrence. This is one of those occurrences.

So, first of all I disagree. Just because something is not prevented by technical means doesn't make it allowed. That goes for all things in life, outside of a supermax prison. And after being asked twice by another maintainer (one of the two current maintainers (none of which are her), as I read it) to please follow the procedures, she tells him to fuck off and overrides him. And after all that she does actually wri…

You are wrong.

It takes no effort to enforce reviews for pull requests. So why not just do it? If that’s the desired behavior, why not just enforce it as the desired behavior?

Relying on people to remember rules or adhere to some informal policy isn’t scalable, and complicates onboarding for new maintainers who may not be aware of the repo’s “culture”.

We are tech people, do things technically.

Re: I'm sorry

#238

Post by ljm »

jsd1982 wrote: post #84

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. Th…

> 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.

Re: I'm sorry

#239

Post by ashtonkem »

knorker wrote: post #218
sillysaurusx wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ending of that was so unexpected: > Wow great conversation! Let's lock it to contributors just for a laugh and not because someone on Twitter just unhelpfully sent 27.3k Looky-Loos over to drop their $0.02 on my repo > @reactiveui reactiveui locked as resolved and limited conversation to collaborators 6 days ago Either I'm out of touch (quite probable) or sarcasm doesn't translate too well, since... I think they'…

I think that was a good call. Most mob-comments on these things are not productive. And especially when done on the project's own infrastructure (unlike here on HN) it's like locking your normally-open door to prevent people coming into your house to berate you. Let the people upset write to their local paper, instead. I don't think the thread would be helped by 100 "who's here from HN?", "Congrats, you're on reddit"…

I think you’re right about making that decision, but the sarcastic description of the situation in the article comes across as condescending.

Re: I'm sorry

#240

Post by joeberon »

xwdv wrote: post #237
knorker wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, first of all I disagree. Just because something is not prevented by technical means doesn't make it allowed. That goes for all things in life, outside of a supermax prison. And after being asked twice by another maintainer (one of the two current maintainers (none of which are her), as I read it) to please follow the procedures, she tells him to fuck off and overrides him. And after all that she does actually wri…

You are wrong. It takes no effort to enforce reviews for pull requests. So why not just do it? If that’s the desired behavior, why not just enforce it as the desired behavior? Relying on people to remember rules or adhere to some informal policy isn’t scalable, and complicates onboarding for new maintainers who may not be aware of the repo’s “culture”. We are tech people, do things technically.

Almost a dystopian, kafkaesque view of the world
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