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