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Getting forked by Microsoft

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#461

Post by veber-alex »

paxys wrote: post #386
layer8 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not the first time I see something like this.

The flake8 (MIT license) maintainer is upset that ruff is copying his lints, for example.

I find the whole thing bizarre.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#462

Post by pyrale »

paxys wrote: post #204
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…

Have to agree with this. There's an endless list of open source maintainers who publish an MIT-licensed project then are surprised when it is treated as an MIT-licensed project. If you want rights, assert them. No one else is looking out for you. Especially not Microsoft.

In this case, there's an open source maintainer who was fine with a MIT license, and even helping onboard people from a big tech firm, only to realize that even attribution was too much to ask.

Since the terms of the license were violated, there's not much to learn about which license was chosen. The only lesson to learn is that big tech will steal everything that isn't nailed to the ground, and then some.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#463

Post by vvillena »

SoftTalker wrote: post #290
jenadine wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that in this case Microsoft has not been following the license, as they removed the copyright notice Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors To replace it by their own. Despite the license says > The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

So if they had left that line in, everything would be cool? To me, licenses like MIT or BSD pretty much imply "do whatever you want with this" I know it's not exactly that but if you really care to keep some control over what others do with the code, you need a more restrictive license (and even then people are still going to copy it, especially in the LLM era).

Yes, it would be cool, and it's the usual way to do these things. You can license code under a more restrictive license, and clarify licensing by adding an extra section to the main license, adding the license to a subdirectory, or adding license headers to the individual files.

Whether the MIT license is the right one to choose is probably a different debate.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#464

Post by cestith »

Tireings wrote: post #336
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…

Or it was just a team inside Microsoft and he thought "Microsoft" talked to him and saw already dollar signs? Open source license is there for reasons, he can sue them if they did it wrong.

Generally a court likes for a plaintiff to try to resolve a dispute before suing. The author should contact the Peerd team at Microsoft and point out that they seem to have overlooked their obligations under the license. Only if they refuse to do anything would it be worth considering a lawsuit.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#465

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

palata wrote: post #415
evantbyrne wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood and this is incorrect. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. It needs to appear somewhere regardless of where exactly the license was placed in the source repository.

Right. So they should just copy this licence somewhere in a subfolder, saying "parts of this project derive from Spegel, with licence: "? They can still do it now, and probably they should (someone can even open a PR?).

They have to say what code where is copied from the other project. It can't just be "parts", because that obscures the authorship.

You can open that PR, if you care to identify which parts were copied and label them all. Really, the people who copied the code in the first place should have done so, and really should have known better, given they work for a massive corporation that claims to love open source and has had a massive interest in copyright over the past three decades. It's not just a "mistake", it's unacceptable for a professional programmer for a corporation to take code from a FOSS project without crediting it. That's a level of incompetence bordering on malpractice for a profession that deals so heavily with copyright on a day to day basis.

edit: According to the MIT license, the notice itself just needs to accompany the code, so I was wrong about the specificity needed. Still, it does mean that any further forks would be unable to remove the license without personally identifying if all the original code was removed. It's always better to identify what code belongs to who.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#466

Post by hnlurker22 »

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.

I think it's weird they didn't mention anything about Peerd or their plans on how to use Spegel to the author. They could've atleast said "btw we plan to do xyz" instead of leaving the author fantasizing about a collab.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#467

Post by klabb3 »

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…

These days there is almost nothing good with permissive if your project gets used by mega corps specifically. They don’t want your opinions, your expertise, they don’t want to share anything back, they won’t pay you, and they will even avoid giving credit – the lowest of the low. And somehow we’re still worrying about inconveniencing megacorps as if that mattered, at all!

I would love a license that says if your company has a physical presence in 10+ countries, one of its executive owns a yacht, or even is publicly listed, you need to purchase a license from the owners. (As a bonus, if the company is primarily selling subscriptions, the license should be in subscription form in return). Free (GPL/MIT/whatever) for everyone else.

Even such a crude stupid license would be an improvement over today for many. Most importantly I think a large amount of code is already closed today, because of the risks. This results in worse technical solutions, eg SaaS instead of libs & docker images that are easy to fix yourself. I don’t understand the fear mongering about licenses that Amazon and Microsoft don’t like. At the absolute minimum, contribute the changes back.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#468

Post by overfeed »

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…

> What's good about being "permissive"?

They want widespread usage of their project, but always decry not like that when Amazon or Microsoft is responsible for the usage.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#469

Post by jlokier »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #340
layer8 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in their products. Internal use is fine, but where it gets dicey from a legal point of view is when you distribute GPLv3 binaries as an integrated part of your product.

Many vendors use Linux in their products. Think: smartphones (Android), routers, smarthome/IoT devices, other embedded devices.

Linux in Android is GPLv2 not GPLv3. The v2-v3 difference is a big deal to some.

Linux developers made an intentional decision to stick with GPLv2 and to remove the "or later version" option, so you can't include it into GPLv3 projects as you can with most other GPLv2 software.

GPLv3 avoidance is why Apple ships ancient versions of Rsync, Bash and Make on its current OSes instead of the current versions, and replaced Samba with its own inferior SMB service.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#470

Post by cestith »

throwaway87464 wrote: post #439
kstrauser wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The GPL and AGPL don't prevent corporations from plagiarizing your code via AI.

It does make them legally liable for doing so.
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