Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft at it again with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
MIT License.
Violated by the removal of author's copyright notice.
Getting forked by Microsoft
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#252> 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 always choose permissive licenses for personal project, and I often avoid depending on other projects that aren't permissive. If I want to know that, if I need to, I can grab the code and change something. And I want others to be able to remix what I make as needed. The more limitations added on a license, the less open it is.
I would like a relatively permissive software license which forbids any profiteering (CC-NC but then strictly software).
I'm fine with people using my code, not fine with companies profiteering off my work. If you want to use it commercially, pay for it.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#253Earlier 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…
> Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? If they're breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven't heard much from them recently). [1] https://softwarefreedom.org/
Sometimes social pressure can be a cheaper approach, time will tell if it'll work in this case :)
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No license stops someone from spinning off an OSS project into their closed-sourced enterprise offering. It's just sad that most corps see nothing wrong with this
GPL definitely does.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#255The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
AGPL without CLA, to be precise. AGPL with CLA is a trap.
What's wrong with CLA?
I've contributed to project with CLA. Have been using them and then wanted a feature and the project accepted my patch.
Ther are still many people contributing to project with CLA.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#256While 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.
No legal basis. They still might have an ethical basis regarding Microsoft's behavior, because law != ethics.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#257Forked up the wazoo. That said, Microsoft provides extremely generous Startup Assistance (to the tune of > 150K of Azure credits). Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with MS but I did their program, also did the Gcloud and AWS programs back in the day. No negative comparisons, but off the top of my head the Azure program is awesome. I really enjoyed working with Azure, and it does what it says on the tin. You can apply h…
Oh boy, credits that only work in their cloud. That’ll cover rent.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#258> 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…
"breaking the licenses"?
"without attribution"?
Did we read the same article?
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#259Earlier 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.
I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world. Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. Asking everybody to be consta…
> Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you.
I agree with you, if we're talking about people acting as individual humans collaborating together on FOSS.
But this is really about a for-profit corporation acting in its own interests, using people to do its "deeds". Then I think it makes a lot of sense to treat any "Hey, could we chat to you about your project?" with a great deal of skepticism, because they have a goal with that conversation, it it's unlikely to align with your own goals, in most cases.
Ultimately, people from that corporation is reaching out to you because there is a potential/perceived benefit coming out of that conversation that they want to have with you. If it isn't extremely clear to you what that exact benefit is, I'd say the smart thing to do is being cautious, to avoid situations like this which happen from time to time it seems.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Temping, but we don't fight their crummy tactics by using the same ones.
Why is it crummy? Open source benefits big tech now. Especially for cloud based stuff. Only open source it if it fucks big tech. E.g. bittorrent or an alternative browser. Or an app on your local machine as a SaaS alternative.
Less permissive copyleft licenses like GPL and AGPL go a long way toward preventing that. It’s important to choose them over weaker licenses if you don't want companies using your work without giving back. If you do that, you don't have to do other unusual things to protect your users’ rights.