Microsoft does, it because they know they can get away with it. Its in Microsofts DNA in my opinion. The company has a long history of such practices, decades. Occasionally they meet someone who has a enough clout to hold them to account. Sometimes they have even tried to copy patented information and get away with it. ( Example Microsoft tried to steal the idea of product activation. The owner had deep pockets enough for the court case cost ~$15M and won several hundred million from Microsoft.) Also, Many companies that disclosed information to Microsoft under NDA found Microsoft developed very similar products
Getting forked by Microsoft
21–30 of 1001 posts
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#22Hey, this sucks. Unfortunately the MIT license doesn't do much to prevent this and (I think?) their licensing transgression is they haven't kept "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" in the LICENSE file. I suspect if you call them out on it that'll be the remediation. Did you manage to reach out to any of the people at MSFT you originally spoke to to ask wtf?
[deleted]
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#23Not 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.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#24Could people say they used "AI" to build the new code?
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#25The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#26I wish people would seriously consider (A)GPL for their projects more often. It hasn't happened here, though has certainly happened in the past without anyone knowing - (A)GPL would make it hard for them to make a closed source "fork".
In fact, I wish an even stronger license existed which allowed the original author to dictate who can build on top of the project to avoid exactly these kinds of situations where a powerful actor completely disempowers the authors while technically following the license (I assume MS will "fix" their error by fixing the licensing information but will continue to compete with Spegel with the intent to make it irrelevant).
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#27[deleted]
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#28> 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…
Microsoft at it again with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#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.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#30Earlier 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…
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Source: the MIT license. https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
There's no writing in that license which I can't change the copyright after forking the code.
There's a copyright line, check. There's the permission notice, check.
The rest is just goodwill and ethics, which is not a very valuable currency in software in these days.