Yeah, scary, in the "you signed an agreement without reading it properly and now your souls, er, your projects belong to us" sense. And in the case of WiX Toolset, they apparently never agreed to the terms & conditions of the .NET foundation in the first place. Also, being forced by the .NET foundation to give an account admin permissions for your repos, and then having that account move your repos to GitHub Enterprise without your permission, even without informing you... I can understand how that creates mistrust.

According to the article, the only thing the .NET foundation did for them was provide certificates, other than that they did nothing for a very long time. And then, of course, this...

Well, the .NET Foundation also holds the copyright and provides the CLA bots. But the great bulk of your point is correct.

This is not about the legal ownership. This is about operational ownership. All these maintainers understood what they signed. However, they expected to be supported to do their work mostly their way. For good reasons since other foundations do it that way. The .NET Foundation is however not communicating and supporting the community but focus on legal ownership including capabilities to enforce that (that is were some of the CoC and billing comments come from).

So it is mismatch of expectation. To blame is the foundation, because what you can read on the web page and the feedback of the maintainer community does not fit to their agenda so they could have understood this early and resolve it peacefully (they are the ones in power).

This is about open source leadership. They screwed up. Legally this is (mostly) fine, content wise it is (mostly) fine but the way how they operate is not okay. And saying sorry is not enough

This may have nailed the issue most closely yet.

It took you a lot fewer words than me too. :)

I am really struggling to understand how those projects cannot be under .NET foundation control. If you ever worked on an Apache Foundation or Eclipse Foundation project, you know that you must use their tools for code hosting and processes for maintainer/lead election. That said, as a project lead of an Eclipse Foundation hosted project (not Eclipse IDE related), I never had the Foundation do something major to our project without properly disseminating the info about on a publicly readable mailing list in advance.

P.S. I read that .NET foundation board now meets every day. I think Apache/Eclipse Foundation boards meet every 1..3..12 months, at least judging by the rarity of emails summarizing their meeting minutes. If a board needs to meet every day, something must be really wrong.

Something is really wrong right now that's why they might be meeting every day.

Your experience with the Eclipse Foundation is very different from how the .NET Foundation has interacted. On top of that, communication has been very poor for a long time. I believe those two differences are at or near the root of all of these issues.

While it's easy to see how this sounds scary; the flip-side of this is that it's not clear if there's more to it than misperception/miscommunication.

To take the example from the blogpost; the author was particularly scared by the move into github enterprise. I don't want to dismiss that worry; but on the other hand - the only consequence of that move seems to have been that logged in members of the project have a very slight UI change. Obviously that's not what people are worried about; they're worried about... well, what else does that mean?

Well, what else does that mean? Is this really something to worry about, or is this really just a misunderstanding - or both?

> Well, what else does that mean? Is this really something to worry about, or is this really just a misunderstanding - or both?

It means microsoft has hijacked the repo. I don't think their intentions or anything else matters. This is imo crossing a huge line.

I was always kind of wary of github, ever since MS acquired it, and I have always made sure to not get trapped by using any lock in features. But I never assumed their lock-in includes going full SourceForge and hijacking people's repos.

Honestly, if GitHub/MS don't come out with a very good statement on how and why this will never happen again, I'll need to figure something out and make sure people use a different URL instead of pointing to my github.

It's absolutely something to worry about. If someone breaks into your house, you should be worried irregardless of if they stole something, or not.

I’m not sure how this is related to Microsoft’s control of GitHub. This was the .NET Foundation using application-level permissions that it was granted on each repo. It wouldn’t matter what platform was used, if it supported re-organizing project hierarchy, this could have happened.

You are exactly correct here. This isn't about Microsoft or GitHub. It is solely about the .NET Foundation's actions.

The Director of the Foundation is a Microsoft employee and they are the creators of the Foundation.

In addition to the obvious issues, this is also about Microsoft and their relationship with the Foundation.

Just to reiterate: the observable consequences of that "hijacking" is apparently an almost imperceptible icon most people don't even see. That cannot be worth getting this worried about; the worry needs to be something else, probably something that hasn't happened yet but the maintainers feel like it (whatever it is) is something terrible they believe the foundation now has the capability for, and do not entirely trust the foundation to refrain from exercising this unknown power in some future circumstance.

If that sounds absurdly vague, it's because the concrete accusations are that vague.

On the one hand: it's possible this tiny UI change does signify some deeper permissions change, but it's not exactly obvious what that would be (especially given the already admin nature of the dnfadmin account). Nor is it clear both the foundation and maintainer really understood what that permission might mean, if it even exists. It's not clear the maintainers have any specific reason to object in the first place!

The one thing that seems clear is that the github UI wasn't clear, allowing the maintainers and dnf to read very different things into a superficially trivial change, and that there's some level of miscommunication at the very least. But it's still not at all clear whether the actual change made warranted the fears expressed, not at all.

Personally, while the dnf clearly and objectively failed in its task of keeping maintainers on board, I can't help but also feel that these maintainers deserve a bit of opprobrium. They essentially started a major social media freak out, and cannot even express exactly what it is they're afraid of, let alone point to any evidence that whatever mistakes the foundation made weren't fixable by measures with less collateral damage.

It's all very nice to blame some scary sounding not-entirely-defined shadowy corporate conspiracy between github, microsoft and dnf, but at the end of the day meltdowns like this do harm, and it's just not clear that was at all warranted.

It might not be clear to you but as a maintainer and member of the Foundation it's very clear to me. The DNF used temporarily assigned permissions (assigned under the premise that they needed authority to fix a CLA bot) to move several repositories to their own organization. This is unacceptable by any measure.

Technically no, they used their permissions to include the organization in the enterprise. But the more relevant question is why that matters. As I tried to point out above, this has essentially 0 impact so far; so people must be worried about some future impact. Which specific one? How does this move cause problems that otherwise would not exist?

I think it depends on whether or not you are operating in good faith and you think he foundation is too. It sounds to me like people are attributing bad faith to this whole misunderstanding.

It’s unfortunate that this has become our mode of conflict resolution: blog posts, public apologies that don’t grovel enough and a trivial issue that people have turned into a political football so they can run that shit into the end zone and spike the hell out of it.

Grievance culture is weak, and frankly, dishonorable.

I might agree with parts of what you are saying but when the channel to communicate back to the "powers that be" is broken and you face (what feels like) an existential threat, the public forum is an enticing, sometimes effective but very messy option.