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

561–570 of 1001 posts

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#561

Post by garyrob »

not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #530
garyrob wrote: post #240

Is it possible that there could be enough damages for Microsoft's violation of the license that a talented law firm would take up a lawsuit on a contingency basis?

FTA > A negative impact from the creation of Peerd is that it has created confusion among new users. I am frequently asked about the differences between Spegel and Peerd. I can't imagine any quantifiable damages here. No business or revenue was impacted. Just chatter in an open source project.

IANAL, so I am just guessing.

But I wonder if an argument can be made that by flagrantly violating the license, Microsoft is devaluing the whole concept of the relevant license and similar ones. The entire body of source code that was created partly because of trusting that those licenses mean something is worth an enormous amount.

So I'm guessing the perhaps there could be a class action lawsuit on behalf of the entire open source community that uses that class of license.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#562

Post by laeri »

kweingar wrote: post #480
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…

The author didn't seem to request payment in monetary form but expected some kind of contributions back which would have helped both sides. It would probably be difficult to include some guarantees about upstream contributions into the license but interesting takeaway.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#563

Post by palata »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #516
palata wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it doesn't here! You are totally allowed to completely copy an MIT file, modify it and add your copyright to it! You should just keep the copyright that is already present in the file! But in the case of Spegel, I don't think that the files contain a copyright header in the first place.

Nonsense. Copyright is implicit and assigned on creation. The git history has a clear trail showing author and contributor details. An explicit copyright notice for every file isn't needed. This is a straightforward, unquestionable license violation, and no amount of corporate FUD will change that.

You're talking about copyright, I'm talking about attribution.

Of course, the author keeps their copyright on the lines of code. But that's completely different from how the attribution should be done.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#564

Post by joshuaissac »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #537
rovr138 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the "fork" peerd is also MIT licensed and contains the same license file unless I'm mistaken. So what does Microsoft need to do to be in compliance? I'm not being facetious here. Genuinely curious/want to learn.

They removed the attribution to the original authors and replaced it with their own name. So the copyright notice is not preserved. They could comply with the licence by adding back that attribution.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#565

Post by aksss »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #489
palata wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. So Microsoft should just have a copy of this LICENSE file somewhere? Can't we just open a PR to add it to the repo? Did the author do that and did Microsoft decline the PR? Feels like Microsoft was not necessarily trying to steal work (they link the original project in their README).

It needs to be present in the headers of each file that they took from. Attribution matters and in mixed projects you need that clarification at the file level.

I think the fork needs to preserve the LICENSE file in the repo and in distributed code (e.g. packages), right? But not replicated as a file header in every blessed file in the repo.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#566

Post by dvektor »

Reminds me of the scene in Silicon Valley where they team are excited to hear a VC interested in the details so they are explaining the technology on the whiteboard to the "investors" who were a team of engineers eager to copy their tech.

But seriously, it sounds like a weird version of "not invented here syndrome" where you are somehow OK with copy-pasting most of it.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#567

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

Won't you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

> No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers.

> Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help."

> They aren't holding people up at gun point. Rather they hold out their Rolex encrusted hand and beg, plead, and shame open source developers until they get free labor.

> Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit.

> They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#568

Post by int_19h »

panzi wrote: post #174
nicoburns wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

So they don't use Linux, bash, or GCC?

From my past experience, it goes something like this.

If software is GPLv2, it's penalized relative to more permissive options when it comes to picking one. In practice it means that it's avoided unless it's "too big to avoid", or because the very nature of what you're doing requires it - this is the case for e.g. Linux and R.

If software is GPLv3, it's considered radioactive and is avoided at all costs, even if it means rewriting large amounts of code from scratch.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#569

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

nicce wrote: post #333
nosequel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. It just so happens that the Microsoft engineer who originally changed the license in GitHub went from Senior to Principal engineer at Microsoft in the past two months (according to LinkedIn). So you probably aren't far off.

I wonder if there exists any system in place that this could backfire rapidly if this could be proved on some level. Unfortunately, world needs examples and consequences before anything changes. If this worked for this particular engineer, others will follow and will attempt the same. It will become a norm in big corps.

Causing a legal shitstorm is most likely not a sustainable way to get ahead at big corps.

If this is what happened, I suspect Microsoft will drop this person even quicker than a hot potato, and even quicker than if they told them to rewrite it from scratch but the person took a few shortcuts too many (which would be my guess).

If they wanted to fork it, they could - just keep the attribution and be done with it. The fact that they tried to rewrite it suggests that someone wanted it to be legally not a copy.

Post reply on HN