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I'm sorry

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Re: I'm sorry

#251

Post by samhw »

RNCTX wrote: post #234
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 polite…

oh, hi Stallman

Re: I'm sorry

#252

Post by BigRedDog1669 »

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…

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)

Re: I'm sorry

#253

Post by ashtonkem »

tlamponi wrote: post #244
ashtonkem wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What you do not see is any deleted messages that already happened before that comment, it can well be that a bunch of twitter/reddit/hn/... users already thought it'd be helpful to invade and post some probably not so well-thought-out nor useful stuff. And I mean, it's their repo, if they want to restrict an issue/pr to contributors only and do so with a sarcastic message or some other rhetoric way, it's their full r…

Of course it’s their right to do so, what a silly response. Just because they can, doesn’t mean they should though.

> What you do not see is any deleted messages that already happened before that comment, it can well be that a bunch of twitter/reddit/hn/... users already thought it'd be helpful to invade and post some probably not so well-thought-out nor useful stuff.

And so the solution is to double down and antagonize everyone else? That’s a good way to lose any moral high ground. Ban the bad actors if need be, lock the comments, but for god’s sake communicate that decision professionally.

Re: I'm sorry

#254

Post by samhw »

remexre wrote: post #67
sneak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so ridiculously annoying when an apology or PR statement assumes complete and total familiarity with the existing goings-on. There's even a whole language of euphemism around it. "Recent events involving the community", et c. So lame!

I think the goal of that language is to avoid an increase in drama from random people outside the community (e.g. us!) reacting to the apology without actually being an affected party. If you don't know what the apology's referring to, it's probably not directed to you!

And also, I strongly suspect, because any description of the events is likely to be considered tendentious by some of the upset parties. Much easier to avoid the issues that come with having to write a balanced history of it.

Re: I'm sorry

#255

Post by samhw »

mustardo wrote: post #225
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #209

Years ago I heard Microsoft was open sourcing .Net. and I thought that was a clever idea. But with all the drama coming out of the community now for years and years I seriously question the intentions behind that move. It seems to me Microsoft just wanted a bunch of free coders on their .Net projects. And it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft set out to destroy a community of volunteers either.

I assume they want to retain "ownership" so they can execute the extend and extinguish steps unopposed

You do realise they created .NET?

Re: I'm sorry

#256

Post by jrochkind1 »

knorker wrote: post #212

"Sorry I opened a PR and merged it without discussion" is not an honest description of what happened ( https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 ), and therefore the apology seems very insincere. You can't apologize and at the same time minimize the thing you actually did. It's pretty much like ending your apology with a "but". And this (not really) apology is a big "but". More to the point though, this apology at…

Coming into this as an outside observer, I don't really understand the original infraction and can't judge it's severity.

But reading the apology, I still had the reaction: Wow, they really don't understand community management if they think this is going to work for anyone, which they seem to be telling us is in fact their whole job?

Re: I'm sorry

#257

Post by knorker »

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.

> Relying on people to remember rules or adhere to some informal policy isn’t scalable

Is that the case here?

She was asked twice to follow the formal procedure. She basically replied "fuck off".

> It takes no effort to enforce reviews for pull requests. So why not just do it?

Fair enough. Devil's advocate here: If they had then they wouldn't have found out that they can't trust this person to act in the project's best interests.

But yeah. Seems reasonable to me to just flip the bit, if indeed for them it's that simple. But there will NEVER be that easy a fix for all issues.

Edit: It seems it may be more complicated than this. Other commenters have said that this project was moved into a Github enterprise account, which granted this person god-like powers. If so, then at the very least this means that she exploited a temporary security vulnerability, where she found herself with god like access she was not supposed to have according to the project maintainers and policy.

It's also not scalable to "just never have a security gap", which is also one of the many many arguments against cryptocurrencies. "Prevent-only" just does not scale.

> We are tech people, do things technically.

Hmm... I'm trying to not say "I used to think that, but then I grew up", because I don't intend it as an insult.

Running a project, and more true the larger it is, is not as much technical work. There will always exist the technical possibility to do the wrong thing (except in a supermax prison).

And even when possible, most technical means are just not worth it. We can't all develop software like the space industry[1]. It's just not worth it. Especially when the problems are of the kind that can be undone, like this one was (rollback PR).

[1] https://www.nap.edu/read/2222/chapter/5

Re: I'm sorry

#258

Post by samhw »

gkoberger wrote: post #51

My best attempt at a tl;dr: There are a number of projects under the .NET Foundation umbrella, all maintained by different teams. The .NET Foundation, supposedly for billing reasons, switched to GitHub Enterprise. People weren't aware it was happening or that a side effect of this would be that certain people would have increased access to their repos. The person writing this post, Claire Novotny, merged in something…

There's another, slightly confusing aspect which u/vb explained absolutely brilliantly here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28781621), namely that she wore two hats: one as the ED of the Foundation, the other as a long-dormant maintainer of that particular project.

She apparently intended to merge that PR qua the latter, but didn't make that sufficiently clear, and also made some offhand remarks about Foundation rules which (accidentally?) implied she was acting qua the former.

Oh what tangled webs we weave...

Re: I'm sorry

#259

Post by samhw »

chrisseaton wrote: post #248
samhw wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if that person is Hitler? What if you work at Dignitas? What if you're Linus Torvalds, working at Dignitas, and the person is Hitler, and Hitler wants to merge a particularly bad pull request to add an NPM leftpad dependency to page_alloc?

These aren't sensible suggestions worth debating. But yes I think it's literally absolutely always wrong to tell anyone to kill themselves, no matter how evil they are. Personal abuse is always wrong.

If it wasn't sufficiently clear from my scenario where Hitler wants to merge an NPM dependency into the Linux kernel while Linus Torvalds is treating him at a euthanasia clinic, I was joking.

In the scope of any realistically possible pull request discussion, yes, you're undoubtedly right.

Re: I'm sorry

#260

Post by chusk3 »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #12
umeshunni wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because attention seeking...

Maybe since this person has a prominent place there is an attempt to set a better example for others? Not a cool move by Oren but maybe a "teachable moment".

Please use the appropriate name for the person in question. Claire is her name.
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