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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#381

Post by evantbyrne »

palata wrote: post #379
evantbyrne wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are supposed to keep the original license for a fork. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license.

> Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license. Did they remove the copyright? All the source files I checked in Spegel don't have a copyright header. To me it feels like it's the author's mistake.

Forks don't get to pretend that licenses don't exist just because they don't like the placement in the source.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#382

Post by WD-42 »

NobodyNada wrote: post #373
WD-42 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.

It's not a "pretty minor violation", that's the only condition of the MIT license. Yes, they mentioned Spegel, but only to thank the authors for "generously sharing their insights" -- that's not even close to the required statement that part of the project is owned and copyrighted by the authors of Spegel.

Ok, so MS will see this thread and re-add the missing header to a few files.

You really think the author is going to then feel 100% better about it?

They are just another data point in the long list of authors who chose a permissive license and are then shocked when a billion dollar company takes advantage of it.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#383

Post by krupan »

nu11ptr wrote: post #360
krupan wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Do you work for Microsoft? There is nothing "non-permissive" about the GPL. You can use the code however you want. "Viral" is a perjorative description that Microsoft pioneered the use of to describe the GPL. The GPL is not a virus that latches onto any code it gets near, without anyone's permission. You should not use that term.

> The GPL is not a virus that latches onto any code it gets near Honestly, that is EXACTLY how I feel about it. If I use GPL code in my code then my code must also be GPL (if I distribute). The term seems to fit to me. And no, I've never worked for MS.

Viruses are things that latch onto other things without their permission. If you choose to build off of GPL code then yes, you must preserve the GPL license. There's an important difference.

It's actually the same as any other copyrighted code (and in the US, all code is automatically copyrighted and restricted). You cannot just take code and use it in your project. GPL code is nothing special.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#384

Post by palata »

WD-42 wrote: post #345
evantbyrne wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are supposed to keep the original license for a fork. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license.

It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.

People here keep saying that they removed copyright headers. I can't find a single copyright header in the Spegel source files. Can someone help me find which headers Microsoft actually removed?

What I see is that Microsoft added headers to their Peerd files. Now they read "Copyright Microsoft", which is correct because Microsoft owns some copyright over those modified files. If those files had had a "Copyright Spegel project" before, Microsoft should have kept it and added their own. But those files did not contain such a header as far as I can see.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#385

Post by hypercube33 »

jxf wrote: post #161

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…

This article and your comment reminds me of the story about winget/appget https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22

Note - maybe they don't pay you the developer sometimes, however.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#386

Post by paxys »

layer8 wrote: post #256
hresvelgr wrote: post #17

While 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.

If the author has ethical concerns with companies using their work there's a simple way to make that explicit and unambigious – the license. No one can read their mind otherwise.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#387

Post by matkoniecz »

ryao wrote: post #117
johnisgood wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I have some open source projects where I only have one LICENSE file (it is also in README), but I will consider adding it to all files, there are just too many files. :/ I am inconsistent, because I have projects that contain the copyright notice in all files.

[flagged]

Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#388

Post by palata »

evantbyrne wrote: post #381
palata wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license. Did they remove the copyright? All the source files I checked in Spegel don't have a copyright header. To me it feels like it's the author's mistake.

Forks don't get to pretend that licenses don't exist just because they don't like the placement in the source.

You don't understand my point (probably my mistake).

If the file starts with:

//

// Copyright evantbyrne

Then a fork should read:

//

// Copyright evantbyrne

// Copyright Microsoft

But if you did not add "// Copyright evantbyrne", the MIT license doesn't say that Microsoft should add it. I don't even know if it's legal for Microsoft to do it. You have to add your own copyright to the files where you own a copyright.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#389

Post by trelane »

ryao wrote: post #66
hardwaresofton wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just to be really clear -- it's not actually a solution to cloud providers not reusing the code for profit (which I assume is the context you're implying, could be wrong here), because AGPL is free software, so people are free to reuse your code for commercial purposes. AGPL at least prevents making private improvements to open source networked code without contributing back. I think in this situation it might ha…

The AGPL doesn't require them to contribute back. It only requires them to provide the code to end users upon request. No license as far as I know requires people to contribute back. In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send th…

The biggest thing that GPL et al. enable is that customers are not locked in to their provider.

It's not as much about the collaboration by the vendor per se, though users would likely prefer it, and are themselves able to collaborate on equal footing.

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