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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#71

Post by hoistbypetard »

skywhopper wrote: post #37
hresvelgr wrote: post #17

While Microsoft is certainly in the wrong for removing the copyright notice, I think the author has zero basis for complaint otherwise. If you're going to release software with one of the most permissable licenses, you need to accept that for all it entails. Consider what you're comfortable with and pick an appropriate license relative to your values.

Did they complain about anything else?

Mostly no, but I read the overall piece as a complaint that they got a fork when they were hoping to get a collaborator.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#72

Post by johnisgood »

ghuntley wrote: post #41
diggan wrote: post #3

> As a sole maintainer of an open source project, I was enthused when Microsoft reached out to set up a meeting to talk about Spegel. The meeting went well, and I felt there was going to be a path forward ripe with cooperation and hopefully a place where I could onboard new maintainers. Seems it isn't the first time Microsoft leads open source maintainers on, trying to extract information about their projects so they…

See also https://isdotnetopen.com and https://ghuntley.com/fracture

@pjmlp, thoughts?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#73

Post by Asmod4n »

bayindirh wrote: post #10
diggan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn't. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put "You must license your project the same as the one you forked from" and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been…

MIT doesn't need attribution. Original BSD does, but revised and most widespread BSDs do not. GPL/AGPL would prevented this somehow, requiring proper attribution via mandatory source code release, and allowing to track project origins. This would make it harder to label it as a "a Microsoft Product from Ground Up", and prevent Sherlocking the original application to a greater degree. As a result, this would probably…

GPL doesn’t help you with them taking your idea and doing a clean room implementation.

You’d need to patent your idea to stop that.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#74

Post by kstrauser »

pyfon wrote: post #63
kstrauser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I released a fun personal project under GPLv3 and the first filed issue was someone saying I should change the license to something friendlier to business interests. Hell no. If they want to profit off my work, pay me. This is something I'm doing for fun, on my own terms. It’s Free for anyone to use as they want, so long as they keep it Free, too.

At this point I'd include some of the code as binary blobs and "pay me for the source!". In addition to GPL!

Temping, but we don't fight their crummy tactics by using the same ones.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#75

Post by sublimefire »

skywhopper wrote: post #42
Zambyte wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copied, not stole. It's unfortunate that the two are so often conflated.

Leaving off the attribution makes it stolen. They stole credit for the code, in violation of its license.

Does it not need to be in each file for it to properly propagate to another source?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#76

Post by hoistbypetard »

Zambyte wrote: post #29

> Software released under an MIT license allows for forking and modifications, without any requirement to contribute these changes back. This sentence is true but a bit confusing, because there are no licenses that require anyone to contribute changes back upstream.

A bit. There are licenses that require people to publish their changes, though, and that is almost certainly what the poster meant.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#77

Post by ryao »

gwerbret wrote: post #59

I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. They went to their manager with "hey I've got this great idea" and followed it up with your code a few weeks later. Of course, this only works if they claim they were "inspired" by Spegel to "write their own code".

The commit histories for the LICENSE files in the two repositories are rather interesting. The original author placed a single copyright notice in that file. Microsoft on the other hand published it with their copyright notice and a Apache 2.0 license in place of the original copyright notice and MIT license. They also put copyright Microsoft and license apache 2.0 headers on all files. They then changed the Apache 2.0 license to MIT, but left their copyright notice in place of the original copyright notice in LICENSE:

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f...

Unless they forked a very early version that did not even have the LICENSE file, such that they never removed the original notice, this looks like copyright infringement to me. That said, I am not a lawyer.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#78

Post by bayindirh »

Asmod4n wrote: post #73
bayindirh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT doesn't need attribution. Original BSD does, but revised and most widespread BSDs do not. GPL/AGPL would prevented this somehow, requiring proper attribution via mandatory source code release, and allowing to track project origins. This would make it harder to label it as a "a Microsoft Product from Ground Up", and prevent Sherlocking the original application to a greater degree. As a result, this would probably…

GPL doesn’t help you with them taking your idea and doing a clean room implementation. You’d need to patent your idea to stop that.

I never claimed that?

Citing myself from my comment:

> As a result, this would probably forced Microsoft to develop a new one from scratch, because they're allergic to GPL, because if they have breached GPL, they would be forced to comply, since GPL is court tested already.

So, we seem to agree here.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#79

Post by phillebaba »

brianwawok wrote: post #46
phillebaba wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, after this happened to me I learned of a few other situations where the same thing happened to other friends. On my end if was a mix of naivete and flattery which made me want to take the meeting. I suspect it is the same case for others. I will not make the same mistake the next time it happens.

Do you think this stops the fork? It’s not like they can’t read the code.

Well your license is only as good as you are able to enforce it. Even with the law there is no guarantees.

I grew up thinking that people would follow the spirit of open source rather than the specific letter of the law. This is obviously not true, and probably never has been.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#80

Post by johnisgood »

ryao wrote: post #54

I initially was going to say: Failing to abide by the MIT license is copyright infringement. My advice is to contact these guys: https://softwarefreedom.org/ They likely can file a cease and desist on your behalf. However, I took a closer look at the files in question. The MIT license requires that they retain and provide copyright notices, but you never put copyright notices in your files. The only place where you a…

> but you never put copyright notices in your files.

I thought having a LICENSE file in the project's root directory was sufficient. Is it not the case?

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