Mastodawn

Forked by Microsoft.

https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/

Getting Forked by Microsoft

Three years ago, I was part of a team responsible for developing and maintaining Kubernetes clusters for end user customers. A main source for downtime in customer environments occurred when image registries went down. The traditional way to solve this problem is to set up a stateful mirror, however we had to work within customer budget and time constraints which did not allow it. During a Black Friday, we started getting hit with a ton of traffic while GitHub container registries were down. This limited our ability to scale up the cluster as we depended on critical images from that registry. After this incident, I started thinking about a better way to avoid these scalability issues. A solution that did not need a stateful component and required minimal operational oversight. This is where the idea for Spegel came from.

Philip Laine

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Arne Babenhauserheide Apr 21

@Crell I like the idea of the project — and the lesson learned:

> This experience has also made me consider changing the license of Spegel

It was initially licensed under MIT.

I’ll remember this article next time someone suggests lax licensing. And stick to using #AGPL as default that I only deviate from when I see a strong reason to do so.

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Lincoln Russell Apr 21

@ArneBab @Crell I came to the same conclusion within the last couple years. I now see more permissive licenses as simply inviting monopolies to steal it after it finds success.

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Arne Babenhauserheide

@linc @Crell Yes — and it’s not like this prevents integration. If Microsoft wants to use my project, they can approach me (as they could approach Philip Laine) and ask for permission (which they didn’t but would have to).

It may then cost them.
Why should I sell my time short?

I publish my code so others can use it and to reduce my upkeep work.

But not to make it easier for large players to replace my project and force me to migrate my own tooling to theirs to keep it working well.

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SomeAnoTooter Apr 21

@ArneBab @linc @Crell it could also prevent fragmentation. As I new user I find it already exhausting, if I would find two active projects doing the same thing and probably would go for the one from Microsoft as that would be a big maintainer and feel a bit safer.
Especially if you do this in a corporate setting, being able to show it comes from Microsoft is a big plus. Even so knowing how big Corp treated some of their products, it might be better to go with a passionate person.

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Arne Babenhauserheide Apr 22

@SomeAnoTooter I’m not sure how safe Microsoft is for longterm maintenance. It is known for EEE: "embrace-extend-extinguish".

Regarding Google: after G+ and far to many other projects, "there’s Google behind it" is a sign for me that the project is likely to be abandoned within a few years.

Apple tries to proprietarize and monopolize. See LLVM and Swift.

Meta builds their own replacement that uses their proprietary infrastructure (see sapling) and stays incomplete.

@linc @Crell