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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#781

Post by canucker2016 »

hnlurker22 wrote: post #466
hresvelgr wrote: post #17

While Microsoft is certainly in the wrong for removing the copyright notice, I think the author has zero basis for complaint otherwise. If you're going to release software with one of the most permissable licenses, you need to accept that for all it entails. Consider what you're comfortable with and pick an appropriate license relative to your values.

I think it's weird they didn't mention anything about Peerd or their plans on how to use Spegel to the author. They could've atleast said "btw we plan to do xyz" instead of leaving the author fantasizing about a collab.

In a reply from an Microsoft employee who's familiar with the situation, some group in Azure wanted support for some Azure-specific APIs. The spegel dev decided that was too far out of their wheelhouse, so they didn't want to add support in spegel for that Azure-specific API. The Azure subteam went ahead and added that support into their fork of spegel.

Other changes removed the spegel project's LICENSE and added in Microsoft's LICENCE file and copyrights on all files.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755745

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#782

Post by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t »

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

Probably already approved by the legal department which is working in damage control mode :D

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#783

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#784

Post by hinkley »

bogwog wrote: post #770
hinkley wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "horizont…

You're blaming an author who offered his code to others (that's a social act) instead of a trillion dollar company.

What do you think I mean by horizontal aggression?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#785

Post by olejorgenb »

paxys wrote: post #440
olejorgenb wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had been factual I the credit I'd agree. When it's actually a fork, why not just say so. "This project is a fork (or based off) Spegel. Thanks to the authors etc" Maybe with a rationale why they forked it. You know, just common decency...

Because it's not a fork. They copied the API and like 100 lines of unit test code.

Maybe not a fork, but the author writes "It looks as if large parts of the project were copied directly from Spegel without any mention of the original source".

So they are exaggerating?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#786

Post by frumplestlatz »

cmgriffing wrote: post #772
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…

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.

> The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there.

That person never learned what plagiarism is throughout their entire academic career, much less once they landed at Microsoft?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#787

Post by da_chicken »

nickelpro wrote: post #754
da_chicken wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point being made is that the executives are either responsible for the company, or they're not actually running the company at all. Like this isn't some tragedy of the commons situation. This isn't some situation where the company is a cooperative confederation of equal partners. Either shit rolls uphill, or you don't have leadership at all. You don't get to pass the buck on criticism because you made a d…

> or they're not actually running the company at all Executives are not micro-managing day-to-day implementation decisions of every team, no. They set broad strategic goals, the management layers below them decide how to best operationalize those goals, and the layers below those middle managers make specific implementation decisions to execute those operations. If you want to think of this as "not actually running t…

You don't have to be personally making the decisions in order to be responsible for them.

That's also the way the world works.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#788

Post by dustedcodes »

This is not the first or last time this has happened. Microsoft does it intentionally and when they get caught they then give a fake apology and pretend it was a mistake. These mistakes keep happening and the pattern is always the same, MS teams engaging with a developer to learn all about their business idea and then they steal it:

https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#789

Post by pessimizer »

minus7 wrote: post #504
paxys wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the author has ethical concerns with companies using their work there's a simple way to make that explicit and unambigious – the license. No one can read their mind otherwise.

If you consult with someone over their project, then proceed to fork it behind their back, that's just being a dick, even if it was perfectly legal. We should not accept that kind of behavior. And that's even ignoring that the consultation was unpaid and the project was actually even stolen.

> We should not accept that kind of behavior.

What exactly is this supposed to mean? We will not be asked. Only alienated teens care if strangers "accept" them.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#790

Post by wilg »

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…

I mean what else are they supposed to say or do to correct a mistake other than "sorry, here's what happened, we have fixed it, we are taking steps to reduce the chances of it happening again"? Sometimes you just have to correct an error.
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