881–890 of 1001 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they forked from before the author had a license, it’s worse. MS had no right to use it. You are right, provided he did not have a notice saying it was MIT licensed elsewhere. > I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake. I would consider it to be both a choice and a mistake. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is no evidence in the fork that…
> There is no evidence in the fork that he is the copyright holder of the original code and it looks like Microsoft is. Part of that is Microsoft’s fault, but part of that is his fault for not including per file copyright notices, such that Microsoft could add theirs and be the sole one listed in every file. Absolutely not! This is completely and only M$'s fault, whichever way you look at it. Copying a file and slapp…
If you look at any major project, you are likely to see license and copyright notices at the top. You even have the Linux foundation pushing to have standardized license notices at the top of every source file:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Package_Data_Exchange...
That said, the engineer who did this is fairly young (7 years out of college) and does not appear to have any experience working on a fork previously:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aviraltakkar/
He probably did not realize he had goofed. It does not take much imagination to guess the sequence of events:
* He copies the source files into Visual Studio Code
* Someone internal tells him he needs a license, so he grabs whatever Microsoft suggests while following internal guidance, without realizing that is only for Microsoft originated code.
* Someone internal tells him to put it on GitHub, so it goes up with the wrong license.
* He realizes that the files already had a license and tries to fix it. Presumably someone told him.
* He misses the copyright notice that he failed to copy in the first place when fixing his earlier mistake.
* People here hear about it.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they forked from before the author had a license, it’s worse. MS had no right to use it. You are right, provided he did not have a notice saying it was MIT licensed elsewhere. > I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake. I would consider it to be both a choice and a mistake. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is no evidence in the fork that…
> There is no evidence in the fork that he is the copyright holder of the original code and it looks like Microsoft is. Only because they removed the license and copyright. If they were willing to do that in 1 file, they are willing to do it in many. It's not the authors mistake in any way shape or form.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they forked from before the author had a license, it’s worse. MS had no right to use it. You are right, provided he did not have a notice saying it was MIT licensed elsewhere. > I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake. I would consider it to be both a choice and a mistake. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is no evidence in the fork that…
> but part of that is the original author’s fault No: the original author could have made it easier to comply, and you could argue that he acted foolishly in not doing so, but that doesn't make it his fault .
If someone wanted to transplant only a subset of files from one project to another, there would have been no copyright notices to retain.
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…
It seems like it would have been a much better strategy to add artifact streaming, submit a pull request and then if the maintainer isn't interested in adding it, proceeding with a fork.
"Probably out of scope" sounds like "I dont have time to implement a feature of that scope"
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The key is that "permissive" is passive voice. It's more permissive for corporations in that they are allowed to use it to tie their customers even tighter to them. Compare this with "restrictive" (for corporations) AKA "copyleft" which ensures that users' freedom is maintained, by restricting how corporations can limit them. It's very akin to the paradox of tolerance.
Some folks are now calling them pushover licenses instead of permissive licenses.
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Doesn't that bring us right back to GPL family licenses?
The GPL doesn't require contributing back, only contributing forward to users.
Unlike permissively licensed software, where you can add proprietary features.
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…
No, it was a whole team at MSFT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755745
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'm confused how you and others reach this conclusion. No, it doesn't.
The MIT license is one of the shortest free license that exists:
Copyright (c)
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
No where does that require attribution. It has basically one condition: perpetuate the license.
Maybe the author didn't actually use an MIT license, despite claiming to? But as far as the MIT license is concerned, as long as the other party provides the same license for the fork, that's all that's needed.