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by michaelmrose
1637 days ago
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> Further disclosure: If someone showed up to a postmortem for my team with this level of condescension and no useful advice, I’d tell them to be quiet or leave. If I worked with you it would be my responsibility to support my coworker and help them improve. As it is neither of us has much of an obligation to the other we are uninvolved third parties giving our unsolicited opinions to one another. It is a privilege as an uninvolved observer to another to analyze it frankly without worrying about hurting someone's ego. It is OK I think to look at some mess or other and the inevitable conciliatory excuses and or hostile push back against criticism and call bullshit. > None of those comments that I’ve seen addresses the fact that adding a license file during a fork at all is probably an error. No, just criticism about this one case because someone told them about the exact observed bug so now it’s obvious. This is an excellent point insofar as explaining why the bug might have happened. I disagree however that it is sufficient explanation. Such code should still check for the presence of an existing license file for another license and raise an error that requires human intervention to override. That is constructive and actionable. |
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Sure. In retrospect, that seems like a really good idea. But I'm sure you've done an awful lot of stuff that is dumb in retrospect, too.
Legal asks for tooling to ensure that the correct license file ends up on all developer projects. It's known that developers will often Google license agreements, copy them from places that don't belong, end up with the wrong LICENSE from a templating mistake. Someone builds tooling to just smash the correct LICENSE file in as a first commit on any repo that shows up in the Microsoft org: if it's an active developer and this is the rare case where this logic is wrong, surely they'll notice that this has happened, and this will prevent code from being up with an incorrect license.
Then, the use case evolves: people start to fork things into the Microsoft organization, and this code does the wrong thing an appreciable fraction of the time. But no one is scrutinizing commits on forked repos to the same extent and doesn't notice.
Maybe you do much better and have never made a mistake like this. But real people make real mistakes. Yes, when you encounter a mistake, you try to get better for next time! But that doesn't mean that we should expect a 0 mistake rate out of ______ org or not assume good faith with an ordinary rate of bad outcomes until proven otherwise.
Unlike the GP poster, I am not a MSFT employee-- I am often skeptical of MSFT actions but they get a pass here. Obliterating the license file has no advantage for MSFT, and has the risk of legal exposure and this kind of public black eye. Obviously someone screwed up, but screw ups happen. Now that Jeff Wilcox has had to work on Christmas, you can be sure he will be even more attuned to this type of issue in the future.