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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

741–750 of 1001 posts

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#741
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And guess what application developers install immediately after getting their MacBooks? The GPL licensed git. If I'm forced to use MacOS, I'm fine installing git, GNU make or whatever I want for myself. But I don't see any downsides in Apple being unable to distribute those applications together with their OS.

> And guess what application developers install immediately after getting their MacBooks? The GPL licensed git. Why would they do that? I didn't, because macOS ships with version 2.39.5 as /usr/bin/git. You're free to upgrade to a newer version, of course, but the included one is recent enough for most uses.

Does macOS include git? Oh. My bad. I concluded from the previous comment that Apple doesn't ship bash because it's GPL and hence doesn't ship anything GPL.

And my point was: this is fine. Even if it was true.

But as this is not the case, I see even fewer arguments against GPL licenses.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#742

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…

It's my personal experience that toxic behaviour is tolerated (and even encouraged) by toxic leadership.

Whilst there are always bad apples in a big company, a good company stamps out bad behaviour as soon as it becomes aware of it.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#743
post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It still boggles my mind that people don't understand this. The FUD and misinformation that's been spreading about the GPL and the FSF the last decade almost seems like an intentional campaign brought on by exactly those who benefit from you using a "permissive" license the most.

The key is that "permissive" is passive voice. It's more permissive for corporations in that they are allowed to use it to tie their customers even tighter to them. Compare this with "restrictive" (for corporations) AKA "copyleft" which ensures that users' freedom is maintained, by restricting how corporations can limit them.

It's very akin to the paradox of tolerance.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#744

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…

Now that you got caught you are fixing it and writing fancy PR fluff. An org the size of MS should have clear policies and processes of how to handle open source forks like this. Unless we assume “bad faith” here. This is a pretty bad look.

I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post?

That said, the author of Spegel should have used another license if he wanted more “recognition” or the like.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Is it USA courts only? If it is, it's the same as nothing for people like me.

Also, GPL is about source code, not ideas. Source code is not that relevant.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#746

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…

> but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry.

In other words: there exists some responsible person at Microsoft who violated the copyright (yes, removing the attribution is also a copyright violation!) for Microsoft.

In consideration how Microsoft has been treating copyyright violators for decades, if Microsoft does not give this responsible person the same crual treatment, it should be considered an honest, clear, implicit official statement from Microsoft's side that they are perfectly fine if hackers violate all of Microsoft's copyright. In other words: it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain.

Also, if Microsot does not make make this responsible person pay the caused damage from their own pocket to the original author of Spegel with the same monatery magnitude as if Microsoft would sue other entities for a violation of copyyright of Microsoft's software, the same statement applies.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#747
They just updated the license and attribution. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110/files . Overall, it does not sit right with me. How can you be at the position you are and make a very obvious non-attribution mistake. I want to side on incompetence and give benefit of doubt but malice (for personal gains) is on the table as well.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#748

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…

> We hear you loud and clear ..

oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#749

Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence and certainly not one that doesn't provide copyleft. This is all very well established at this point and yet somehow the GPL seems to have gone out of vogue.

And there is not only the GPL. MPL and EUPL are great, too!

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#750
post #521
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a nerdy colloquialism. ie, it's not that serious

That’s part of the reason why I’d object to it in a commit message, in a professional setting.

Some organizations strongly encourage marking all commits as one of a list of categories such as "feature/fix/chore/...". The tags are then bound to loose all meaning (literal or figurative) very soon.

Unless there was some "conspiracy" to violate the license (my original comment was an attempt at playfully hinting at that possibility, though I don't find it very likely), I'm sure the person who wrote that commit message thought about it for less than three seconds.

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