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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#731

Post by aleph_minus_one »

bornfreddy wrote: post #323
ryao wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. That violates the first clause of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd It probably violates 5 and 6 too. > But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork wi…

Maybe the open source definition needs to change, or it is time to find a better way of protecting community software? This one is clearly (in some ways) not working.

> Maybe the open source definition needs to change

Maybe you rather don't actually want your software to be open source. Maybe you rather want your software to be under some copyleft license. Maybe you want to use an OSS license that is inconvenient for cloud providers (while still being an open source license) like the AGPL.

Choose wisely.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#732

Post by aleph_minus_one »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #153
talkingtab wrote: post #84

My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. The problem this addresses is not that Microsoft forked this project. The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community[0]. Open source thrives because a bunch of individuals and groups collaborate. Microsoft, is built around the concept of profit for stock owners a…

> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

> > My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community.

> It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

CC-NC-SA violates the open source definition.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#733

Post by trelane »

riquito wrote: post #589
diggan wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For the copyright part, it wouldn't have lead to a different outcome. What could have been different is that Microsoft could have had difficulties in working on a GPL fork which is harder to resell (you can, but people are sometimes afraid for good or bad reasons) and so Microsoft could have proposed to the author to sell them a copy with a different license. But reading the article, the author appears to be more dis…

I suspect that damages may also play a role in practical resolution of infringement.

There is a large difference between "they didn't put in a sentence that they needed to," and "we have 30 users who didn't get the source code that they were required to receive."

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#734

Post by aleph_minus_one »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #428
talkingtab wrote: post #84

My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. The problem this addresses is not that Microsoft forked this project. The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community[0]. Open source thrives because a bunch of individuals and groups collaborate. Microsoft, is built around the concept of profit for stock owners a…

It already exists: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0

These are not open source licenses; they violate the open source definition.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#735

Post by trelane »

alganet wrote: post #729
trelane wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Look up the WRT54g sometime

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st...

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#736

Post by palata »

SpaceNugget wrote: post #727
palata wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have the timing wrong, I did not do that in the order you suggest :-).

I thought people were saying that Microsoft removed the copyright headers and replaced them with them, which they did not.

Microsoft replaced the LICENSE for the whole repository with their own, and thanked Spegel in their README. While this is some kind of attribution, it's not enough for the MIT LICENSE. I don't know exactly what would be good enough, I think having a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file somewhere in their repo would be enough (though possibly less visible than the line in the README, to be fair).

My overall point is that it feels like people are complaining a lot about what seems to be an honest mistake. And not just that: the way Peerd did it is arguably giving more visibility to Spegel than if they had just copied the licence somewhere in their repo. Peerd could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#737

Post by davidkwast »

sokoloff wrote: post #724
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).

I think AGPL2 or newer and GPL3 helps a little too

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#738

Post by kyleee »

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…

Maybe as a show of good faith you could send the original creator 10 or 20k usd as a thank you. Talk is cheap

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#739

Post by palata »

rovr138 wrote: post #573
palata wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, not somewhere. That’s the license. If they reuse it, they have to use that license.

This is wrong. Peerd can use whatever licence they want that is compatible with the MIT licence for the code they imported from Spegel.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#740

Post by palata »

robmccoll wrote: post #524
palata wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they very clearly aren't. Peerd seems very different from Spegel, so Microsoft does hold quite a bit of copyright over Peerd. Now I genuinely wonder if the main LICENSE should say "copyright Spegel and Microsoft", or if somewhere in the repo Microsoft should just have a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file?

Generally, you would want to do one of: a) Keep any code that you've pulled in from another project in its own directory structure with a license file indicating where it came from and its licensing terms. b) If you intend to modify the code or integrate it more tightly with your own, copy the notice into each source file that was taken and perhaps put a pre-amble along the lines of "Portions of this file were copied…

Generally, what I take from this discussion is that what you want to do is get as much inspiration as you want from the code, but absolutely rewrite it from scratch such that it is yours and yours only.
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