681–690 of 1001 posts
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The D programming language code is all Boost licensed and billion dollar companies are welcome to take advantage of it.
How much consulting revenue does it generate for you?
Getting 'forked' (so to speak) by Microsoft was the norm, and might again be. Up until the dotcom boom (and in the earlier days of it), one of the questions I'd heard of software startups was something like, "What will you do when Microsoft decides to own your space?" Fortunately, the broad tech industry overall got a decade or two reprieve from that, though it might be starting to return. A long related question, wh…
> 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…
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I agree, after this happened to me I learned of a few other situations where the same thing happened to other friends. On my end if was a mix of naivete and flattery which made me want to take the meeting. I suspect it is the same case for others. I will not make the same mistake the next time it happens.
Do you think this stops the fork? It’s not like they can’t read the code.
Large corporations should and can be extremely clear about their intention, which is clear to them before they reach out.
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Note that in this case Microsoft has not been following the license, as they removed the copyright notice Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors To replace it by their own. Despite the license says > The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
So if they had left that line in, everything would be cool? To me, licenses like MIT or BSD pretty much imply "do whatever you want with this" I know it's not exactly that but if you really care to keep some control over what others do with the code, you need a more restrictive license (and even then people are still going to copy it, especially in the LLM era).
In this context, not "citing the original author" in the copyright statement, labeling the repository as a "fork" on GitHub, clearly crediting the original author in a way that clearly describes the fact that a significant portion of their code is used in the new project isn't just a violation of the license, it's plagiarism.
So in that sense it could be better potentially.
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…
And as you illustrated, for a one-off project, rate doesn't really matter. It just needs to get approved by someone senior enough, who will ask "Do we have anyone in-house that knows this?" and "How much will it cost to do all this ourselves?" If the answer to the first question is "No" then you'll be very cheap compared to the second answer no matter how much you cost.
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Which notice? None of the *.go source files I have opened in Spegel contain a notice. Microsoft cannot remove a notice that does not exist... In my opinion, it's the Spegel author's fault: they should have added a notice in every single file!
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.
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Not arguing for Microsoft, rather the fact that people put out MIT licenced stuff out there, or similar, arguing how bad GPL happens to be, and then get all up in arms when companies do exactly what the licence allows for. Microsoft might not have fully complied with the licence, adding the copyright notice to fix that, won't change a millimeter from what they are doing.
I don't disagree with the general point but in this case we're looking at what (seems to be) a blatant copyright violation. It would not be any more or less of a violation if the infringed license had been a more or less permissive one, because the license has not been followed. Sure, the MIT is very permissive so it's very easy for Microsoft to correct their repository so that it's in compliance for the future , but…
The comment above, which I mostly agree with, is that the point of the MIT license to permit anyone, including large corporations, doing this kind of thing. Since this doesn't seem like an outcome the author is happy with, maybe a different license would be better.
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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…
If you stop people from using your software while they are at work, you stop people from using the software and it is no longer open.