Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#761

Post by trelane »

matkoniecz wrote: post #376
koiueo wrote: post #19

> I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive What's good about being "permissive"? I keep hearing this argument, but I still don't understand, what's the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything "permissive". Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good? AGPLv3 still allows forking, still allows maki…

> What's good about being "permissive"? it is good if you do not plan to go for violators anyway I made some photos and published them on Wikimedia Commons (say, of random bicycle infrastructure). I am fine with people using them without attribution, I expect that their use overall furthers my goals rather than damages it and if I would release it on CC-BY-SA 4.0 or similar I would not go to court over missing attrib…

You might not care, but your downstream users might care about being locked in.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#762

Post by throwaway642012 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #746
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…

> 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 sho…

Based on the initial commits and the logs after that surely there’s someone unethical person at MS. This might have been brushed under the carpet and due to sheer luck it reached HN frontpage.

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5...

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#763

Post by aleph_minus_one »

unixhero wrote: post #751
dustedcodes wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think the response is sincere and adequate.

It is indeed sincere:

> 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.

This is a more than clear corporate statement from Microsoft's side that Microsoft is perfectly fine if copyrights are violated (implicitly including Microsoft's), as long as, if they get caught, people start giving proper credits. This implicitly implies that Microsoft promises that from now on they will only sue for getting proper attribution in case of copyright violations, and not for monetary compensation for damages.

I find this implicit statement really nice from Microsoft's side - actually more than what I could ever have wished for. :-)

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#764

Post by rererereferred »

kyleee wrote: post #738
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

10 or 20k USD for Copyright Violation sounds cheap.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#765

Post by koiueo »

golergka wrote: post #490
koiueo wrote: post #19

> I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive What's good about being "permissive"? I keep hearing this argument, but I still don't understand, what's the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything "permissive". Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good? AGPLv3 still allows forking, still allows maki…

> exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good Yes, that's the whole point of open source? Most contributions to the most popular libraries and frameworks (not necessarily end products) are from employees on their paid corporate time to begin with.

> Most contributions

How did you count?

> most popular libraries

How did you measure?

I agree this is the case for Linux kernel, for example. But I don't know if it applies to entire ecosystem.

> Yes, that's the whole point of open source?

I think it's a gross oversimplification. For some reason there is not much code in public domain.

People do want different things in exchange for their work. Hence different licenses. Some want to receive credit for their work, some want to enrich the opensource ecosystem, make it more sustainable. Which brings me to my final point.

> are from employees on their paid corporate time to begin with

It's natural for companies to open their code under permissive licenses. Very often such code is just a first free sample of whatever they are selling: consulting services, a SaaS, etc.. So it makes sense to have an attitude "do whatever with the code, just please-please-please use it".

For an individual developer working on a one-man project the incentives structure can't be similar to one of a company. Hence my trouble understating why people pick MIT/Apache/BSD for their projects.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#766

Post by SpaceNugget »

palata wrote: post #736
SpaceNugget wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

The file titled LICENSE contains a copyright notice. That's what a license file _is_ in the context of software a LICENSE to use someone's COPYRIGHTed software. You must abide by the terms under which you are granted the license, otherwise you don't have access via the license, and are thus violating the copyright. They aren't two unrelated concepts.

Anything else is noise, they violated the license. They blatantly copied copyrighted works. They can't "oopsie" that away or claim it as a mistake, honest or not. You simply are not allowed to do that.

Suggesting that they "could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README." is wrong. They MUST include the copyright notice and the rest of the license. They don't get to choose whether or not to respect the license. And they don't need to remove the link, That's got nothing to do with the copyright issues. No one at Microsoft thought that call out was somehow the legally required attribution clearly explained in the MIT license.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#767

Post by trelane »

alganet wrote: post #745
trelane wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The WRT54g led to a variety of user-serviceable firmware worldwide, including dd-wrt and openwrt. It gave, and continues to give, new life to otherwise wifi devices that shipped with a abandoned propeietary software. It was a revolution in wifi router firmware, and still is.

It was created because Linksys shipped GPL code to customers but didn't provide the source.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#768

Post by owlstuffing »

tacker2000 wrote: post #744
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…

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 u…

[flagged]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#769

Post by aleph_minus_one »

deknos wrote: post #748
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…

> We hear you loud and clear .. oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D

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

Better do care a lot about it, and use every syllable of the corporate statement against Microsoft. :-)

I.e. the principle of some martial arts: use the force that the opponent applies against himself/herself.

Addendum: In this particular case

> We hear you loud and clear ..

can be considered as a very official statement from Microsoft that from now on, they cannot claim anymore that they didn't know of something ..., i.e. the hangman's noose is slowly closing. :-)

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#770

Post by bogwog »

hinkley wrote: post #602
bogwog wrote: post #395

This sucks and I feel for the maintainer, but it really is their own fault for publishing as MIT. However, that is a pretty common mistake that most people never learn until they've been screwed by it. The OSI have done a good job at convincing devs to open themselves up to exploitation for the benefit of big tech companies, and I find it hard to fault people for falling for that. The social pressure is very high. Bu…

Open source is very much like a party. You are perfectly entitled to expect the host to be gracious and the guests not to steal things. “It’s your fault for inviting them in” is victim blaming and horizontal aggression. The people at the top of the pyramid love it when the peasants fight each other. Saves them getting callouses.

What a terrible take. This is the kind of "social pressure" I was talking about.

Open source licensing isn't a party, it's a business decision you make as a participant in the intellectual property economy. If you make a stupid and/or uninformed decision, you're opening yourself up to exploitation. It is victim blaming because this situation is entirely the victim's fault.

I don't even know what you mean by "horizontal aggression", and your comment about peasants makes no sense in this context. How does advocating that people be informed and use appropriate licenses count as in-fighting, or beneficial to big tech companies? If anything it's literally the opposite.

Post reply on HN