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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#551

Post by zdragnar »

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…

I think this behavior stems from how big companies do performance reviews and promotions for developers.

Contributing to someone else's open source project is for schmucks and juniors. Authoring a "new" open source project in the company's name, getting recognition and solving problems is seen as "leading the industry" and whatever other wankery sophistry they come up with to try to motivate employees with.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#552

Post by thwarted »

kergonath wrote: post #374
WD-42 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.

> It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. Quite the contrary. The licence does not have many constraints, but this one is important. Volunteer developers let their code being used in closed source commercial programs. Recognition is the only thing they expect and the whole point of the licence.

"There won't be any money, but we won't properly credit you and you'll won't even get any exposure". Not even offering exposure anymore.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#553

Post by orthoxerox »

jenadine wrote: post #255
orthoxerox wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL without CLA, to be precise. AGPL with CLA is a trap.

What's wrong with CLA? I've contributed to project with CLA. Have been using them and then wanted a feature and the project accepted my patch. Ther are still many people contributing to project with CLA.

In addition to what buzzy_hacker has written, in a normal FOSS project A I can ask maintainer X to include a feature from a compatible FOSS project B written by programmer Y. The maintainer can do it themselves, or I can adapt the code myself and submit a patch, referencing the original authors. That's how FOSS is supposed to work.

In a CLA-restricted project, there's only one entitity that can contribute copyleft code. Everyone else must donate the code to them, and they forbid themselves from using other people's copyleft code, because they can't relicense it.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#554

Post by joshuaissac »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #456
jenadine wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with CLA? I've contributed to project with CLA. Have been using them and then wanted a feature and the project accepted my patch. Ther are still many people contributing to project with CLA.

https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-wh...

For an argument from the other side, here is the GNU project's defence of CLAs:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#557

Post by whywhywhywhy »

vvillena wrote: post #457
palata wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am genuinely interested: everybody here says that they removed the copyright headers. But when I browse through the Spegel sources, they do not contain a copyright header... To me it's the Spegel author's fault: there should be a copyright header in every single file, such that Microsoft would have to keep it.

It's in the LICENSE file. With a MIT license, you assign a copyright to the project, or to a certain set of files. The Spegel license attributes copyright to "the Spegel authors", while Peerd attributes it to "Microsoft Corporation". If some of the peerd code was lifted from Spegel, it's blatant stealing. Code attribution is the only thing a MIT license asks people to honor, and Microsoft couldn't even do that.

Can’t help but feel no matter what they’d done there would be some route of thought that leads them to wronging the author other than just paying and using the code as is. I don’t know why a corporation would do that though as they likely have their own changes and direction they want for it and working with an unknown 3rd party on that could be a nightmare.

From the authors reaction they chose the wrong license for the project.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#558

Post by int_19h »

palata wrote: post #503
tedivm wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "notice" is the literal license file. It is illegal to strip someone else's license from their work. It doesn't matter that they replaced MIT with MIT, because they stripped the author and attribution from it. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE If you read that file you'd think that Microsoft was the copyright holder, but they very clearly aren't.

> but they very clearly aren't. Peerd seems very different from Spegel, so Microsoft does hold quite a bit of copyright over Peerd. Now I genuinely wonder if the main LICENSE should say "copyright Spegel and Microsoft", or if somewhere in the repo Microsoft should just have a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file?

From my own past experience working with F/OSS at Microsoft, they should at the minimum have "third party notices" file somewhere in the repo. Something like this: https://github.com/microsoft/debugpy/blob/main/src/debugpy/T...

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#559

Post by firesteelrain »

NobodyNada wrote: post #402
palata wrote: post #371

I tend to disagree with the criticism of Microsoft here. The author of Spegel released it as MIT, which means that anyone can fork it as long as they keep the attribution. So if every file of the original project has a header containing the copyright, Microsoft has to keep it. Looking at Spegel, I haven't found a single source file containing an MIT header and copyright. Microsoft added their header with their copyri…

The MIT license doesn't say anything about headers. The attribution requirement is: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. The license is saying you have to retain the license itself ; it doesn't say anything about any other attribution notices that exists in the source files or anywhere else. It doesn't specify where you have t…

License is a license. It doesn't provide legal advice for how to properly mark documents or source code. You should always mark every file and put it under configuration management. A single LICENSE file is step 1 for how the code can be treated/forked/etc. But all of spegel's files lacked any sort of copyright headers.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#560

Post by kgwgk »

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.

Do you own the word?

  2 (transitive, of ideas, words, music, a look, credit, etc.) To appropriate without giving credit or acknowledgement.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/steal#Verb
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