Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 1001 posts

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#51

Post by throwaway277432 »

bayindirh wrote: post #30
Zambyte wrote: post #20

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.

No!

Once you change the copyright line, you no longer include "the above copyright notice". At that point you're violating the license.

You are also not allowed to change the copyright notice or license text in any way (you may however add to the license, which is a loophole other licenses such as GPL fix.)

Substantial is subject to (legal) debate as the Oracle vs. MS case has shown. Whole functions or large parts of files however should always be considered substantial, as the software would otherwise not work.

I'm seriously flabbergasted at how bad reading comprehension seems to be among coders.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#52

Post by CommanderData »

That's why you release projects like these under restrictive licences.

Far too many times big company's take what they choose and give you nothing. Use licenses for your advantage, heck dual license if needed. Not sure what the desire is of a Eutopia open source world view, where not everyone has the vision or plays by the rules anyway.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#53

Post by bayindirh »

Zambyte wrote: post #47
bayindirh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't just remove the above copyright notice and replace it with your own and claim you retained the copyright notice lol

Can you give me a couple examples how this is done? I mean, in terms of actual repositories.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#54

Post by ryao »

I initially was going to say:

Failing to abide by the MIT license is copyright infringement. My advice is to contact these guys: https://softwarefreedom.org/ They likely can file a cease and desist on your behalf.

However, I took a closer look at the files in question. The MIT license requires that they retain and provide copyright notices, but you never put copyright notices in your files. The only place where you appear to have placed a copyright notice is in the LICENSE file:

https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/commit/23ed0d60f66dd292...

Things become interesting when I look at their LICENSE file. They appear to have tried to relicense this to Apache 2.0 before backpedaling and reinstating the MIT license:

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f...

Unless they forked from a very early version of the project that did not even have the LICENSE file, they removed the sole copyright notice you had in the repository. That brings us back to my original thoughts, which is that they have committed copyright infringement, and you should contact OSS friendly lawyers about it.

I am not a lawyer, but I do contribute to various OSS projects and all of the ones to which I have ever contributed have copyright notice headers at the top of every file to ensure proper attribution is maintained no matter where that code is used. Beyond having that sole missing copyright notice reinstated, I am not sure what else you could expect since none of your files have proper copyright headers in them. The SFLC guys would be in a better position to advise you, as they are actual lawyers.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#55

Post by koiueo »

Zambyte wrote: post #31
skywhopper wrote: post #23

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.

Stole.

When you download a movie from torrents, you don't submit it for an Oscar nomination claiming you've made it. You just copy a file to your computer intending to kill a few hours of your time while playing it back.

Microsoft®™, however, not only copied the code, but claimed it's theirs.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#56

Post by hardwaresofton »

phillebaba wrote: post #25
hardwaresofton wrote: post #16

The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.

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 have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it's Microsoft. Also, they're well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc.

I think another important point might be that "free software" aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#57

Post by freeamz »

keepamovin wrote: post #8
vasco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

Not just a megacorp. Anyone for a commercial purpose

Hmm, think we ought to judge on a case by case basis. However, for megacorp and especially banks that has almost 0 to 1% access to cost of capital, vs rest of us who at at 20 - 30 % ( for credit card, loan sharks), then there should be a different license for these people. There should be a GLP type license adjusted to the cost of the capital.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#58

Post by buran77 »

vasco wrote: post #6
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…

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

Because they're hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source.

It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'll end up face down in a ditch and authorities will look the other way. Megacorps have stolen, copied, reverse engineered, replicated, etc. things since forever and it always worked out for them.

In this case MS didn't need any help. They could very well take everything and face no real repercussions (this is the reality when the majority is uneducated, and their elected representatives are greedy and spineless). So playing along gives some chance to get something positive out of it.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#59

Post by gwerbret »

I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. They went to their manager with "hey I've got this great idea" and followed it up with your code a few weeks later. Of course, this only works if they claim they were "inspired" by Spegel to "write their own code".

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#60

Post by kstrauser »

martin-t wrote: post #26

I wish people would seriously consider (A)GPL for their projects more often. It hasn't happened here, though has certainly happened in the past without anyone knowing - (A)GPL would make it hard for them to make a closed source "fork". In fact, I wish an even stronger license existed which allowed the original author to dictate who can build on top of the project to avoid exactly these kinds of situations where a pow…

> I wish an even stronger license existed which allowed the original author to dictate who can build on top of the project

Such licenses exist. They're just not Free or Open Source. They can't be, by definition.

Post reply on HN