601–610 of 1001 posts
Bro releasing software under MIT. Others picking it up and use it under terms of MIT license. Bro gets upset. Can someone please explain why?
This sucks and I feel for the maintainer, but it really is their own fault for publishing as MIT. However, that is a pretty common mistake that most people never learn until they've been screwed by it. The OSI have done a good job at convincing devs to open themselves up to exploitation for the benefit of big tech companies, and I find it hard to fault people for falling for that. The social pressure is very high. Bu…
“It’s your fault for inviting them in” is victim blaming and horizontal aggression. The people at the top of the pyramid love it when the peasants fight each other. Saves them getting callouses.
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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.
> I don't see why they wouldn't pay it. Oh I do. The person that wanted to setup the meeting likely has no budget control. Big corps like to keep the ability to pay for stuff out of the hands of individuals and isolated in bureaucratic nightmares. You'd be more than reasonable to demand "$1000/hr with 1 hour minimum" for such a consulting and I'd see HR in MS doing an immediate "hell no" to that.
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This is a huge difference. The GPL and its flavor are explicitly not about use . They place zero restrictions on use. Unlike, say, just about all proprietary software. It only governs distribution and especially prevents distributors from locking their users in, and from placing restrictions on their users' use of the software.
If you count AGPLv3 as a "flavor" of GPL, then it absolutely does place restrictions on use.
If the service provider is the "user," and performing actions with it on behalf of the ultimate user is "use," and not "distribution," then you are technically correct. It restricts the service provider from forcing their customers to be dependent on the them and/or restricting the end users' use of the service, like the GPL does for proprietary software the user runs on their machine.
I personally disagree that running something on behalf of a user makes you the end user, but there's always the GPL if you think that.
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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.
Yes, charity. That's exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.
It's time we switch to "fair source" or "equitable source".
Put MAU/DAU/ARR/market cap limits in your license. Open to everyone with a market cap under $1B or revenues under $100M. All others, please see our "business@" email.
Place viral terms like the AGPL that requires that all other systems touched by your code to be open - especially the backend/server components that typically remain hidden.
We're giving away power to these companies for free, and they use their scale and reach to turn our software into a larger moat that ensnares us and taxes us in everything else we do.
Your contribution of open source in one area might bubble up as Microsoft or Google's ability to control what you see or how you distribute software to customers. It's intangible and hard to describe these insane advantages and network effects big players like this have to lay people, but I know we as software engineers understand this.
Open source has been weaponized against us. They get free labor and use our work to tax us, pin us down, out compete us, and control us. We need to fight back.
More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment. They can steal users from the original project and justify using Microsoft's resources to maintain it, which puts more resources under their control, and gives them something to talk about during performance reviews.
The open source community should have a way to enforce professional consequences on individuals in situations like this. They are motivated by professional gains after all. That's the only way this will stop happening. Professional consequences does not mean doxxing or other personal attacks, it means losing career opportunities, losing contributor privileges, and becoming known as untrustworthy. These consequences have to be greater than the expected gain from passing a project off as your own at work.
I wonder if a new kind of license could be created which includes projects in some kind of portfolio and violating the license means losing access to the entire portfolio. Similar to how the tech companies added patents to a shared portfolio and patent treachery meant losing access to the portfolio.
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> 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 c…
When a megacorp forks an OSS project, the maintainer should know that it is allowed. If you are MIT licensed, that megacorp can resell your software, create a business around it and make billions in revenue. That is allowed. If they are bothered by it, they either should use a different license or take the software proprietary. To me, the problem here is that Microsoft hasn't properly followed OSS license here. My qtile window manager config file has copyright notice of all the authors. That is how you follow MIT license. Another problem I see here is not knowing how to do license compliance. Also, why should it matter if the one who forks it is an individual or a mega corp. As far as OSS is concerned, it's irrelevant.
> 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?
I have been an OSS guy for a long time. And think OSS in business is a very tricky and hard problem. If you don't have the reason to be OSS, it's better to be honest about it. There are other ways to support OSS. Just support like 10% or even 5% of the dependencies you use as a business and that will make wonders. And be honest about things. Obviously, there are success stories. But if you have seen the recent trend, people are in the mindset that someone forking your OSS is ripping off of them. Not stopping to think that it was allowed all along.
> 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.
Because the moment you "tweak" the OSS license the way you are talking, it stops being OSS. Also, your proprietary software still needs to abide by the OSS licenses it uses. If I use a OSS software, it should abide by the OSS license somewhere in the output.
I think it's better to be honest about OSS than being like... we love OSS (Just like Microsoft <3 Open SOurce) and saying.. you know what? Don't use this software in this industry because that where my business happens. Oh and since you don't agree with my politics, you can't use it. I am not gonna list them, but there are licenses which does these and they are exclusionary. Free as in Freedom is what brings in people to OSS. The moment you start excluding people, it's a slippery slope. It's already happening in politics and else where. Let's just keep software away from it all please.
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.
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> but you never put copyright notices in your files. I thought having a LICENSE file in the project's root directory was sufficient. Is it not the case?
It's not required, but it's generally safer to put a notice saying who owns the copyright and what license the file is released under at the top of each file. Some licenses like MIT, the BSD licenses, Zlib, etc are short enough that you can include the full license text in the notice, and others like GPL provide sample copyright header text to include. Here's an example of this from a random file in the SDL source co…
> 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…
See also https://isdotnetopen.com and https://ghuntley.com/fracture