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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#721

Post by trelane »

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…

We don't need yet another license, especially not a use license. Just use a GPL, the version (LGPL, GPL, or AGPL) depending on what you are concerned with.

> Open source has been weaponized against us.

This was always going to be the case. We Free Software advocates have been saying this for decades.

And you're not even to the most important part: this isn't about you, me, or megacorps. It's about users.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#722

Post by lachie83 »

Hi Philip, I'm Lachlan from the Cloud Native Ecosystem team at Microsoft. Our team works in the cloud native open-source community with a goal of being great open-source collaborators in these projects and communities, and I’m sorry that this happened.

We appreciate your leadership and collaboration on Spegel and see your project solving a real challenge for the cloud native community. I wanted to thank you for your blog post https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/, let you know what we’re doing, and address a few points.

We’ve just raised a pull request https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110 amending the license headers in the source files. We absolutely should have done better here: our company policy is to maintain copyright headers in files – we have added headers to the files to attribute your work.

I also wanted to share why we felt making a new project was the appropriate path: the primary reason peerd was created was to add artifact streaming support. When you spoke with our engineers about implementing artifact streaming you said it was probably out of scope for Spegel at that time, which made sense. We made sure to acknowledge the work in Spegel and that it was used as a source of inspiration for peerd which you noted in your blog but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry. We hear you loud and clear and are going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention. We will improve the way we work and collaborate in open source and are always open to feedback.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#723

Post by ahepp »

laeri wrote: post #562
kweingar wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't that bring us right back to GPL family licenses?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#724

Post by sokoloff »

mmaunder wrote: post #711

If you want them to contribute back changes, use a license that makes them contribute back changes, like GPL. Don’t ever “default to” a license.

GPL only requires you to contribute changes if you distribute the program (not if you just use it internally).

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#725

Post by Zambyte »

cestith wrote: post #509
ryao wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Spegel changed the copyright notice in 2024. It used to say someone else. That said, Microsoft is definitely missing the notice.

The original author can change their own notice. Why would that be a problem?

Well they could technically have proper attribution without the literal string "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" if they included an older copyright notice that was more appropriate. I think that was the point they were making.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#726

Post by trelane »

saulpw wrote: post #611
sbarre wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The GPL and Free Software, yes. Open Source not so much. The term "open source" was originally coined to make Free Software more easily understandable to newbies. Pretty much right away, though, it was used to water down Free Software licenses to make them more palatable to businesses by selling the end users' freedom.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#727

Post by SpaceNugget »

palata wrote: post #497
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…

Right. So Microsoft should just have a copy of that LICENSE somewhere in their codebase?

Why are you doing this? Posting in a way that suggests purposely confuses/obfuscates the difference between the general concept of a copyright notice and the practice of putting a copyright comment at the top of every file in a project, then immediately get corrected, then post basically the same intentional misunderstanding on someone else's comment elsewhere in the thread.

You:

> I don't think Microsoft removed the copyright notice. I think that the original author did not add one...

Direct quote that from the file containing and requiring the copyright notice in derivative works that was not included in Microsoft's fork. This was also included in a comment which you have replied to:

> The above _copyright notice_ and this permission notice...

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#728

Post by trelane »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #186
ryao wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL doesn't require them to contribute back. It only requires them to provide the code to end users upon request. No license as far as I know requires people to contribute back. In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send th…

This is a good point, the AGPL and free software in general is really more about users than individual projects and developers. AGPL may not have convinced Microsoft to collaborate.

It is in a roundabout way also about collaboration with upstream, since the users (or those working for them) are fully empowered to be developers if they so choose.

And the upstream and buy the product and get the same rights as a user.

But first and foremost it's about the users.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#729

Post by alganet »

trelane wrote: post #721
echelon wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't need yet another license, especially not a use license. Just use a GPL, the version (LGPL, GPL, or AGPL) depending on what you are concerned with. > Open source has been weaponized against us. This was always going to be the case. We Free Software advocates have been saying this for decades. And you're not even to the most important part: this isn't about you, me, or megacorps. It's about users .

Getting someone who worked on the thing or someone close to the author to be hired by your company and bumped to a high prestige position probably has more effect on law than a license (just an intuition).

"Hey, that guy worked with the author, and he was hired and now is a super top dog there... he must be the true genius behind it"

I mean that for ideas, not materialized code. You guys are so focused on small text files and miss the big picture sometimes.

Licenses are a small angle for those things.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#730

Post by dustedcodes »

lachie83 wrote: post #722

Hi Philip, I'm Lachlan from the Cloud Native Ecosystem team at Microsoft. Our team works in the cloud native open-source community with a goal of being great open-source collaborators in these projects and communities, and I’m sorry that this happened. We appreciate your leadership and collaboration on Spegel and see your project solving a real challenge for the cloud native community. I wanted to thank you for your…

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