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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#471

Post by dec0dedab0de »

WD-42 wrote: post #349
latexr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are never just money. There is a monumental difference between: 1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world. 2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical. You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for fre…

How do you refuse to engage if you use the MIT license?

don't respond to their emails.

If you want to be extreme don't distribute it to them in the first place. Licenses do not come into effect until after distribution. So you could have a pay-to-download model that comes with a %100 discount if you're a lone developer or an organization with under X amount of revenue. You wouldn't be able to stop someone redistributing it after the fact, but you're not engaging.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#472

Post by shagie »

krupan wrote: post #368
p_ing wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple famously migrated away from bash (stuck on 3.2 in macOS 15) to zsh to avoid the GPLv3 'problem'.

There was zero chance of them having problems shipping bash and I'm glad you put problem in quotes.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

  11. Patents.

  A "contributor" is a copyright holder who authorizes use under this License of the Program or a work on which the Program is based.  The work thus licensed is called the contributor's "contributor version".

  A contributor's "essential patent claims" are all patent claims owned or controlled by the contributor, whether already acquired or hereafter acquired, that would be infringed by some manner, permitted by this License, of making, using, or selling its contributor version, but do not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of the contributor version.  For purposes of this definition, "control" includes the right to grant patent sublicenses in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License.

  Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.
This is a "some companies might not want to have to litigate that". Whether or not there would be a problem is an open question. Legal likely advised not touching GPL version 3 out of an abundance of caution.

https://fsfe.org/activities/gplv3/patents-and-gplv3.en.html#...

Eben Moglen speaking at the GPLv3 launch, January 16th 2006

    ...

    We recognise that for parties who have extensive portfolios that are extensively cross-licensed, what we are saying here for the first time creates questions concerning their cross-licenses in relation to their distribution.

    We recognise also that to say that you must "act to shield" is not explicit enough. We recognise that this is a very hard problem and though we have worked long at it we have no unique solution to offer you, even as a beginning for conversation.

   ...

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#473

Post by glitchc »

The solution is to change the license ASAP, add some must-have features from the pull requests (or your own imagination, you know best what's missing), and continue on your merry way.

Eventually the MS fork will be so far behind yours that they will come back to talk to you. And this time, you will be prepared.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#474

Post by rexpop »

cenobyte wrote: post #448

Not to be mean, but if you don't like the consequences of using an MIT license then don't use it. Using it then complaining about its effects because you don't like the company is silly. Use a different license if this is important to you.

> This experience has also made me consider changing the license of Spegel, as it seems to be the only stone I can throw.

Well, yes, that seems to be the conclusion OP has come to.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#475

Post by unethical_ban »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #348
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. You are going exactly against the OSS philosophy. OSS shouldn't restrict the use of software just because you don't like it. It was created to fight exactly this. This is also why source available BS (like BSL) is against OSS. OSS is literally about being about hacking and changing software to suit you…

"It was never about the money part"

That seems to be the point being debated now. When a megacorp forks an OSS project and cuts out the author, how does that encourage developers? How does that encourage OSS?

And for that matter, perhaps less ideological but practical, how does that encourage small startups who want to be as open as possible while wanting to be able to scratch out a living working on something they care about?

You suggest staying closed source, rather than tweaking an open-source license to limit corporate forks, for the purpose of protecting OSS philosophy. It strikes me as odd.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#476

Post by nrabulinski »

Why haven’t you threatened to sue yet? They very clearly violated the MIT license by getting rid of your copyright, which is literally the only requirement MIT imposes. Go after them, don’t let the corporation get away with

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#477

Post by daedrdev »

talkingtab wrote: post #172
jeremyjh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The k8s community is mostly people who work for commercial interests and use k8s in their companies. If you develop a component of the k8s ecosystem, and you want people to use it, you can't really exclude businesses from using it. There just aren't enough installations outside of commercial spaces for it to be relevant.

Very good point. Trying to think this through. I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that pe…

I think one of the most important parts of open source is that it's available to even those you don't like.

I simply do not get this corporate hate. Corporations and individuals can both use it for good and bad. A company might use open source to make a pacemaker to save lives or world improving research, or it might be Facebook and sell personal data.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#478

Post by rovr138 »

palata wrote: post #399
pritambaral wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violated by the removal of author's copyright notice.

Everybody claims they removed the author's copyright notice. I checked many source files in Spegel, and none of them contain an MIT header with copyright. I don't think Microsoft removed the copyright notice. I think that the original author did not add one...

https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE

The license doesn't have to be in each file. It's a license for the software. A software is a thing.

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files

> ...

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

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#479

Post by coldpie »

baq wrote: post #422
coldpie wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, just use the (L/A)GPL. It's already well understood and established; humans and well-meaning businesses can use the software ethically; corps won't use it even though they could because their intellectual property lawyers don't understand how intellectual property works.

They most likely understand, they don’t trust their engineering coworkers to not ignore it. Blanket ban is an easy sell when upside is limited and downside is basically unbounded.

My experience talking to big corp IP lawyers is they have a set of policies ("open source bad; protecting our IP good") and will make up any justification to support those policies, even if their justifications are plainly incorrect given the license text. Usually they just stop responding when you point out the obvious contradiction. It'd be one thing if they just said "no" with no justification, but my experience is they spout a bunch of false stuff about open source licensing, then explain how that false stuff violates their policies even though the real license actually doesn't, and then stop talking when you show them that they are wrong.

As you say, their job is to protect the company, not actually understand how IP works. But it's pretty silly when some stupid dev like me knows their supposed area of expertise better than they do.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#480

Post by kweingar »

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…

This is the reason why I am so confused by the strain of open source thought which says that large companies exploit OSS maintainers and ought to pay them.

Maintainers often pick permissive licenses specifically because they want companies to use the code. They want their project to grow and be adopted, and they reason that GPL would stifle adoption.

I don't really like the tactic of making your code as convenient as possible for anyone to grab off the shelf when they want to use it, and then later turning around and saying they should pay you. Why not do the payment part up front (by GPL-licensing the code and then selling dual licenses to interested companies)? Because then you wouldn't have any takers. Better to wait until people have integrated it into their systems before informing them that they ought to pay you.

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