Hey, I'm the author of the post. I did not post it to hacker news, but to the r/rust subreddit, where I think people had more context, and more reasons to be interested in it. Someone else posted the link to hacker news.
The title (which I indeed wanted to be a good catch phrase) was not meant to be an apology. English is not my mother tongue, so I may be misguided, but I meant "sorry" as "I am sorry about the state of affairs", not literally "I apologize to you, the sqlx library".
I don't think the fact that it's sqlx or rust is really relevant. What you're describing is a problem and conflict of interest that's pervasive on open source, and that's what I thought worthy of discussing on hn.
I'm sorry that people seem to focus on your use of the word sorry, I read it to mean in the sense of "it's a shame that the world is how it is".
Adding a ‘but’ in there is often times used to negate everything before the but, like “I’m sorry but I had to fork you” would imply you’re not sorry, you had to do this.
This person does not actually seem to be sorry? (I am not--at least right now, with what little I know about the situation--saying this person should be sorry... but, I read this entire thing, and it doesn't really come off as a legitimate apology, which makes the language awkward; it feels more like an explanation about why they feel justified in their actions and how, at most, they are conflicted internally due to how those actions undermine their own stated beliefs... but not that they are exactly sorry about the action itself.)
This takes me back to the first time I read the word sorry that was not an apology, but rather an expression of regret or sorrow.
> There was further debate over the exact meaning of the Chinese translation issued by the U.S. Embassy. A senior administration official was quoted as saying "What the Chinese will choose to characterize as an apology, we would probably choose to characterize as an expression of regret or sorrow".[32]
> I’ve yet to encounter a tech company that isn’t built on the foundation of free and open source software.
I have worked at two companies which have not built on open source software at all, both companies which built a product from the ground up that has not existed before. There are a few open source libraries used in peripheral parts of the codebase, but the money-maker codebase was, both times, powered by proprietary compilers and not much else.
I understand it like this: the author is sorry he had to fork the project instead of supporting the main project. But also sorry that he saw no other option.
I think "I Regret the world has come to this" is a better translation.
But ultimately he is making a good point. IMO FOSS is the ultimate socialism - literally anyone who downloads Linux is a part owner of a trillion dollar construct - we all own it. We can fork it any time - and the reason we keep to one is purely a social decision to use that fork not that one.
And if we all own FOSS like we all own the seas or a forest we need to find means to look after it.
Instead, the title functions as a clickbaity hook, to promote the fork that the author is ostensibly apologizing for making.
(I don't know whether the fork is good, bad, or neither. Just, probably I should've guessed what the most likely meaning of the title would be.)