Setting things right...
The last few days have been pretty interesting around the WiX Toolkit community, and I guess I’ve been the catalyst for most of the commotion. A lot of folks have been following along as I publicly aired by feelings about some of Rob Mensching’s comments on COM Advertising, but what you may not know is that Rob and I have also been exchanging some very lengthy emails offline. In spite of what you may have seen publicly, our offline emails have been anything but a shouting match. We both shared our feelings on a number of issues that we were both concerned about and I think we both benefited from the exchange by learning about each other and how to interact with the community. I’m writing today to own up for my mistakes and set things right.
My comments through this whole thing have been motivated SOLELY by my passion for Windows Installer and deployment technology in general. I have committed myself to this segment of software development and that commitment has been both a blessing and also an enormous curse for me personally. The result of everything that I’ve been through is that sometimes I tackle things a bit too aggressively. So, while I adamantly insist that both my intentions and arguments were honest and correct, I recognize now that my demeanor and mannerisms were easily perceived as being brash and abrasive. For that, and that alone, I extend my sincere apologies to Rob, and to anyone else following along who may have felt insulted by my words. I do see now that I might have been able to achieve my goal of making this an important issue without resorting to “shock” value to get people’s attention.
I’m happy to be putting this behind us, and look forward to working with Rob and everyone else in a much more productive (but less exciting) fashion in the future!
Oh – and by the way – I realize that the underlying issue of COM Advertising may still be a question in some of your minds, so I think you can expect to hear more on the topic from either Rob or myself very soon! ;-)