121–130 of 1001 posts
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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.
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No! Once you change the copyright line, you no longer include "the above copyright notice". At that point you're violating the license. You are also not allowed to change the copyright notice or license text in any way (you may however add to the license, which is a loophole other licenses such as GPL fix.) Substantial is subject to (legal) debate as the Oracle vs. MS case has shown. Whole functions or large parts of…
> I'm seriously flabbergasted at how bad reading comprehension seems to be among coders. Sorry to deflate your amazement, but I made the remark because I have never seen a permissively licensed repository which changed hands and had multiple copyright lines in the last 20 years or so . Maybe it's not my reading comprehension (and English is not my native language to begin with), but the behaviors of other coders to b…
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No there aren't. You can make changes to AGPLv3 software without publishing it anywhere. The only requirement is that you make your changes available in source form to anyone that you distribute changes to, which may be entirely private, or involve no one besides yourself.
The AGPL requires that your publish your source to the people who use your software over the network.
You can run derivative AGPLv3 software to service the public without distributing your changes to the source code without violating the license as long as nobody asks for the code.
> I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive What's good about being "permissive"? I keep hearing this argument, but I still don't understand, what's the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything "permissive". Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good? AGPLv3 still allows forking, still allows maki…
I initially had the same reaction to the MIT license; but it sort of looks like the GPL (or AGPL) wouldn't have really prevented this behavior. Microsoft (it sounds like) is making the code available; they've just extended and renamed the project. They could have done exactly the same thing (fork, rename, release under the same license), with the same effects he's complaining about (free-loading the consulting time,…
i.e. they could have emailed the author to ask:
1. "Would you rather us fork your project (new name), or would you rather donate your project to us under its original name, as well as give us the ability to rename it (which we will)"
2. "Would you like a $300 microsoft store gift card as thanks for writing some code we're planning to use?"
3. "Would you be open to providing a paid ($600 microsoft gift card) 1-hour consulting meeting to ramp our engineers up on your codebase? We won't actually listen since our engineers can in fact read, but we'll pay you"
4. "Also, just in case you don't know who microsoft is, we do have a careers page over here, and our team doesn't have headcount but other teams do "
It sounds like microsoft didn't do any of that, which as you say is well within their right, but emailing to ask is polite.
Not just forked. Microsoft stole the code without attribution, violating the license terms. Truly shameful behavior. Best case, it was a single engineer who was tasked with duplicating the functionality, but chose the lazier, fraudulent route and was even too lazy to clean things up entirely. Still, MS should own up, correct the record, and make this right.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
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Because they're hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source. It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get…
> especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them? Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply. Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course…
He was hoping for a fruitful collaboration and offered the help towards this goal. MS taking whatever they wanted anyway just proves that they had no intention to cooperate, let alone to pay handsomely for something that was already free.
Ending up in court means you need to sue the megacorp to enforce the license. This makes it a free lunch for a megacorp.
With every single scenario MS takes whatever they need. They don't have to pay, don't need the help to read code, and you can't afford to force them to respect the license.
P.S.
> As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
There's a guy rotting away in a El Salvadorian prison with a lot of press to keep him comfort. Not sure your letter will capture the world's attention like you think it will.
> I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive What's good about being "permissive"? I keep hearing this argument, but I still don't understand, what's the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything "permissive". Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good? AGPLv3 still allows forking, still allows maki…
What I’ll never understand is people who release their project with a permissive license and then get upset when a big company distributes their own version of the project in accordance with the license. If you don’t want that sort of appropriation then you need to pick a license that doesn’t allow it.
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(A)GPLv3 does not prevent their projects from being used. That's the point! GPL family of licenses would've made a difference in this aspect for libraries (because afair if you link to GPL code, you must be GPL). But for an app? You can use it, fork it, modify it... Just make sure you make your changes available under the same license. Seems very fair to me.
> (A)GPLv3 does not prevent their projects from being used. In practice, it does in many cases. Many companies have a blanket policy of avoiding these licences. But I agree that they make more sense for apps than libraries.
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Hmm, think we ought to judge on a case by case basis. However, for megacorp and especially banks that has almost 0 to 1% access to cost of capital, vs rest of us who at at 20 - 30 % ( for credit card, loan sharks), then there should be a different license for these people. There should be a GLP type license adjusted to the cost of the capital.
There should not be any difference between small or large entitise in how you deal with them as an opensource maintainer. Just because someone has more money (or less), should not automatically mean you treat them with more leniency or ethics. You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.