Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

github.com

431–440 of 626 posts

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#431
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what kind of language you would need to add to your license in order to explicitly forbid the ingestion of your code by Copilot and/or like projects.

> I wonder what kind of language you would need to add to your license in order to explicitly forbid the ingestion of your code by Copilot and/or like projects. If Microsoft's theory is correct, under US law it is impossible to forbid this with a license, because a license is just an offer of additional permissions beyond what is available automatically under law, and Microsoft's theory is that ingesting code into Gi…

There's a part that I don't understand. If some software is mirrored on github by someone that isn't the copyright owner, it seems like github shouldn't be able to use it. Yet they said nothing about that specifically. In that case, is the only option to put code somewhere else than github under a license that forbids reuploading to github, and issue DMCAs when/if people reupload your code? It also sounds like when code is removed through DMCA, it should be removed from the training set and they should retrain copilot.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#432
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think this is an example of addressing a mistake that other companies should take note of. I don’t trust Microsoft-sized corporations as a matter of principle, and I don’t typically give them the benefit of the doubt, but when one of their own engineers explains in human-readable terms what specifically happened—on a holiday, no less—I’m impressed enough to believe him. Some PR flack showing up with vague boi…

Quoted post unavailable.

Alright... What is a proper response to an honest mistake in your book? We have links to a bug, explanation of what happened, a clear response (that they will check to see if this happened on other forks), they reversed the change...

Unsure why the bar would need to be higher. This is all reasonable given the circumstances.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#433
post #391

What's surprising to me about all the negative reactions Microsoft receives, especially on here, is that from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc). I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open, but they do no wrong in most people's eyes, where even a simple mistake by…

Please, Google contributes far more to open source than both. Between Chromium (which seemingly most other browsers are based on now as well as things like VSCode) to Android, GSoC, Golang, Dart/Flutter, the Linux kernel and a bunch of other random stuff, Google has probably done as much or more for the open source ecosystem than pretty much anyone.

Pretty much MS' only useful contributions to open source are from MS Research, everything else feels like a Trojan horse, designed to make you like them and then lock you in to something proprietary later.

Lots of plugins don't work on open-source VSCode, they tried a bait and switch with .NET features, Windows 11 has a bunch of anti-patterns, GitHub is being dodgy about how they train Copilot, etc...

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#434
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Releases of all open source things Apple uses, by OS: https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ These mostly link to repositories under one of their GitHub organizations: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/ Apple's open source projects: https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ Which mostly link to repositories under their main GitHub organization: https://github.com/orgs/apple/repositories

Note these are thrown-over-the-wall source dumps, with no valuable VCS history, nothing more recent than at least 2 releases ago, and sending a PR will likely only receive crickets (said as someone who recently found an easily patchable bug in dyld, contemplated the idea of opening a PR and was told by an ex-colleague who now works at Apple that my best shot would be through feedbackassistant.apple.com). BTW, those r…

I just got a security bug fixed last month in dyld in one release cycle. Didn't strike me as difficult. I emailed them, and they fixed it. Not much more to add then that. Have you actually tried?

Also dyld isn't just some thrown-over the wall code. It's completely designed and built by Apple and is the cornerstone to making the user-space runtime functional.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#435
post #391

What's surprising to me about all the negative reactions Microsoft receives, especially on here, is that from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc). I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open, but they do no wrong in most people's eyes, where even a simple mistake by…

what surprises me the most about Microsoft related hate is that, despite the fact that they had (still have pretty much) control over the OS market they never locked their system down or charged people in any capacity. People take it for granted that you can just run what you want on your windows machine but they could have turned it into smartphone style locked down system. Imagine if every app developer in history…

They didn't do it because regulators were already on them, hard. They literally funded Apple to try have a competitor so they wouldn't be broken up. A judge did, at one point, rule that they should be broken up anyway.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#436

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

Thanks for explaining. Out of curiosity, does Microsoft have any external-facing GPL-licensed projects? Are there any restrictions to using (i.e. open sourcing something developed internally or forking something from outside MS) GPL-licensed projects? Specifically, would teams be able to get approval to fork GPL repos?

Git for Windows comes to mind. Teams can absolutely get approval for any open source license; however, for a GPL project, we'd have their open source legal team work with them to brief them on the license obligations and requirements, such as publishing code to https://3rdpartysource.microsoft.com/.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#437
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just bots, it's real people: https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/8100595a3a3a6d5c7d0...

How is this commit in May related to the current thread? Your post doesn't contain enough information for me to understand your meaning.

No post body was provided.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#438
post #391

What's surprising to me about all the negative reactions Microsoft receives, especially on here, is that from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc). I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open, but they do no wrong in most people's eyes, where even a simple mistake by…

what surprises me the most about Microsoft related hate is that, despite the fact that they had (still have pretty much) control over the OS market they never locked their system down or charged people in any capacity. People take it for granted that you can just run what you want on your windows machine but they could have turned it into smartphone style locked down system. Imagine if every app developer in history…

Well we're all just lucky nobody had thought of that yet.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#439

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

And here I was ready to sharpen my pitchfork. Thanks for communicating the error and the correction. I know this time of year can be especially challenging.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#440

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

FYI: when linking to a line of code, simply press Y on your keyboard to have Github switch from the _branchname/path/to/file.xyz_ URL to the _sha1/path/to/file.xyz_ URL. The former can result in your URL pointing to unrelated code if lines are added or removed in future commits on the referenced branch.

https://github.com/microsoft/opensource-management-portal/bl...

Post reply on HN