171–180 of 1001 posts
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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?
My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. The problem this addresses is not that Microsoft forked this project. The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community[0]. Open source thrives because a bunch of individuals and groups collaborate. Microsoft, is built around the concept of profit for stock owners a…
The k8s community is mostly people who work for commercial interests and use k8s in their companies. If you develop a component of the k8s ecosystem, and you want people to use it, you can't really exclude businesses from using it. There just aren't enough installations outside of commercial spaces for it to be relevant.
I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay.
But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free.
I guess the concept is playing by the same rules?
The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
LGPL is sufficient (without the extra baggage of AGPL).
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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.
The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
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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.
Companies are never just money. There is a monumental difference between: 1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world. 2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical. You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for fre…
A company is not a person, and can literally have its entire staff changed in short order. Or be bought.
Companies have no morals. Sometimes people in companies do, but again, that person can vanish instantly.
You should treat a company as a person which may receive a brain transplant at any time. Most especially, when writing contracts or having any expectation of what that company will do.
> 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…
People using that gift is the point. Forks aren’t just permitted, they are encouraged. That’s why we release free software.
You aren’t in competition with Microsoft and their fork. There is no such thing as marketshare when there is no market.
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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 think the better approach would have been to give the author a choice of what happens. 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 plannin…
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> 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?
Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files. Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.