[gautamcgoel]

A lot of commenters are sharpening their pitchforks, but this comment, in my opinion, makes it very likely that it was an honest mistake. Amazing what taking personal responsibility and earnestly apologizing can do to restore trust and credibility!

[_zzaw]

Yeah, I think this is an example of addressing a mistake that other companies should take note of. I don’t trust Microsoft-sized corporations as a matter of principle, and I don’t typically give them the benefit of the doubt, but when one of their own engineers explains in human-readable terms what specifically happened—on a holiday, no less—I’m impressed enough to believe him. Some PR flack showing up with vague boilerplate about how Microsoft values the open-source community and they’ll look into it would only have encouraged more outrage.

I always appreciate communication that acknowledges I’m a person, not a data point or a customer. I wish more companies ditched the greasy PR approach and allowed folks like Jeff to do their talking for them.

[novok]

I think a key reason that corps do try to avoid admitting fault, is because in a lawsuit that can be used as evidence for a guilty verdict in a civil lawsuit in some of the most slam dunk ways.

If we remove this feature of common law legal systems, I think you will get far more admissions of fault like this one.

If you hurt people, organizations, etc for admitting their mistakes, they're going to stop doing it.

[jdsully]

The key take away is that apologizing and admitting fault doesn't absolve one of liability. There are a number of "amnesty" laws on the books where admitting fault can server to limit or reduce your sentence - especially with tax issues. I'm not sure how desirable such a thing would be in civil law among private parties. Especially in cases where a tort is minor to one party but a big deal to the other because of disparate wealth.

E.g. if Microsoft burned your house down would an apology and explanation be enough to settle the matter? How could we encode this principle into law for minor things but not large things?

[_zzaw]

I don’t think accidentally removing credits from a software license is exactly on the level of burning someone’s house down.

In general, I wouldn’t say that causing someone harm should be dismissible with an apology, but in a situation where the harm seems pretty limited, easily reversible, and unintentional—and the apology seems genuine and even informative—I don’t see a particular benefit to causing hardship to someone who made a mistake. The communal reaction as it is should give Microsoft/Google/etc an idea of what the blowback would be if this sort of thing was a deliberate corporate practice.

[jdsully]

The harm is depriving the author of their moral rights, and the name recognition from their work. Depending on how popular the library becomes this could deprive the author of substantial business opportunities.

[_zzaw]

And if this was a deliberate decision that Microsoft refused to undo, I’d be as outraged as everyone else here would be.

But it wasn’t, and they did undo it, and I found their response impressively civilized and professional. So I’m not really understanding why everyone seems to want to hold this guy accountable for all the shitty stuff Microsoft could have done, didn’t do, and apparently did in the past.

[PragmaticPulp]

> makes it very likely that it was an honest mistake.

I don’t have any doubt that it was an honest mistake. They also took accountability for the mistake, shared their steps to prevent it from happening again, and they’re in contact with the original repo author directly.

At this point, anyone digging for excuses to further demonize Microsoft isn’t interested in honest discussion about this issue. This is a textbook mistake followed by rapid resolution (on Christmas Day, no less), with great communication on top.

[scorpio241]

Here in "honest mistake" they try to patent somebody's method: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_patent/

[tptacek]

It was obviously a mistake. Still nice to have someone involved give the backstory.

[sharken]

Yes, very nice writeup from Microsoft.

Had a similar experience with AzureCli v2.30, where the environment variable to ignore certificate errors suddenly did not work anymore.

It turned out it was removed but there was no mention of it in the release notes.

On the GitHub page quick response was provided by Microsoft.

[laumars]

If you read the comments, most people believed it was an honest mistake. What we didn’t agree with was that it was an excusable mistake. Microsoft have since acknowledged it’s not excusable and thus will rectify that error. So as far as I see it, all parties, both for and against MS, should be satisfied with the outcome.

[hawski]

In a way I'm glad that this is not taken lightly. We all need to be informed and calm, but mega-corporations should be held to higher standards. They should feel breath of an angry mob once in a while. I imagine, that if reactions to things like that would be just "meh, it's probably just a mistake" it would not be resolved as quickly or it could just be ignored. But now that it is all cleared up let's go home and Merry Christmas.

[indrora]

A phrase I've come to appreciate:

> Prescribe not to malice that which may well be a buggy edge case.

[prvc]

Intent is a red herring, especially when the actions of an organization, rather than an individual are being considered. More important are the actions' consequences and the organization's propensity for repeating them.

[noobermin]

Honestly, doing this all on Christmas nonetheless. This sort of thing is why I never want to be in leadership roles.