41–50 of 1001 posts
> 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…
Not 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.
Copied, not stole. It's unfortunate that the two are so often conflated.
> 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 don’t mind sharing my software with others, even folks who want to make a profit. Of course, that’s easy for me to say since I’ve only released a few small projects open source. But when I do, I make my projects fully public domain. I’m not interested in feeling any sense of obligation to those who try the software out, so I free them from any obligation to me as well. That said, I fully support larger projects bei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/
Yes and they do redistribute under MIT as well, there is no foul play here
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?
> 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…
During ZIRP-boom-times, having a successful popular open source project could be a ticket to kudos and a high paying job and a certain level of responsibility and satisfaction. BigCos spread the money around, and your job as a SWE ended up being gluing together a bunch of these open source pieces to solve corporate problems. And on the whole people felt like their corporate jobs were giving a fair deal, and a decent dividend for the open source work they were doing.
In that context why would you pick a license that your generous employer couldn't use?
The GPL and the free software movement is borne out of an earlier era, GenX and younger boomers who lived through seeing their hard work exploited and stolen from them. Or corporate entities that cut budgets, laid people off en masse, exploded in stock market crisis, etc and suddenly the good will was lost.
I think we'll see a bit of a resurgence in the GPL, as some people try to protect the work they've done.
(I do thnk the personality of Stallman himself has become a bit of a problem to be associated with)
> 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…
I agree, after this happened to me I learned of a few other situations where the same thing happened to other friends. On my end if was a mix of naivete and flattery which made me want to take the meeting. I suspect it is the same case for others. I will not make the same mistake the next time it happens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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 mean, consider an alternate timeline. It's clear MS had their own, strong vision for the project, that overlapped with but wasn't identical to his. Is it actually that much more considerate to show up with two dozen new developers suddenly flooding a single-maintainer project with pull requests, some of which completely restructure the code and re-orient it towards a new vision that the original maintainer might not want?
Either the maintainer is now doing loads of unpaid labor for MS, and is the bottleneck; or he ends up having to step back and let the new MS developers bulldoze the project and take it over anyway.
What would have been a better approach?
> 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…
Hell no. If they want to profit off my work, pay me. This is something I'm doing for fun, on my own terms. It’s Free for anyone to use as they want, so long as they keep it Free, too.
Here it is:
Copyright (c)
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
IN THE SOFTWARE.