> He intended to say nothing in public about it, but changed his mind when the foundation posted that "we wish him all the best as he refocuses on his personal life."
> Concerned friends contacted him, resulting in this post, where he explains some of the background to his resignation and said: "I am fine. No issue in my personal life took me away from the board."
That's a really weird thing to write about someone without clearing it with them.
The non-standard part is stating what he will be doing with that time when you don't know. "refocusing on his personal life" is also, unfortunately and I am positive used without malice, kind of a loaded phrase. Without context I would always read that as "dealing with an unspecified personal tragedy" or the like.
Anyway, if your point is that it isn't something super crazy to say then you're right. It looks like it was a guess, and it was wrong, and it rubbed the author the wrong way for reasons they detail in TFA.
I think the specific euphemism "refocuses on his personal life", as opposed to a more general "pursue other opportunities", reads more like serious illness or family disturbance. It provokes sincere concern for his wellbeing beyond a job move.
I always felt this particular euphemism was code for resigning through being forced out as a part of crisis management strategy, to avoid a big PR or legal fallout.
I think the cases you are thinking about are agreed upon by the subject, who might be a high level politicians and/or CEOs whose "lack of a next step" would "stick out like a sore thumb", but whose prior hard work and/or financial success would leave them in a position to deserve to devote more time to family. Something like that.
"Refocusing" implies he was not focused on his personal life prior and things happened which necessitated him to step away and pay more attention to it. There's no scenario in which it's a good thing.
What strikes me is how wealthy corporations act like such cheapskates. The bring the guy in for a job interview, suck the rest of the vision for the tool out of him, ghost him for a few months, release a copycat product and even stiff him on travel reimbursement.
I don't really understand why they stiffed him (the only thing I can think of is that he's the core maintainer of Sonarr which might make him legally radioactive, but you should tell him), but what I don't understand is why they even called him in the first place. There's about a billion package managers for desktop operating systems and programming languages (shoot, Microsoft runs five or six), and the ups and downs are known by anyone who's used one for more than an hour (shoot, look at the winget issue tracker, there's still active tickets that were filed in the first week). There's no reason to play the wine and dine game, there's no secret sauce anyone really needs to know.
That's why we must always give these companies a consulting quote that covers much more than flight tickets and expenses. Make sure they pay up front, otherwise it's some project manager's empty promise.
I once interviewed a smart guy from a certain UC across the bay. Still undergrad, he played a lot with Python and wished he could have something similar to pip when doing C/C++.
So he wrote himself a "package manager" that could fetch binaries, place header files correctly and add them to his build. Neat little project.
That's basically what this guy did. It reads a YAML file and exec() whatever build instruction is in there. The CS102 guy I hired could do it as well.
Keivan was brought in by Microsoft for an interview and he didn't get the job. He kept talking about how "he could have patented this" or how it was an "acquihire" but there's nothing new to acquire in there!
But hey, he flunked his interview and got a lot of eyes on his startup thanks to some well placed clickbait on HN...
Lots of different Twitter threads on this topic since a few days. For example other OSS project maintainers also noticed that their project was moved to a different GitHub org without their knowledge:
This also comes on the back of the .NET Foundation now requiring new projects to assign their intellectual property, lock, stock, and barrel, to the foundation itself. You can no longer simply contribute code to the foundation - it has to own it now.
Isn't this very common for large projects? Solves the future problem of potential relicensing, doesn't it? Of having to track down potentially 10's of thousands of contributors that may be hard to find (or even dead) to get their consent?
> Solves the future problem of potential relicensing, doesn't it?
Yeah, by giving the foundation all the power it needs to relicense it however it wants.
> Of having to track down potentially 10's of thousands of contributors that may be hard to find (or even dead) to get their consent?
That's the ideal situation. Make the copyright stuff so hard no one will ever bother trying to take over a project. Linux kernel does this. It will never be licensed as anything other than GPLv2 because it's virtually impossible to obtain the consent of all developers who ever contributed to it. The more Linux grows, the more people contribute to it, the stronger this protection becomes.
>Make the copyright stuff so hard no one will ever bother trying to take over a project.
Also means if the license ever loses a legal case then the project will always be susceptible to that flaw since it cannot be corrected.
Think of a license as code. It currently works, but tomorrow you may find a serious bug, or, in the case of law, laws change outside the project, making a serious bug.
Now you cannot ever fix it.
And, in common cases, it protects the project from contributors wishing to remove their contribution later, breaking the project.
Linus could get a brain tumor and decide to revoke his contributions to the Linux kernel. Or his heirs could do it, since by law they get his copyrights, including all the code he ever contributed. Guess what that would do. Or any contributor to Linux can do it.
10,000 legal minefields is not a good way to run a project.
The FSF isn't run by full-time employees of a for-profit megacap company that also owns the runtime and package distribution system the projects use though. It's also not the promise the foundation made when it first began soliciting projects to join it.
Yes, that's it. It was(is?) a .Net Foundation project that was included in ASP.NET Core starter templates. The maintainers decided to go non-FOSS for the future.
Interestingly though, there seemed to be no talk or discussion of finding new maintainers for the .Net Foundation project. Microsoft decided to update their templates for the upcoming .Net 6 to use the new, non FOSS identity server project(despite their being no real need for any identity server in these setups, and despite it no longer being FOSS).
Even more strange(coming from other FOSS platform communities) was how much shilling for Duende IdentityServer, and by Duende, was occurring in this thread discussing the development(buckle up): https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/32494 . Was really strange for a FOSS community to not be discussing the road forward for FOSS, but to be making arguments like "the license isn't that expensive" and etc. All this time the project is still listed as a .Net Foundation project: https://dotnetfoundation.org/projects/identityserver .
I was somewhat surprised when looking into the .Net Foundation rules that they don't require turning over the project in any way to the community or foundation. I'm wondering now if MS was just going along with the easy path to avoid even more drama while the dust settles and they shore up foundation rules to prevent this from happening in the future.
> 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 project transfers ownership of the copyright to the .NET Foundation. Under the contribution model, a project retains ownership of the copyright, but grants the .NET Foundation a broad license to the project’s code and other intellectual property. The project also confirms that the project’s submissions to .NET Foundation are its own original work (there are also instructions for any third party materials that might be included).
They accept both models (Contribution and Assignment).
And it was never discussed nor has it ever really been revisited since, as you point out in your own comments on that issue. This is part of the larger issue of how the DFN interacts (or lack thereof) with its own member projects and usually only lets us know about changes after they're announced
I don't believe this is currently true. The contribution model is there. I even recently had a PR accepted to clarify the language on the submission page and form.
For my project, which was also on the contribution model, I balked when they asked me to add them to the copyright line on every file. I pushed back and they said I didn't need to do it. I got the feeling it was just another checklist item from them--but attention to detail matters and communication is key.
While this is quite concerning, honestly as someone deep in the .NET ecosystem, Microsoft has made so many (surprisingly) good moves in recent years that I think there’s room for a couple of fuck ups. [1]
I see all this as something that can be corrected. Not necessarily a sign of anything too sinister. (Maybe I’m too optimistic).
Admittedly I didn’t like the AppGet/WinGet story but there could be a side to that which we don’t hear about. First time I’ve heard about the IdentityServer issue - doesn’t sound great.
But MS have gone too far down the path they’re on for me to any longer dismiss their new found “open source” focus with the same level of cynicism that I once had.
There is a LOT of really good stuff happening here. It can no longer be brushed off as just surface-level pandering, which was what I used to think in the early days of their move to .NET Core and open source.
But that said, I really hope they take the lessons from this and sort out the Foundation.
I am quite irritated how they managed the whole C++/CX replacement via C++/WinRT, throwing .NET devs that still have to drop down to C++ back into the VC++ 6.0 / ATL 3.0 days.
Then the radio silence with .NET Native is so typical Silverlight/Managed DirectX/XNA.
I was at Microsoft when Silverlight & XNA were the only supported platforms on Windows Phone 7.
Less than a year after launch, just as some devs started writing windows phone apps, “we” decided to deprecate Silverlight and XNA in favor of WinRT for Windows Phone 8.
Devs were just pissed and vowed to never touch Windows Phone after that.
Also, all the customers that bought WP7 phones - they couldn’t upgrade to WP8, because “security”. These were the Microsoft fanboys and early adopters.
I left Microsoft the following year. But it looks like they haven’t improved very much over the years.
You will see with time that Microsoft has not really changed. They go through cycles when they're behind, they're nice, when they're ahead, they're jerks. The problem is people keep getting fooled by the "embrace" aspect of their embrace, extend, extinguish tactic, because it seems like, "oh hey, Microsoft's here! They're helping out! This is great!".
A lot of times, the folks responsible for welcoming the embrace part of the cycle either move on to actually work at Microsoft or elsewhere, and then the following two steps usually take place after they're gone.
Microsoft has also been really good at seeding standards organizations or pushing out sock puppet companies/representatives to advocate for positions that undermine their competitors.
There's really no long-term good practices. The short term niceties are all just to get the foot in the door to finish their cycle.
microsoft wasted its time rewriting dotnet to catchup with java
nobody moved, instead they had other needs, GO appeared, and people adopted it
what's left? people maintaining Java servers; and when it's time to switch tech, it's GO
politics is what ruined C#, now they are bloating the language with features nobody asked/needed
microsoft have the wrong culture, they are bloat oriented, and they are vendor locking driven
it's either ASP.NET or nothing with C#, that says it all
and you still CAN'T build a AOT statically compiled single file executable, you have to ship your 300 DLLs with you, even that, they couldn't improve, it's 2021, it's a billion dollar company, and yet, it's still "we are working on it", dude no, it's too late, i'll go with GO
for a while they recommended zipping/unzipping at runtime your 300+dll folder as a solution to the "single file problem", so no, you can't come up and say, "we are awesome piece of tech", because that's a pure lie, a billion dollar company
and msbuild, while it has improved, it still a joke compared to what other languages are providing, not worse than gradle or maven, but equally shitty
>and you still CAN'T build a AOT statically compiled single file executable, you have to ship your 300 DLLs with you, even that, they couldn't improve, it's 2021, it's a billion dollar company, and yet, it's still "we are working on it", dude no, it's too late, i'll go with GO
I published a single file executable just last week, what in the world are you talking about? If there are any native code DLLs you have to include 1 extra line in your .csproj file to get those to be included in the single file, but other than that it works without any issues whatsoever. Literally spits out a .exe and a .pdb file and nothing else.
I was referring to the previous commenter's claim about publishing single file executables, not AOT compilation. AFAIK, true AOT compilation is still only possible with Mono, not .NET Core. Though the line between those is getting blurrier all the time now, since I'm pretty sure Mono is what is technically used if you publish a Xamarin app for iOS, even if you technically developed it in .NET Core/6.
my first job inside Azure had a lot of traumatic political battles like this, but since moving to a different division (still in Azure) years ago, everything's a lot smoother. it really varies, but overall my impression over the past 9 years inside Azure is that it's really gotten better on the political infighting front. the Ballmer years were definitely the low point. it's really about the incentives the execs set up, and execs vary on how well they keep things harmonious.
Those of us who are cynics saw things of this nature coming a mile away. I'm no graybeard but I'm still old enough to remember Microsoft of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Being a sort of corporate misanthrope seems baked in to Microsoft's DNA, at least from my outsider's perspective. The brief and now-concluding era of tech optimism that was born of "Don't Be Evil" has shown us that corporations gonna do what corporations gonna do.
Never trust Microsoft. You might know Microsoft employees but by and large Microsoft is not your friend.
I'd go further. No institution is your friend. Their mission might be aligned with yours. In which case, great! If it's not, then be cautious.
Your job as an individual is find alignment. An individual, or even a small group, isn't likely to turn a large institution. But you can find those that have aligned missions.
I agree. I had a bad feeling when .Net core was released and billed as Microsoft "embracing" open source. I've been hoping the typical extinguish would not follow, but it seems Microsoft hasn't yet learned the value in nurturing a truly independent, open source community.
I think the details have to be read there carefully. The foundation has different goals (legal ownership of .NET independent of Microsoft) than most its members (as outlined in the article). It is a failure in the foundation setup.
When you want to foster a community, you have to focus on the community. Not (only) be the legal guardianship of some (important) stuff.
The biggest problem is that most .NET shops never moved away from giving tier 1 clearance to Microsoft, while making it almost impossible to use anything else from legal point of view.
There are people at Microsoft that "get" FOSS. But there are also people calling shots that simply don't and continually make cringe decisions that poorly balance business interests with their FOSS community. The identity server debacle is great case study.
The Identity Server open source project with its maintainers going commercial is a truly sad and worrying aspect of Microsoft related open source efforts. This is not the way things are supposed to go.
I think it's phenomenal that a .NET OSS project was so useful to the world that there was a viable path to commercialization. The .NET Foundation should not exist to force maintainers from monetizing their work.
This is a good point. Having and taking a path to commercialization itself shouldn't be the problem in and of itself.
I think the issues with IdentityServer was that it felt like a bait-and-switch in the timing of the commercialization decision more than anything: Microsoft replaced a lot of bespoke OpenID/OpenID Connect/OAuth libraries in ASP.NET with IdentityServer including in out-of-the-box ASP.NET Core templates. Then IdentityServer decided it needed to explore commercialized relicensing.
1. Microsoft could have done better diligence that IdentityServer was financially healthy and in a place to deal with increased maintenance and support needs before baking it into ASP.NET templates.
2. The .NET Foundation could have helped IdentityServer find a commercial licensing regime/path to commercialization that wouldn't have impacted as much all of the users now using it ASP.NET templates.
3. IdentityServer's authors seemed to be in a "take our ball and go home" mood anyway and probably wouldn't have listened to advice from the .NET Foundation had they asked. (And it sounds like they didn't from the article here.)
4. The .NET Foundation sees the root cause problem here that they don't own the projects' copyrights/licenses/CLAs and want to crack down on mandating full ownership now. The article points out this feels almost an unnecessarily rude and authoritarian response. However, as other comments here point out, this is always the harsh learning cycle of Open Source Foundations going back to the OG FSF itself, and including just about everyone (Apache, Software Freedom Conservancy, you name it).
Of those, the .NET Foundation is in the hard place of getting most of the blame that they couldn't stop IdentityServer taking their ball and going home and the rock of now trying to do the hard part that they should have done sooner to prevent this mess in the first place just a little bit too late (and making other projects feel like they are being punished even though they did nothing wrong).
Between Microsoft and IdentityServer there should have been more ways to commercialize the success of the project without relicensing IdentityServer or dropping the project from open source to spite Microsoft trying to rely on it in templates. I don't know who is to blame more there, but I don't envy how much this seems a PR disaster to the .NET Foundation.
The major theme in that event is that there was poor communication all-around.
Unfortunately, one of the primary functions of the foundation is to facilitate communication around things like this. It's clearly not done that (and issues highlighted in the article indicate more of the same problem).
I wonder how much it was ever actually attempted to get more community involvement? At least as of few months back IdentityServer4 was not planning on updating the project for .Net 6. This led to Microsoft updating the ASP.NET templates to point use the new, not-FOSS IdentityServer. Seems like a situation like this, or bug fixes, or etc could have prompted community contribution from companies relying on the project.
IdentityServer decision (at least publicly) was a decision of the two maintainers and I think Microsoft/community was pretty shocked about it.
The Foundation failed here in its oversight role and also sustainability wishes from the maintainer perspective. The two maintainers are just overloaded with the project and they had to start earning money with it because no one else was helping. Which again is a community problem which the .NET Foundation fails to address.
I won't speak for the maintainers, buy I believe there was some falling out between the maintainers and Microsoft. As if there were financial expectations that were pulled or reduced or unsatisfactory.
No matter. IS4 is a brilliant open source project and should have been one of the highlights of the .NET Foundation and Microsoft's relationship with the OSS community.
I don't understand why the foundation didn't just fork IS4 and continue developing it? Identity server gathered an unusual amount of corporate support and mindshare that it feels like a huge waste.
It sounds like the .NET Foundation didn't feel they owned enough of the copyright to do that, which would be why the article talks about the .NET Foundation now (too late) doing what Open Source Foundations do as a base principal: requiring the assignment of copyright/ownership/CLAs to control/avoid relicensing. Asking now makes them seem like jerks, but if they had asked before and made it a policy from the beginning they would have avoided some of the root causes of this mess. (This a harsh lesson that just about every major Open Source Foundation has faced.)
Are you sure they are requiring copyright assignment? I recently had my project included under the contribution model where I retain the copyright. The website wording was ambiguous on the .NET Foundation page about this option so I created a PR to clarify that there was a contribution model in addition to the assignment model and the PR was promptly accepted and went public:
See assignment and contribution models:
https://dotnetfoundation.org/projects/submit
The word in the GitHub issues discussions is that they are working with their lawyers to clarify, but as of right now the contribution model is an option.
There is no sufficient community around the .NET Foundation to "continue develop it". The F# foundation could pull that off but not the .NET Foundation. And identityserver especially needs a shitload of domain knowledge (and Ms itself is competing with Azure AD) so they are probably unwilling to chime in
Disagree. There are people at Microsoft that "get" how important it is to look FOSS friendly in order to stay relevant in the developer community and continue to breed C# developers who will deploy to Azure.
They don't get FOSS at all though. They want to control it to their advantage and that's about the extent of which Microsoft is interested in FOSS.
I think I lost count of how many warnings were given about Microsoft suspiciously getting too involved in open source in general which at this point, issues like this are unsurprising.
What would be the problem for Microsoft to just be open about it?
Tell them to give a donation for work and a recurring salary based of continued work on the same project but under "MS Official" and upgrade it's role in the dotnet eco system.
I don't think anyone would say no to a bag of money and continuing their interests.
> Project Maturity was a pilot including "maturity profiles," designed to improve software quality. The project was abandoned shortly after its introduction after community members complained that it was over-reaching,
So "community library developers" complain when "user-developers" default to MS nugets because, hey, it's MS and tested, maintained and supported; and the same (?) "community library developers" also complain when rating system is conceived that'd help "user-developers" choose and use stable/mature 3rd party packages. Well.
The issue here was Microsoft appointing itself judge and jury of which projects should have most-favored-nation status and that criteria being reflected directly into the package distribution system. Given Microsoft's singular influence over the .NET ecosystem, this presents a massive conflict of interest especially when pitting Microsoft's own first party solutions versus third party ones - there would be a tremendous amount of pressure to ensure that the MSFT packages rise to the top of the ladder without any guarantee as to their longevity.
I've seen your other (earlier) posts about .net ecosystem and... I'm sorry, but if the said maturity scale would exclude projects like the ones you're bragging about, it would only be good, for it would reduce the amount of junk on nuget.
Simple file locking implementation? Why the hell would someone risk importing a nuget when they can implement it themselves in like half a day? (If you know you need a file lock, you know what's needed to implement one, the rest is about finding the docs.)
Library for scalable servers? You don't need one with async, all the other building blocks are already shipped with netcore. (Ya, maybe you won't be able to squeeze the last 5% of performance without enormous amount of work, but 99% of the projects don't need that. Those which do would probably roll their own anyway. BTW, the remaining 5% performance win from some library would easily spoiled by inefficient event handlers.)
Implying that lack of libraries akin to those in Java means that .net developers are doing non-innovative, boring CRUD stuff is extremely condescending. Maybe Java has so many more of such libraries because everything is so much more cumbersome to write from scratch in Java?
(All libraries are a liability. They'd better solve a HARD and/or COMPLEX problem that'd take 1+ months to implement before I vet them into a project. Your examples are not in that class.)
I can safely assure you that you don't know what you're talking about. I work on distributed actor system OSS full-time and I wouldn't have customers of the out of the box defaults that shipped with .NET Core did the job.
Oh btw, there was no conflict of interest from your side? _Your_ company did not want to follow the maturity scale, so you made an effort to shoot the proposal down... How does that make you better than Microsoft?
As for customers... there will always be customers for pre-packaged solutions, quality and support. Obviously .net cannot include a framework for $X for every possible X. But that does not mean that non-customers of yours are _not_ doing (approximations, to the degree they need) of X internally.
In your posts, you were complaining about the lack of innovation, yet Akka.NET (I assume that's what you're referring to) does not seem to innovate anything, it's a carbon-copy of Akka for Java and the "raw" actor model.
Project Orleans from MSR on the other hand _does_ innovate. I have a PhD related to distributed systems and I investigated the actor model a lot. Orleans addresses the deficiencies/problems with [1] it that I myself noticed.
[1] Quote from the introduction of https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/orleans...: "Actor platforms such as Erlang [3] and Akka [2] are
a step forward in simplifying distributed system programming. However, they still burden developers with
many distributed system complexities because of the
relatively low level of provided abstractions and system
services. The key challenges are the need to manage the
lifecycle of actors in the application code and deal with
inherent distributed races, the responsibility to handle
failures and recovery of actors, the placement of actors,
and thus distributed resource management. To build a
correct solution to such problems in the application, the
developer must be a distributed systems expert."
I don't understand why people gets surprised over and over again when a megacorp does it's megacorp thing. Corporations are not people, they will do whatever it takes to play in their best interest. Especially large corporations.
They can sell you the dream of x but if they feel like it, they will kill that dream faster than you will be able to wake up.
The surprising part I guess is that originally it seemed like the foundation for them was to market goodwill. Now it seems like that wasn't the goal after all, but to more be able to control/takeover these projects. I guess now that I write that, yea, I shouldn't be surprised.
I still don't see why there's outrage. It's a silly think to be outraged over something predictable. This sort of thing is. It's like being outraged over a mosquito biting you.
There is at least some non-zero chance that widespread expressions of outrage can encourage even megacorps to change direction - the same cannot be said of mosquitoes. The latter are expressing their immutable core nature, whereas the core nature of the former is the aggregate effect of the behaviour of a collection of human beings and therefore subject to change.
Megacorps change their nature about as well as mosquitoes do. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Now what corporations do do (sometimes quite well) is make superficial changes to avoid bad PR. But if you really want them to change their nature you must use a very blunt instrument -- government regulation.
Any particular input as to where developers should move their projects? I've had wonderful luck with self-hosted GitLab, but while it meets our organization's purposes, it doesn't seem like it'd be the best general purpose Git provider.
>>>>Microsoft engaged in some strange behaviour with regard to its WinGet project, finding out all the details of an existing open-source project called AppGet by dangling the prospect of a job at Microsoft for its creator, but then in effect killing that open-source project though borrowing many of its ideas. Littles was more than disappointed.<<<<
This is a misunderstanding of what open source means. I has zero to do with community. You may think that, but that doesn't make it true. Open source is only about license. It means you, as the copyright owner, give permission for others to use the software royalty free, and you can modify the software as you wish. With permissive license, you don't even have to give us the changes you made. But you do need need to keep the original copyright.
THAT'S ALL IT HAS EVER MEANT.
Now, a lot of open-source is created in a community. But this things about how so-and-so took the source-code and ideas from another projects and reused it, whether that act is done by the big guy or the small guy, or the project you took from ends up getting killed, that's just too bad.
Don't join the game and then complain about the rules later.
> This is a misunderstanding of what open source means. I has zero to do with community. You may think that, but that doesn't make it true.
You would have a point, but this isn't about open source in general. This is about the .Net Foundation, which has the goal "to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework" and it hardly improves collaboration when the parent organization openly acts like a parasitic ass. Of course since this is Microsoft we are talking about a strongly worded letter wouldn't have achieved anything of note either.
> Concerned friends contacted him, resulting in this post, where he explains some of the background to his resignation and said: "I am fine. No issue in my personal life took me away from the board."
That's a really weird thing to write about someone without clearing it with them.