Live data from Hacker News

Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#811
post #7

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.

> Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn't. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put "You must license your project the same as the one you forked from" and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been…

It matters because the GPL has been upheld in US courts.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally a list of other projects they have since found and attributed.

From the tone of the response to Microsoft response, people will not be happy unless Microsoft publicly executed the engineers that did it.

I think people tend to forget that large companies are made up of flawed individuals and their policies mitigate but don't eliminate mistakes

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#813

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…

Just thought I'd mention something...

Free Software (like GPL) has the philosophy that you can USE the software for any reason. The rights are for the USER. The responsibility kicks in when you redistribute the software. It ensures that you preserve the same freedoms you received when you pass it on.

But if you restrict USING the software, it's not free software anymore.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#814

Earlier 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…

Sounds like a very expensive legal gambit.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#815
post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very silly, they can't rewrite the commit history nor would it be proper to update old packaged releases.

What do you mean they can't rewrite the commits? They can, they should, and it's really easy to do so. As for the packages, they should be taken offline.

They should neither rewrite the commits nor take the old packages offline. It's not worth a huge potential clusterfuck when the issue has been fixed on the latest version.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#816
post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ideally a list of other projects they have since found and attributed.

What if there aren't any or they have not yet done that because they wanted to respond to this person first?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#817

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 might not be up to speed, is naming this behaviour "source of inspiration" a common industry term to accurately represent an unacknowledged fork by the large company over the small?

It seems an option to not take free labour to build a commercial cloud largely as a wrapper of open-source, and maybe find other ways to support the creators.

If one person's labour is that valuable to a company, maybe it will help someone realize that supporting such individuals monetarily might help create the next thing with time that they can't get to today.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#818
post #161

In distant times (before Microsoft's Satya era) I was the maintainer of a popular OSS product that scratched an important itch for specialist people who were doing work in the early cloud days. It solved my own problems, and I didn't want to make a business out of it, so I was content to release it as OSS. A Microsoft director who ran a portfolio of product teams reached out to ask about a "collaboration". I said I'd…

I always tell this cautionary tale when talking to friends turned founders. I was going to a 1-1 with a Director (Bob) in a FANG company. As I was walking to his desk, another Director and a Senior Director (Gus) called out to him that the meeting was starting and he should join -- he asked me to come along and tell him my thoughts.

It was a sales call with a 2-person tech company building some tools in the cloud native space. They were super eager, walking through the product. My manager put the phone on mute and asked "So what are we trying to do here" to the other directors. They replied "We just want to kick the tires to figure out how they built it, we're not going to buy". They let these guys pitch for 20 minutes, periodically asking questions and then muting to mock them. My manager nudged me to ask something, since I ran a similar initiative internally. I asked how they would handle a gnarly case we had and they didn't have a solution yet, but could come up with one (super eager, wanted the deal).

At the end of the call, Gus un-muted the phone and said "This looks great but I'm having a hard time following the demo. Can you fly out and show us in person?". The sellers paused and then started asking when the other was free etc, one was going on vacation but could "make it work" to come out the next week. Gus replied "Great, see you next week".

I left that meeting realizing they were all psychopaths. Notably, Gus had the charism of Gus Fring from Breaking Bad.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#819
post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean they can't rewrite the commits? They can, they should, and it's really easy to do so. As for the packages, they should be taken offline.

They should neither rewrite the commits nor take the old packages offline. It's not worth a huge potential clusterfuck when the issue has been fixed on the latest version.

They should absolutely do it. They made a serious mistake and should pay for it, even if that means every Microsoft developer having to rebase all their WIP branches. The more expensive it gets the more they’ll pay attention to those things in the future.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#820

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…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN