An apology

[Matt Stancliff]

Hey list,

I need to apologize. I gave a presentation a few weeks ago that ended up upsetting people and that wasn’t my intent.

It was inappropriate of me to vent my frustrations as a Redis developer at a Redis conference. It was inappropriate of me to comment on Salvatore’s professional decisions. The presentation was all my own, unreviewed by anybody else, and only represented my own private delusions.

I’m sorry for all of the hurt my presentation caused. I’m sorry to Salvatore and to the conference participants. I’m sorry for my unprofessionalism. My goal wasn’t to introduce conflict, but rather to focus on what’s best for all users, and I failed my goal by introducing conflict that obscured the larger goal of helping users through creating better software.

Again, I’m sorry to everyone, but especially to Salvatore, who has kindly tolerated me for the past year and deserves better public treatment than what I gave.


Here’s to Redis,

-Matt

[Salvatore Sanfilippo]

Hello Matt,

thanks for writing this email, not for me, since I'm not interested
about you saying you apologize, or going to travel, or drinking a
bottle of wine.
You have the right to say whatever you want. My only concern was that
I had no right to reply, but given that there where 250 people at the
conf, and millions of people reading the internet, I had the ability
to explain myself.
The main point however, is that you had technical points. Some people
don't understand them, some people strongly agree. The world is view
of different angles.
What I want to stress is that I don't care at all. For me Software is
not a sum of features. Whatever you think, or other people think, is
useful for me in order to give a chance to ponder my decision. Like
you pondered your decisions of giving the talk, and writing this
email. However as you don't express any deny on your thoughts, and
just apologize for the form, but recognize your frustration about
Redis development, I want to express my frustration for people that
want to tell me what to do. I'm not going to be told what to do. I
hope you'll not stop expressing yourself. I'll not care at all, but it
is important to have freedom into this sad world.

Salvatore

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--
Salvatore 'antirez' Sanfilippo
open source developer - Pivotal http://pivotal.io

"If a system is to have conceptual integrity, someone must control the
concepts."
— Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", 1975.

[Salvatore Sanfilippo]

Sorry my email is full of errors and typos, however it's night, it's
Friday, and I don't want people writing they are sorry to wait 48h to
get a reply, nor to stress myself over the weekend thinking I need to
reply. I'm confident it is understandable in its gist.

[Geoffrey Hoffman]

Here here

+1

[Demis Bellot]

To provide some context on Salvatore's reaction, it refers to a talk given at redisconf that was summarized at: http://antirez.com/news/87

I also believe everyone should have a right to their opinion, but that it should also be transparent. Unfortunately I also found it hard to correlate the intent of that talk with "larger goal of helping users creating better software".

But I do agree with Salvatore deserving better public treatment for his years of tireless efforts, dedication and strong vision for making Redis what it is now and how it's shaped in the future - which is a unique, versatile, robust, beautifully simple piece of engineering that's a rarity in this world of ugly complex, bloated and fragile software. Redis doesn't need changing, other projects should be so lucky to have someone like Salvatore at the helm maintaining its exceptional quality.