821–830 of 1001 posts
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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?
There's a lot of blame being assigned to Microsoft, the entire corporation. But I doubt this was a heavily contemplated decision by a room full of executives, or voted on by the shareholders. More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment. They can steal users from the original project and justify using Micro…
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…
Microsoft is a large, wealthy corporation has a big target painted on its back, and, consequently, CELA (corporate, external, and legal affairs) are, for good reason, a very strong force inside Microsoft. You can't just grab some code from someplace at Microsoft. Your PM has to run it past your division's CELA rep, look at the terms, assess exposure, etc. Did that happen?
If not, that's a big hole and you should probably beg forgiveness from them as you ask for an audit of every other piece of code you've picked up.
If it didn't happen, well, I suspect someone in your group just became the new Nelson, the hapless developer, in Microsoft's Standards of Business Conduct videos. You really don't want to be Nelson.
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I don't think you understand the difference between use and distribution, between running code and copying code. All source code is automatically copyrighted and restricted (at least in the US) and you must follow copyright laws and license agreements for all source code that you copy and distribute. GPL licensed code is not special in this regard. How you use GPL software has zero restrictions.
I understand just fine. Placing any obligations on distribution, either mandating or prohibiting, is a de facto restriction on use in many contexts. There is a lot of source code that you might want to remix with GPL code that the user has no control over the legality of its distribution. That situation comes up often enough, sometimes in unplanned or unexpected ways, to strongly incentivize the blanket bans on GPL s…
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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.
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Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans?
> Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans? Can you quote which part of the LLM chat above constitutes legal advice? I read the whole chat and didn't see any.
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There was zero chance of them having problems shipping bash and I'm glad you put problem in quotes.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt 11. Patents. A "contributor" is a copyright holder who authorizes use under this License of the Program or a work on which the Program is based. The work thus licensed is called the contributor's "contributor version". A contributor's "essential patent claims" are all patent claims owned or controlled by the contributor, whether already acquired or hereafter acquired, that wou…
Like seriously, maybe Oracle comes and sues Apple for patent infringement, and Apples only defense is to counter sue Oracle for using bash on their Macbooks?? They lost that defense when they stopped distributing bash, why not just distribute it under GPLv3 anyway?
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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
> Why I (A/L)GPL
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
Always choose AGPLv3 no matter what it is you're doing. If they want it, AGPLv3 gives you the leverage to negotiate a licensing deal. You sell them permission to violate it. I even emailed Stallman asking what he thought of this strategy. He thinks it's a net good.
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…
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As someone commented above, commercial use is an issue. Creative commons is good, but the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. It seems to be that the crucial issue here is the duplication of the project by forking. I am unclear of where the boundaries could and should be, but in essence we want money to flow into community source projects. Corporations and commercial entities can and should p…
> the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. [...] Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses. There are a number of GPLv3 (or other restrictive license) projects with a note like "contact us for commercial licenses" in the README. Licenses aren't exclusive by default.…
Be careful. Changing the license presumably requires the consent of every copyright holder. It's trivial when it's just you but quickly become impossible in practice as the number of contributors increases. Stuff like this is why some projects ask you to reassign your copyright to them.