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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#81

Post by throwaway277432 »

bayindirh wrote: post #53
Zambyte wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just remove the above copyright notice and replace it with your own and claim you retained the copyright notice lol

Can you give me a couple examples how this is done? I mean, in terms of actual repositories.

The easiest way to do it is to add your own copyright line above the original LICENSE copyright line.

That way anyone touching the project can just add their own line on top.

Done.

EDIT: Example: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE

A more complicated way to do it is to add a folder that contains the original LICENSE file or files. Sometimes there is more than one license, or the license texts differ. In that case, you must preserve all the different variants, even if they all call themselves MIT.

Then, you can optionally add your additional own LICENSE file * only iff* it is compatible with all existing LICENSES. In the case of the MIT license, you may relicense, sublicense, or use a different license in addition, provided it is MIT-compatible. With e.g. GPL you can't. Note that you still have to preserve all the original LICENSE files in the repo.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#82

Post by koiueo »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45
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…

I think attitudes on license reflects on the whole a generational attitudes towards corporate use because the younger generation of software nerds grew up in epoch-boom-times. During ZIRP-boom-times, having a successful popular open source project could be a ticket to kudos and a high paying job and a certain level of responsibility and satisfaction. BigCos spread the money around, and your job as a SWE ended up bein…

My conspiracy theory: Stallman's "rough edges" were deliberately highlighted and blown out of proportion to discredit GPL and his overall ideology.

On one hand we have a guy, who just pointed out that the age of consent is a culture-dependent concept. On the other we have a guy who literally visited Epstein's island to fuck minors (as defined by his country of residence).

One is now considered "a bit of a problem". The other is a beloved public figure.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#83

Post by sublimefire »

gwerbret wrote: post #59

I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. They went to their manager with "hey I've got this great idea" and followed it up with your code a few weeks later. Of course, this only works if they claim they were "inspired" by Spegel to "write their own code".

It might be just a decision to own the code as it probably ends up in production, e.g. run codeql and other tools to scan it, have controlled releases and limit access to the repo. They might have had some other stuff to change and did not want to bother doing it in the original repo with unexpected timelines from the repo owner. A fork is a logical step for a company.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#84

Post by talkingtab »

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 at any cost. They may collaborate as long as their interest in profit is served, but otherwise, it is back to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [1].

This lack of community ethic is endemic in corporations. It is also an existential threat to our community. Profit at any cost is not collaboration. It is predatory.

And yes, I know, corpies and other greedist will vote this down, blah, blah, blah.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

[edit clarity]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#85

Post by [deleted] »

Zambyte wrote: post #31
skywhopper wrote: post #23

Not just forked. Microsoft stole the code without attribution, violating the license terms. Truly shameful behavior. Best case, it was a single engineer who was tasked with duplicating the functionality, but chose the lazier, fraudulent route and was even too lazy to clean things up entirely. Still, MS should own up, correct the record, and make this right.

Copied, not stole. It's unfortunate that the two are so often conflated.

[deleted]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#86

Post by jezek2 »

phillebaba wrote: post #25
hardwaresofton wrote: post #16

The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.

The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me.

I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#89

Post by latexr »

buran77 wrote: post #58
vasco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

Because they're hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source. It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get…

> especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive

What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them?

Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply.

Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course free to contribute or fork within the constraints of the license.”

Scenario 3: Microsoft contacts (…). You reply “sure! I charge $X/hour or I could do a flat rate of $Y for the meeting. Is that acceptable to you?”

What basis would they have for taking you to court in any situation? As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#90

Post by Zambyte »

bayindirh wrote: post #53
Zambyte wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just remove the above copyright notice and replace it with your own and claim you retained the copyright notice lol

Can you give me a couple examples how this is done? I mean, in terms of actual repositories.

Original license of Redis is retained in the form Valkey:

https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/blob/unstable/COPYING

Third party licenses retained in a THIRDPARTY file in MariaDB

https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/main/THIRDPARTY

Only two good examples I could quickly find.

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