I disagree, here's a line which rubs me the wrong way: "We tried to be transparent about what we’d done as much as possible since the beginning of our journey, but that wasn’t good enough." Couple this to "talking about it so publicly online, made it look like we were stealing the work of others as our own."
Contrast that to their comment about "100+ contributors".
It feels like typical deflection.
Also egregious is "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
It's hard to trust someone who would think this in the first place.
They're manipulating the reader into thinking it's their unachievably high moral standards that is to blame here: "...but that wasn’t good enough".
You can't "tried to be transparent about what we’d done" and "made it look like we were stealing the work" at the same time.
Either you announce yourself as "Pear, the VS Code Fork that will change the way you code", or you try to be very low key about it yet hope to retain plausible deniability when people call you on your BS.
> In summary, the apology appears mostly sincere but is tinged with some defensiveness and rationalization, which might affect how it's received, especially by those who were most upset by the initial actions.
Maybe they should pivot to developing an AI powered suite of software license generation and code rebranding and serial number filing and non-apology apology writing plugins for VSCode, so they can say they eat their own dog food.
Contrast that to their comment about "100+ contributors".
It feels like typical deflection.
Also egregious is "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open." It's hard to trust someone who would think this in the first place.