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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#491

Post by pstoll »

evantbyrne wrote: post #199
giancarlostoro wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very possible they had been working on it already and wanted to compare notes, I certainly would if I were working on something internal and found a similar project, but I agree, ask them for a consultation fee. I don't see why they wouldn't pay it. Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.

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.

The other thing is that Microsoft does not own the copyright for any of the code they used. Facing their work on code they don’t own the copyright to is incredibly messy from an IP point of view.

It’s why con contributor licenses agreements exist in most open source popular projects.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#492

Post by overfeed »

nicoburns wrote: post #101
koiueo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(A)GPLv3 does not prevent their projects from being used. That's the point! GPL family of licenses would've made a difference in this aspect for libraries (because afair if you link to GPL code, you must be GPL). But for an app? You can use it, fork it, modify it... Just make sure you make your changes available under the same license. Seems very fair to me.

> (A)GPLv3 does not prevent their projects from being used. In practice, it does in many cases. Many companies have a blanket policy of avoiding these licences. But I agree that they make more sense for apps than libraries.

This is even more damning because it means the maintainers want their MIT-licensed projects to be used by for-profit companies, but bellyache when certain big-tech companies fulfill the maintainer's vision.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#494

Post by palata »

Kubuxu wrote: post #451
palata wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft does credit the authors on their README. Maybe it's not exactly the right way to do it, but they do it. Now if it's not the right way to do it, what about opening a PR and asking to change it? Instead of writing a blog post to complain about them? Now maybe those engineers thought they did well, will get issues internally because of the bad publicity for Microsoft, and next time they want to use an open sou…

The question is who does the copyright belong to in this repository. It is both original author and Microsoft (because they took authors code and modified it). So the License file should mention both.

I am not convinced that the main LICENSE file should mention both. I feel like somewhere, in the project, there should be a copy of the original license.

When you depend on a third-party, you don't add their copyright in your main LICENSE file.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#495

Post by starkparker »

ryao wrote: post #289
talkingtab wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. That violates the first clause of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd It probably violates 5 and 6 too. > But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork wi…

the OSCL turned 18 years old a month ago. maybe things have changed enough since then to validate revisiting it.

OSI is too busy trying to come up with an equally mid (at best) OSAID for another thing thing that corporations already don't and won't care about following, so I don't expect them to prioritize it even if it got raised

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#496

Post by nemetroid »

palata wrote: post #453
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The details are less important. The code that is copied needs to be attributed, either with comments, or a license file that states which files came from the project, or something else, but the specific code does need to be recognizable by a reader as coming from that other source. Comments and copyright headers are the easiest way to do this.

Still, to me it's not even clear if "substantial parts of the code" were copied. What the article shows is really small snippets of pretty generic code. Ok, it keeps the original comment and the overall form. But if it's 15 lines, it may even count as "fair use", couldn't it? Remembering how LLMs use the concept of "fair-use" by stealing everything everywhere... My point is that Peerd seems like it's loosely based on…

All this uncertainty is caused by Microsoft's copyright infringement.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#497

Post by palata »

rovr138 wrote: post #478
palata wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. So Microsoft should just have a copy of that LICENSE somewhere in their codebase?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#498

Post by johnisgood »

matkoniecz wrote: post #387
ryao wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

It is for inserting a copyright notice in the files, I will use a for loop and sed for it though. I'm old school. :P

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#499

Post by YetAnotherNick »

gwd wrote: post #36
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…

> Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? If they're breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven't heard much from them recently). [1] https://softwarefreedom.org/

Is there any for profit law firm which works without fee in cases like these and split the earnings? Needing to pay lawyer upfront makes it hard for individuals to sue mega corp even if they were clearly wronged.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#500

Post by nu11ptr »

krupan wrote: post #383
nu11ptr wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is very easy to accidently use a GPL library without knowing it, especially if it is a dependency of a dependency and you aren't using a license scanner.
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