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Getting forked by Microsoft

philiplaine.com

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Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#941

Post by palata »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #786
cmgriffing wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good case for applying Hanlon's Razor. The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there. I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.

> The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there. That person never learned what plagiarism is throughout their entire academic career, much less once they landed at Microsoft?

Most software developers I know have no clue how open source licences work.

Hell, I have been reading a lot about them (including the licences themselves and stuff like the GPL FAQ) many times, and in situations like this it's still not entirely clear to me what Microsoft should do (surely there are different valid ways to handle this).

Would you consider yourself competent as a lawyer regarding open source licences? If not, can I say that "you apparently never learned it" and aren't better than the rest of us?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#942

Post by johnisgood »

renewiltord wrote: post #897
saagarjha wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand what direction leadership flows in our political system.

If you’ve funded Abu Ghraib (by paying the US government) then you’re criminally culpable. And don’t try the Nuremberg Defense on me: “I was just following orders to pay every April 15”

> by paying the US government

Directly, or indirectly through taxes?

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#943

Post by isp »

saagarjha wrote: post #862
isp wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other possibilities, for example, the person may have thought that they were complying with the MIT licence by releasing the new project under the MIT licence too + including a mention of the original project in the README. This, of course, is incorrect, and a cursory read of the very short licence text would show it to be incorrect. But I, too, am strongly favouring Hanlon's razor.

Hanlon's razor can indicate an absence of malice, but that doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong, nor should Microsoft skimp on taking steps so it never happens again.

I agree on both points, and with the earlier comment:

> I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.

In response to:

> ... going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#944

Post by dickersnoodle »

leoqa wrote: post #818
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…

I always tell this cautionary tale when talking to friends turned founders. I was going to a 1-1 with a Director (Bob) in a FANG company. As I was walking to his desk, another Director and a Senior Director (Gus) called out to him that the meeting was starting and he should join -- he asked me to come along and tell him my thoughts. It was a sales call with a 2-person tech company building some tools in the cloud nat…

This happens at all levels of scale. Many years ago I was a PHP freelancer for a while and as often as not prospective "customers" would try to 20-question me out of the shape of a solution for them so they could avoid paying me.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#945

Post by sbarre »

saulpw wrote: post #611
sbarre wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations Citation needed here, if you're going to make such a bold claim. The open source movement began as a counter to proprietary closed-source software, and nothing more. It has never been about "fairness" (however you define that) or about preventing anyone from profiting from OSS. Now that said, fairness matters and I agree that some of wh…

The GPL was "To prevent free code from being proprietarized" by for-profit corporations. In addition the origin of Stallman's open source philosophy was a printer he couldn't use because of closed-source software. From the start it was about the rights of the users, not corporations. https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/ > In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all…

As someone else said GPL !== OSS.

> The GPL was "To prevent free code from being proprietarized" by for-profit corporations.

You are adding the "by for-profit corporations" here. That's not in the link you provided. Let's distinguish between what was actually said or meant, and your own personal interpretation or editorializing here.

In the GPL context "proprietarized" could apply to anyone. I could write and release proprietary code with restrictive usage limits, and I'm not a corporation. And the GPL wants to prevent me from doing that as well.

The right to see and modify the source code to the software you run is not restricted, or aimed at, individuals or corporations. I think the GPL's goals here are universal, meaning any entity should have those rights.

Which I think is a good thing. We agree on the ideals of free software here, I just think you're layering "for-profit corporations" on top of it in a manner that was never actually part of the philosophy, because it doesn't make those distinctions.

It can certainly be part of your philosophy, but be clear about that.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#946

Post by nu11ptr »

pama wrote: post #880
nu11ptr wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That is a fair point. I admit I'm speaking purely from a selfish dev perspective. I am glad there are other licenses available, and that people are free to choose what fits them. I myself simply won't use GPL code, however, for the reasons I've specified.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#947

Post by jxf »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #916
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) ?

There was no hourly rate. It was roughly US$125,000 in today's dollars for the 2-day workshop with some other riders (e.g. additional consultation rate).

This factored in my prep time, prototyping, flights (since I didn't live in Redmond, where this team was headquartered, and this was before video calls were more popular), et cetera.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#948

Post by talkingtab »

BeetleB wrote: post #514
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…

> The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community What is this "our community"? My releasing something under the MIT license doesn't mean I'm part of whatever community you're invoking. It means I'm releasing something with an MIT license. That's it. I certainly don't want to give companies like MS a "pause" before they decide to fork my project. I'm explicitly telling them th…

Adding an additional kind of license simply gives you an additional choice. There is nothing about you not being able to use the MIT, or any other license for your code. Providing options for people is not an instance of me imposing my values on you.

Your code, your license. My code, my license.

Re: Getting forked by Microsoft

#950

Post by averageRoyalty »

tacker2000 wrote: post #744
lachie83 wrote: post #722

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…

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…

> 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.

What would you prefer them do? A public flogging? Bring back the stocks?

I agree with the sentiment with these types of comments (I hate PR fluff too), but the aggression when a company has screwed up and not only admits it but tells you their plan going forward is silly. The best case scenario is it does nothing, worst case it encourages them to ignore it next time it happrns.

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