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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#611

Post by saulpw »

sbarre wrote: post #523
saulpw wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations. Then for-profit corporations co-opted the "Open Source"(tm) label to ensure they could benefit from all this free labor. You and many others are falling for it, and doing their work for them by scolding OSS developers for "going against the OSS philosophy". So screw this corporate "OSS philosophy", and stop telling people what they "shou…

> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations Citation needed here, if you're going to make such a bold claim. The open source movement began as a counter to proprietary closed-source software, and nothing more. It has never been about "fairness" (however you define that) or about preventing anyone from profiting from OSS. Now that said, fairness matters and I agree that some of wh…

The GPL was "To prevent free code from being proprietarized" by for-profit corporations.

In addition the origin of Stallman's open source philosophy was a printer he couldn't use because of closed-source software. From the start it was about the rights of the users, not corporations.

https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/

> In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#612

Post by neonsunset »

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…

Yeah, at this point I feel .NET could benefit from being made into a proper marketed as independent foundation (and not the failing .NET foundation that does very little).

Because all these actions will get associated with .NET teams even if the latter go to great lengths to collaborate with community and ensure that new feature work does not step onto the toes of existing popular community libraries (for example Swashbuckle or eventing/messaging framework that was postponed/cancelled not to interrupt the work of other libraries including MassTransit, which is a bit ironic as MassTransit went full commercial later).

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#613

Post by saulpw »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #581
saulpw wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations. Then for-profit corporations co-opted the "Open Source"(tm) label to ensure they could benefit from all this free labor. You and many others are falling for it, and doing their work for them by scolding OSS developers for "going against the OSS philosophy". So screw this corporate "OSS philosophy", and stop telling people what they "shou…

> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations I beg to differ here. OSS and Free Software movement was conceived for the freedom to change the software to the user's needs. The entire meaning of free as is freedom means as long as I abide by the license properly, I can do whatever I want with it. Whether you like it or not, this means Microsoft can make money out of curl project if…

> the freedom to change the software to the user's needs.

How is this not exactly helping end-users? Corporations are producers, not users. And no one is complaining about MSFT or any other corporation using OSS as users, but only about co-opting it as a producer.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#614

Post by jeanlucas »

alphazard wrote: post #606

There's a lot of blame being assigned to Microsoft, the entire corporation. But I doubt this was a heavily contemplated decision by a room full of executives, or voted on by the shareholders. 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 Micro…

Yeah, but Microsoft's response to this will actually be a company official position.

It's a space to keep watching.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#615

Post by neonsunset »

johnisgood wrote: post #294
pjmlp wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is new, I have mentioned multiple times that Microsoft management undoes the great work from .NET team. Also as polyglot developer, while I happen to have my preferences in regards to technology, I am not married with any of them. Being MVP, Champion, or whatever program each megacorp happens to have, was never something I saw value in. Never make a specific technology, or company, part of your identity as pe…

I'm only pinging you because I think a couple of days (or weeks, even) ago you or someone else mentioned it is open source (?), so I was wondering what's going on.

.NET is open source and people working on it go into great lengths to ensure it is a good citizen to open-source projects and communities. It has been open source for almost 10 years damn it. All in all what other divisions or teams do is greatly unfortunate because it will get associated with the aforementioned. Personally, this annoys me because other languages like Go or Swift do not receive the same criticism for the bad practices their respective companies engage in. Go in particular.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#616

Post by zamadatix »

diggan wrote: post #533
zamadatix wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters because the only thing which can be claimed to have been ignored here is missing the line "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" in the main license file. Now that it's brought up https://github.com/Azure/peerd/issues/109 that'll probably be fixed. What remains after full compliance with the MIT license choince will be the bulk of the complaints in the article.

> It matters because the only So if the author instead used GPL, this wouldn't have been a problem? Call me pessimist, but I don't think Microsoft would have cared if it was MIT, GPL or even missing a license (so copyrighted by the author), they would have made the same choice as they just now did. I'm sorry, but it's really hard to understand what you mean here, how choosing GPL would have somehow lead to a differen…

GPL would have helped with the concerns around the distributed software (instead of just source) not clearly including attribution/copies of the license (which would also lead to a better form of notification than the conference and webpage acknowledgement). These were also the types of points Tanenbaum famously regretted regarding MINIX https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ despite him not having the further regrets in the article.

I do agree for the author to be _fully_ happy they would probably have wanted something even more restrictive than any traditionally "open" license like GPL, but about any choice would have better aligned with their desires than MIT.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#617

Post by billllll »

alphazard wrote: post #606

There's a lot of blame being assigned to Microsoft, the entire corporation. But I doubt this was a heavily contemplated decision by a room full of executives, or voted on by the shareholders. 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 Micro…

Just because the shareholders didn't vote on it, or an exec didn't explicitly say "hey steal this" does not absolve the company. Leadership doesn't get to throw up their hands and say "not my fault" when something bad happens.

It is ultimately the responsibility of the company and its people to create a system where things like this are discouraged or prohibited. Not doing so is tacit approval, especially in this case where they have a significant history of doing the same thing.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#618

Post by cflewis »

ryao wrote: post #263
boxed wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says "copyright microsoft" in that license file. Just because THAT file is MIT is irrelevant. They didn't retain the original license file. They should have APPENDED to it, keeping the original copyright holder name, otherwise it's just blatant copyright infringement that coincidentally is released under the same license.

I am not a lawyer, but I imagine a lawyer would find it alright if they just restore the missing notice. I do not imagine there is much else that can be done here since he cannot really claim to have been significantly damaged by the absence of a single line, but these matters are best discussed with attorneys.

IANAL but my understanding from floating around open source licensing circles is that you'd have a hard time with the judge if you didn't just ask for the license to be put back as step 1. Microsoft willingly not restoring the license would be more problematic.

The forgiveness clause in GPL 3 is as much an acknowledgement of actual reality than anything else.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#619

Post by hiatus »

WD-42 wrote: post #416
RIMR wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the author understands the MIT license, and is upset that the terms of that license aren't being honored. If I were them, I would absolutely feel better getting credit where credit is due. If they wanted a less permissive license, they could have used one.

Did you read the article? The missing attribution is a tiny part of it. That’s not really what the author is complaining about.

That seems to be exactly the thing they are complaining about:

> Spegel was published with an MIT license. Software released under an MIT license allows for forking and modifications, without any requirement to contribute these changes back. I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive. The license does not allow removing the original license and purport that the code was created by someone else. It looks as if large parts of the project were copied directly from Spegel without any mention of the original source.

Can you share what you think the author is really complaining about?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#620

Post by frumplestlatz »

maleldil wrote: post #529
KTibow wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's GPL-like its usage would be mostly confined to open source projects.

That's the whole point. If you build something on top of open source code, your code should be open source too.

Those of us who disagree are happy to see our software used in any context in exchange for attribution.

The problem that occurred in this case is someone at Microsoft taking the code without following the license at all.

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