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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#911

Post by LtWorf »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #471
WD-42 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you refuse to engage if you use the MIT license?

don't respond to their emails. If you want to be extreme don't distribute it to them in the first place. Licenses do not come into effect until after distribution. So you could have a pay-to-download model that comes with a %100 discount if you're a lone developer or an organization with under X amount of revenue. You wouldn't be able to stop someone redistributing it after the fact, but you're not engaging.

Unfortunately now that everything is based on automated pipelines, something that doesn't integrate well is not so good.

Although at work we have a provider of proprietary software that has an APT repository where the URL includes a secret token, so they can track from where it's being accessed.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#912

Post by tough »

talkingtab wrote: post #172
jeremyjh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The k8s community is mostly people who work for commercial interests and use k8s in their companies. If you develop a component of the k8s ecosystem, and you want people to use it, you can't really exclude businesses from using it. There just aren't enough installations outside of commercial spaces for it to be relevant.

Very good point. Trying to think this through. 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. But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that pe…

AGPL tries to solve this

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#913

Post by Fraterkes »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #809
epanchin wrote: post #805

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.

That would be a start yeah

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#914

Post by Fraterkes »

darepublic wrote: post #699
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…

They created the atmosphere that encourages or even necessitates shenanigans like these. Absolutely blame the corporation

Exactly. If you don't hold managers responsible for the results of the incentives they set, you give the most powerful people in a company the most moral leeway. It should be the other way around.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#915

Post by debugnik »

ahoka wrote: post #171
Zambyte wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE I don't see "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" (the "above copyright notice" in https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE ) anywhere. Where do you see it?

They are essentially claiming copyright here for something they don't have the license for, no?

To remove the original copyright notice, they'd need a copyright assignment (possibly implicit, as when the work is made for hire). They've already got a licence and they've infringed it by doing this.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#916

Post by fabiensanglard »

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…

> Don't work for free.

I may encounter this situation some day. Could you share how you structured your fees (and give the hourly rate you charged them :P) ?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#917

Post by marcus_holmes »

optymizer wrote: post #528
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…

They want you to be intimidated by their reputation because it's easier if you make concessions first hoping to get some benefit later. Keep in mind, these are business people and they're very good at it (otherwise they wouldn't be giants). The benefit will never materialize. Working for free just means it was an easy win and you left money on the table. Do not work for free. Large companies have a shit ton of money.…

> these are business people and they're very good at it (otherwise they wouldn't be giants)

just adding the point that the people who made them giants have all left by now, and the people they have now are incredibly good at internal politics rather than actual biz. You will probably find that they are more interested in how you can make them look good rather than how you can make their company money.

But yes, do not work for free. Large companies have a shit ton of money. Agree 100% with parent.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#918

Post by xwolfi »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #757
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…

> 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…

You have to prove the mens rea, and even then, people committing crimes don't automatically deserve crimes committed upon them.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#920

Post by Mashimo »

vvillena wrote: post #825
wilg wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might be overestimating how hard this is, because it's not hard at all. It takes less than half an hour to create a script that does it.

What is the benefit of re-writing the git history?
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