Getting forked by Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#631

Post by finnh » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

hnlurker22 wrote: post #466

hresvelgr wrote: post #17

While Microsoft is certainly in the wrong for removing the copyright notice, I think the author has zero basis for complaint otherwise. If you're going to release software with one of the most permissable licenses, you need to accept that for all it entails. Consider what you're comfortable with and pick an appropriate license relative to your values.

I think it's weird they didn't mention anything about Peerd or their plans on how to use Spegel to the author. They could've atleast said "btw we plan to do xyz" instead of leaving the author fantasizing about a collab.

"fantasizing about a collab" sounds like the world of sneakers, not software. What does that even mean in the world of software?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#632

Post by lucb1e » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

noisy_boy wrote: post #320

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…

> Not sure how people fell so hard for "Microsoft Give them a (somewhat) open source IDE and they start believing you are friend of open source in general.

There's also WSL, .NET Core, they own GitHub and continue to host a lot of stuff for free, and more things I'm forgetting. I think the IDE was the least of it frankly. People do seem a bit too gullible because all of these things serve Microsoft's bottom line more than it does open source developers' (isn't it nice that we can now run Linux things right in Windows? How convenient that you don't need to dual boot and boot out of Windows rather than using WINE to run Windows things on Linux..!), but to say that it was all because of the electron IDE version named after a much better IDE is misrepresenting the situation

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#633

Post by johnisgood » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

neonsunset wrote: post #615

johnisgood wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do these links have much if any merit? I would have to re-check their claims though.

As I said, I have misconceptions of .NET, so it is always useful to get to the bottom of it.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#634

Post by frumplestlatz » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #486

krupan wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was zero chance of them having problems shipping bash and I'm glad you put problem in quotes.

They still ship bash. It’s just not the default shell anymore.

They ship the last GPLv2-licensed version of bash — bash 3.2 was released in 2006, with minor bug fix patches released up until 2014.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#635

Post by kshri24 » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

> How can sole maintainers work with multi-billion corporations without being taken advantage of?

Use AGPL, Fair Source or BSL. That's the only way forward. I for one will be using AGPL in everything. If a trillion dollar company cannot pay for services it is a fucking shame. Absolutely disgusting. Microsoft should be ashamed.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#636

Post by burnte » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

jxf wrote: post #161

In distant times (before Microsoft's Satya era) I was the maintainer of a popular OSS product that scratched an important itch for specialist people who were doing work in the early cloud days. It solved my own problems, and I didn't want to make a business out of it, so I was content to release it as OSS. A Microsoft director who ran a portfolio of product teams reached out to ask about a "collaboration". I said I'd…

I worked for them for six months just to help them collaborate with Mozilla, about 20 years ago. They will absolutely pay.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#637

Post by immibis » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

Friends don't let friends release as MIT, except for trivial amounts of code.

Last week I relicensed most of my previously released Minecraft mods (except those with trivial code and those with missing source code) to AGPL plus a bunch of exceptions.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#638

Post by immibis » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #605

siva7 wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open source has been hijacked by trillion dollar hyperscalers. 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/serv…

There was already a term - "free software".

"Open source" was literally created as a corporation-safe neutered form of "free software".

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#639

Post by rglover » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

This is why I wrote the SAUCR license [1] for my full-stack JavaScript framework.

A lot of OSS developers get "got" by the ideological arguments of OSS and shy away from doing "source available" (which if we set down the Kool-Aid, is in effect open source because...the source is open).

If you're an independent or small team and want to protect your IP as best you can while keeping source available for learning/auditing, check it out.

[1] https://saucr.org

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#640

Post by shahzaibmushtaq » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

croemer wrote: post #216

shahzaibmushtaq wrote: post #126

Never providing counselling free of charge for anyone.

I think you meant consulting, but it's not wrong for counselling either :)

You are not wrong either, consulting can be free of charge (it shouldn't be) but in this case Microsoft played with him (because he was expecting something good or big in return) and they attributed one line to him.