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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#161

Post by jxf »

In distant times (before Microsoft's Satya era) I was the maintainer of a popular OSS product that scratched an important itch for specialist people who were doing work in the early cloud days. It solved my own problems, and I didn't want to make a business out of it, so I was content to release it as OSS.

A Microsoft director who ran a portfolio of product teams reached out to ask about a "collaboration". I said I'd be happy to send them my consulting agreement. There was a little grumbling about the rate but I just reiterated that it was my rate. After a lot of legal back and forth, they signed, I answered a bunch of questions for them in a 2-day workshop, and they paid.

If they want you badly enough, they'll pay. Don't work for free.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#162

Post by dizhn »

vasco wrote: post #6
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…

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

Probably expectation of some monetary gain. At the very least getting hired to keep working on the same thing. I do not blame him at all for this. Though when things didn't work out, all he thought he could realistically do is start accepting donations.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#163

Post by ryao »

Zambyte wrote: post #44
sublimefire wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and they do redistribute under MIT as well, there is no foul play here

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE I don't see "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" (the "above copyright notice" in https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE ) anywhere. Where do you see it?

To be fair, Spegel changed the copyright notice in 2024. It used to say someone else. That said, Microsoft is definitely missing the notice.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#165

Post by nosequel »

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".

> I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet.

It just so happens that the Microsoft engineer who originally changed the license in GitHub went from Senior to Principal engineer at Microsoft in the past two months (according to LinkedIn). So you probably aren't far off.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#167

Post by Zambyte »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #136
Zambyte wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL requires that you publish a notice that the source is available on demand to the people who use your software over the network. The easiest way to do this is usually to just publish your changes so you can link everyone to it, but that is not a requirement of the license. You can run derivative AGPLv3 software to service the public without distributing your changes to the source code without violating the li…

From the text of the AGPL: > The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public ac…

That's not in the terms of the license, that's in the preamble as a stated goal. Read sections 4-6. They're not that long and don't really have much legalese.

In practice, the goal is met because someone is likely to request the source for AGPL software. Publishing the code is not a requirement of the license though.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#168

Post by lolinder »

jezek2 wrote: post #86
phillebaba wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.

The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me. I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.

The anger over cloud hosting came from a specific set of Open Source companies that produced cloud software with the intention of earning money by selling hosting. Mongo, Elastic, and Hashicorp were the big ones. These companies failed to realize that the licenses they chose were incompatible with the business model they chose and then blamed the resellers for their own failure to plan.

It was particularly problematic for the FOSS companies because each of these players' plans was to resell the Big Three clouds and live off of the margin, so the instant that the cloud providers decided to just directly compete in the hosting space the original company physically couldn't compete on price.

The moral of the story is that if you're releasing cloud software as FOSS you can't plan your business around the idea that you'll be the only hoster.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#169

Post by em-bee »

As a maintainer, it is my duty to come across as unbiased and factual as possible

i disagree with that. factual? sure, but unbiased? why? it's your project, and you have every right to be biased towards it. on the contrary, i expect you to, and i actually believe that not being biased towards your own project is very difficult so that i don't expect many people to be able to not be biased.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#170

Post by Maxious »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #118
vasco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

It's also very possible they had been working on it already and wanted to compare notes, I certainly would if I were working on something internal and found a similar project, but I agree, ask them for a consultation fee. I don't see why they wouldn't pay it. Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.

Very possible, from the in repo documentation (which credits Spegel yet again) https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md it seems like there was a particular engineer at Microsoft who was working on Azure Container Registry who found it useful to integrate Azure Container Registry.

If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably.

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