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Getting forked by Microsoft

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#291

Post by robmccoll »

orochimaaru wrote: post #280
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…

Don’t entertain meetings without compensation from megacrop. But the project is open source. The author provided the right for them to take it in any way possible and copy it. If I’m not mistaken the MIT license allows what they did. I’m assuming the complaint is more about Microsoft duplicity in asking for information as opposed to the forking of the code. The latter is fine - the license explicitly allows it.

You are mistaken. The license explicitly allows it subject to the terms of the license:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Microsoft didn't follow these terms. They copied "substantial portions of the Software" and didn't include the notice.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#292

Post by eduction »

This is good not bad.

Their improvements are available under MIT license. They would have been fully within their rights to not release and put in a proprietary product but did not do this.

Instead everyone can benefit from their improvements. Author can steal whatever he wants for his upstream.

(I can’t find any details of “Microsoft MIT” and the above is premised on it being functionally MIT.)

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#293

Post by indrora »

gavinhoward wrote: post #281

Use copyleft. I know it isn't mainstream, but companies try to avoid those licenses as much as possible. Tinfoil hat: sometimes I wonder if companies astroturfed support for permissive licenses. Getting the entire Rust ecosystem to avoid copyleft was a huge win, for example. And now that copyleft Gnu tools are being replaced with permissive uutils in Ubuntu, it seems they won, whether or not they were the ones to pus…

Copyleft and the shift to static executables are incompatible.

The vast majority of the rust (and Go) ecosystems is non-copyleft because you cannot satisfy the GPL in any meaningful way and satisfy your corporate legal department’s IP lawyers.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#294

Post by johnisgood »

pjmlp wrote: post #227
johnisgood wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@pjmlp, thoughts?

Nothing is new, I have mentioned multiple times that Microsoft management undoes the great work from .NET team. Also as polyglot developer, while I happen to have my preferences in regards to technology, I am not married with any of them. Being MVP, Champion, or whatever program each megacorp happens to have, was never something I saw value in. Never make a specific technology, or company, part of your identity as pe…

I'm only pinging you because I think a couple of days (or weeks, even) ago you or someone else mentioned it is open source (?), so I was wondering what's going on.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#295

Post by koiueo »

andybak wrote: post #238
koiueo wrote: post #19

> 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…

> Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good? By far the biggest risk for most projects is "nobody notices it and nobody uses it". And if someone "takes" your project and uses it - you've usually still got it. Software is funny like that.

If the project is good, the license is hardly ever an obstacle for adoption.

At least I can't recall any such cases.

Do you have any examples?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#296

Post by bdcravens »

talkingtab wrote: post #84

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…

Does this exclude anyone who works for a corporation from contributing? I think the obvious answer is no, as long as someone is working in their own interests, but it would be very hard to establish. After all, Linus worked for the Transmeta Corporation during some of Linux's most seminal years.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#297

Post by diggan »

sublimefire wrote: post #39
diggan wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

MS has internal tools that scan dependencies etc and flag them against legal team if anything is fishy. License choice matters quite a bit, they will not risk litigation.

Guess they should start using those tools when they setup their "looks-like-acquihire-but-really-is-a-brain-dump" meetings so they could flag the FOSS projects they want to rewrite internally.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#298

Post by bornfreddy »

ryao wrote: post #268
scosman wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they forked from before the author had a license, it’s worse. MS had no right to use it. I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake.

> If they forked from before the author had a license, it’s worse. MS had no right to use it. You are right, provided he did not have a notice saying it was MIT licensed elsewhere. > I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake. I would consider it to be both a choice and a mistake. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is no evidence in the fork that…

> There is no evidence in the fork that he is the copyright holder of the original code and it looks like Microsoft is. Part of that is Microsoft’s fault, but part of that is his fault for not including per file copyright notices, such that Microsoft could add theirs and be the sole one listed in every file.

Absolutely not! This is completely and only M$'s fault, whichever way you look at it. Copying a file and slapping your own license on it, without consideration of the original one, is never acceptable. Don't blaim the victim please.

As for incompetence - well maybe they (M$) need to get better at managing licenses? Accusing others of stealing when the reverse is true only makes everything worse. Let's not try to change the standard way of licensing because some developers can't be bothered to check the license (and even fix typos in comments, apparently).

As an aside, there is no need to add copyright / license to every file. I would even consider it an anti-pattern, because it pollutes the code with noise.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#299

Post by bdcravens »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #153
talkingtab wrote: post #84

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…

> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

So only hobbyist software? NC applies to use as well as contribution.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#300

Post by zitsarethecure »

dankle wrote: post #138

Bro releasing software under MIT. Others picking it up and use it under terms of MIT license. Bro gets upset. Can someone please explain why?

Too many developers don't really understand licensing. Everyone defaults to permissive to be politically correct, rather than on merit.
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