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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#831

Post by pabs3 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #153
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…

> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

This license is incredibly vague, for example would it be a violation to use NC licensed code in your personal website with a few Google Ads on it that earns a few pennies a day? What about for another personal website/blog that earns hundreds of dollars a week?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#832

Post by pabs3 »

talkingtab wrote: post #205
philipwhiuk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community. It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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 corporations aren't going to pay anyway, they will just rewrite your code or something better from scratch and use their marketing money to beat you in the developer mindshare stakes.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#833

Post by pabs3 »

starkparker wrote: post #495
ryao wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay. That violates the first clause of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd It probably violates 5 and 6 too. > But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork wi…

the OSCL turned 18 years old a month ago. maybe things have changed enough since then to validate revisiting it. OSI is too busy trying to come up with an equally mid (at best) OSAID for another thing thing that corporations already don't and won't care about following, so I don't expect them to prioritize it even if it got raised

https://openhub.net/licenses/OSCL-C

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#834

Post by pabs3 »

gwd wrote: post #36
diggan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? If they're breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven't heard much from them recently). [1] https://softwarefreedom.org/

I would suggest Software Freedom Conservancy instead:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#835

Post by matheusmoreira »

diggan wrote: post #7
benwilber0 wrote: post #5

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…

I may be a hobbyist developer but I do have access to lawyers and I'm not afraid of using them. People get sued over the smallest matters every single day. Corporations should be no exception.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#836

Post by pabs3 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #828
mickael-kerjean wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co... > 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 Sta…

Depends on the terms of the deal, I would want to at minimum get back any modifications they are making.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#837

Post by NoahZuniga »

guywithahat wrote: post #776
kyleee wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also it seems like in the original comment they already admitted to breaching the copyright, so sending him money doesn't increase the chance of a lawsuit succeeding.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#838

Post by yahayahya »

Xelynega wrote: post #555
lonelyprograMer wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see AGPL project, I close the page, and I believe many others would do the same.

Why?

Probably because the dependency scanner the lawyers at his company required be added to the code review system will instantly fail the review if he added an AGPL project as a dependency.

There’s no reason to worry about the AGPL unless you plan to conceal code from its users. Most software businesses take this approach because it’s hard to sell information that is publicly available, and code is just information. Some businesses make money operating software for others. AWS pays on-call engineers to keep RabbitMQ highly available.

Free Software protects the user from the developer. Permissive licenses protect the developer from the author.

A lot of professional software engineers get confused and think of themselves as the “user” when they’re actually more of a middle man.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#839

Post by NoahZuniga »

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…

You can get pretty close with a copyleft license like GPL.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#840

Post by matheusmoreira »

pabs3 wrote: post #836
matheusmoreira wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co... > 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 Sta…

Depends on the terms of the deal, I would want to at minimum get back any modifications they are making.

It's your work. Negotiate any terms you want. Extract as many benefits as you can get away with. If they accept it, you win. If they don't, they gotta abide by the AGPLv3 and everyone wins.
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