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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#871

Post by gscott »

hypercube33 wrote: post #385
jxf wrote: 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…

This article and your comment reminds me of the story about winget/appget https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 Note - maybe they don't pay you the developer sometimes, however.

Steve Jobs and Winamp

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#872

Post by [deleted] »

beefnugs wrote: post #779
tacker2000 wrote: post #744

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…

He is lucky microsoft doesn't have 30,000 ai-agents out there just stealing everything he has ever done and spinning up 10 competitors to each project all with new license and money flow into microsoft in any number of ways. I mean they made sure to get all the consent from all authors on github before training on it right

[deleted]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#873

Post by [deleted] »

alphazard wrote: post #606

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…

[deleted]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#874

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#875

Post by sureIy »

joshdavham wrote: post #853
jxf wrote: 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…

> There was a little grumbling about the rate but I just reiterated that it was my rate. Would you be willing to share what your rate was? I think it'd be useful for other FOSS maintainers to get a better understanding of their worth.

I'm curious as well, but simply to understand why Microsoft would even waste time discussing the rate for a 2-day workshop.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#876

Post by wyldfire »

"Can this feature land upstream?"

"No."

:shrug: - of course, the failure to preserve the license is an egregious error which amounts to infringement. But it's easily remedied.

And if the downstream project has a popular feature that can't / shouldn't land upstream, then that's okay - that's what everyone prefers.

"$BIGCO shouldn't be using my software, certainly not outside of how I intended it to be used!" - this attitude is totally contrary to both Free Software and Open Source IMO.

If you don't like it then you should probably consider a more restrictive license.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#877

Post by shagie »

krupan wrote: post #827
shagie wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not a lawyer, but what I understand from that is, if Apple authorizes use of bash under GPLv3, and then Apple decides it has a patent on something and bash is infringing on that patent, Apple can't go sue their customers for patent infringement because they are using bash. I'm 99% sure that's the intent of the clause. Lawyers are famously pessimistic and so I can see why they wouldn't want to test that, but seri…

As I understand it, it's more difficult than that... though I'm not a lawyer.

Let's say {some company} and Apple have a cross patent licensing for some set of patents.

Apple releases some softer under GPLv3. {Some company} sues someone else for a patent in bash. Since Apple licenses that patent and distributes bash, Apple is now obligated ("must act to shield") the distribution of bash that includes that patent.

    If you distribute a covered work knowingly relying on a patent license, you must act to shield downstream users against the possible patent infringement claims from which your license protects you.
That wording of "knowingly relying on a patient license" and "must act to shield downstream users" are things that lawyers don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole. Would it mean that Apple would be required to defend the company that its patent partner is suing? Not a spot that lawyers want to be in. Furthermore, if you distribute GPLv3 software, it may mean that doing the cross patent licensing is more perilous... again, not a situation that lawyers or large companies want to be in.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/bash/tree/bash-13...

There's Apple's bash distribution. If this was the GPLv3 version of bash and apple distributed a version that {some company} decided was infringing, and {some company} sued you - "I got it from Apple. Apple Legal, help me."

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#878

Post by miffy900 »

vvillena wrote: post #796
wilg wrote: 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.

Rewriting those commits would effectively allow them to erase their mistake, which kind of lets Microsoft off the hook in a way.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#879

Post by kazinator »

sureIy wrote: post #875
joshdavham wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a little grumbling about the rate but I just reiterated that it was my rate. Would you be willing to share what your rate was? I think it'd be useful for other FOSS maintainers to get a better understanding of their worth.

I'm curious as well, but simply to understand why Microsoft would even waste time discussing the rate for a 2-day workshop.

I'm guessing that somebody pitched it to their superiors as a free solution with all the source code they could just take over and use, and now they had to have an awkward conversation about spending some money on the author. At which point it behooved them for it to at least be as cheap as possible.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#880

Post by pama »

nu11ptr wrote: post #355
pama wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that GPL is very permissive. If you need to use it in a proprietary way in your own company for internal purposes, no problem; if you release software that others use, you have to release the code as well. I dont want to be using black boxes in this day and age.

Permissiveness is relative, so in relation to MIT/BSD/Apache, it is not.

As a user of code I feel it is more permissive to me to see the code. As a licenser of code I want what is best for me and for others as a user and future developer. Others are free to do anything as long as they dont remove the license and the modified code if they release a software.

If one wanted a different linguistic of pseudo philosophical spin, one could argue that a society would be more permissive than ours in a similar sense that MIT is more permissive than GNU, if it allowed free killing of random people for no reason. Nobody wants to live in such a society and it would not develop as fast as our society. I want to live in a society that permits collaboration, editing, and modification of software I use under the guarantee of the license.

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