Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I see AGPL project, I close the page, and I believe many others would do the same.
Why?
They have to wait for the AI scraper bots to steal it for them :(
Getting forked by Microsoft
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#772Hi 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…
I think this is a good case for applying Hanlon's Razor. The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there.
I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure. I understand.
My work is with DSLs: domain specific languages. The work is in the idea realm (most of the time is spent there), not the source code implementation, which is often trivial once the language is developed.
The gratification also is different. Seeing others use the language is the best one can hope to achieve nowadays. Maybe publish a book about it, but that sounds more trouble than it is worth (judging by how books on patterns, a similar realm, are often misquoted and misused).
That's why all this talk about licenses sounds like nonsense.
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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? As I wrote in my parallel post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756102 ): these copyright violations (not giving proper attribution of the license requires it is copyright violation) from Microsoft's side (the more, the "better", and the clearer the message) can be considered…
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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#775Hi 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…
> it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain.
You have said many things like this in this thread. I don't think you understand how laws or courts or legal fees work. Good luck defending yourself against MS's army of lawyers during your court proceedings though!
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#776Hi 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
This sounds like a good idea but getting the checkbook out at a company like Microsoft probably takes 3-5 meetings, and saying you want to donate because you accidentally stole their code and put the company at (theoretical) risk of a lawsuit seems like a bad conversation starter with management.
I like the thought though
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#777Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience talking to big corp IP lawyers is they have a set of policies ("open source bad; protecting our IP good") and will make up any justification to support those policies, even if their justifications are plainly incorrect given the license text. Usually they just stop responding when you point out the obvious contradiction. It'd be one thing if they just said "no" with no justification, but my experience i…
Well, it's great that you have that understanding. But the internet is full of FOSS types fantasy IANALing based half-forgotten RMS FAQs, even in places where they really should know better. Most of these nerd arguments are pretty much worthless if it came to a courtroom.
Yeah, I said I was stupid. What's their excuse? :)
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#778Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you worked at a megacorp you’d know they care a whole lot about not allowing GPL code anywhere near their propertiary repos; this is usually enforced by IT security (NOT engineering) with dedicated scanners, confirmed matches are at least highest priority bugs.
Not just mega corps. Everywhere I've worked for the past 10+ years treats GPL code like leprosy. You just don't go anywhere near it for any reason. It's the first thing you look for when taking on a new external dependency.
Everywhere I've worked for the past 10+ years treats open source like a candy store to benefit from and wouldn't allow contributing code back
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#779Hi 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…
He is lucky microsoft doesn't have 30,000 ai-agents out there just stealing everything he has ever done and spinning up 10 competitors to each project all with new license and money flow into microsoft in any number of ways.
I mean they made sure to get all the consent from all authors on github before training on it right
Re: Getting forked by Microsoft
#780Not a direct solution to your problem, but people should definitely consider Apache over MIT when reaching for a permissive license. In addition to being more robust about things like, notifying users of modifications that have been made to the original source code, it also explicitly requires that forkers maintain the NOTICE file in its entirety, and distribute that file to users receiving copies of the software (wh…
I considered forking an MIT repo once but had no idea how to communicate which parts were under the original MIT license and which weren’t. Unless I copied it into each file and deleted the root license, it seems like it would license all my changes as MIT, too, basically becoming a copy-left license.