Getting Forked by Microsoft https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/ The author details his frustration over Microsoft seemingly creating a derivative of his open-source work. He raises concerns about their collaboration methods and asks, "How can a solo open-source developer work with multi-billion dollar corporations without being taken advantage of?" Microsoft has a long history of as an evil corporation. I'm not surprised at all. We know it well. Search for "EEE" ;)

#opensource #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
@nixCraft Don't use MIT (or BSD) license if you are unhappy with such behavior. It's really that simple.
@taschenorakel @nixCraft Microsoft seemingly violated the terms of the MIT license in this case, so what difference would another license have made?

@taschenorakel
Well.. while I too think that MIT is bad and everyone should use (A)GPL it would've unfortunately not solved anything here as the common MIT licenses already require giving credit and license the used code under the same license. And Microsoft even went a step further and released everything under the same MIT license, something that they didn't have to.

The only potential issue I see here is the question on whether the credit was enough or not. A court would be needed to decide that though, and if it wasn't enough it still was not an issue with the actual license but with Microsoft violating the terms. The issue is then the common free software issue of giant companies simply stealing code and an individual not being able to do anything about it directly. (But some free software orgs like FSF(E) can help with the process of enforcing it)
@nixCraft

@the_moep @taschenorakel @nixCraft I’m an open source proponent and I don’t think Microsoft did anything wrong. I don’t think anyone have an obligation to not fork open source projects.

@lacraia Actually they would have had to replicate the full copyright message to comply with the license instead of just mentioning the original author.

But then the original copyright was an unspecified „Copyright by the Spegel authors“. Could even imagine that a lawyer has recommended to not copy that message and give explicit creds instead, as the Spegel message might cause problems to MSFT because too unspecific, too volatile, prone to trouble. But IANAL.

@the_moep @nixCraft

@taschenorakel @the_moep @nixCraft I don’t really understand this, but it seems the MIT attribution clause is a little fuzzy or at least hard to enforce in court.
@nixCraft We need new open source licence forbidden for corporations.
@madalinignisca AGPL is not enough ?
@saliaku i think agpl is fine for many projects, but what I have seen happening from the corps since late 90's since I am active in tech, I think there is a need also for more restrictive licences that force businesses to ensure they support financially the core developers of projects and are forbidden to fork and get away with it. AGPL will not block them to use it internally, even modify, make billions in profit and keep it silent so nobody knows. The licence must ensure they will have tp pay when they face a legit complain.

@madalinignisca Why? Just use the GPL if you want to avoid evil company practice. It enforces giving back. It enforces fair use of patents. It was tested many times in court. It's really that simple. Especially if you are not a lawyer.

@nixCraft

@taschenorakel @nixCraft no. It is not forcing them to give back.

@madalinignisca It does. As soon as they want to publish derived work, they have to publish their code. Well, and it isn't sufficient to just drop code. What they publish must be sufficient to produce exactly their published binaries.

This has been tested countless times in court, and the GPL withstood these tests.

@nixCraft

Deed - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International - Creative Commons

@nixCraft I started my own licence for similar reasons.

@madalinignisca Which probably the most stupid approach you could have picked, unless you are a lawyer and unless you are prepared to spend endless amounts of money in court to defend your license.

One picks stock licenses for the huge amount of legal expertise that has accumulated around them.

@nixCraft

@taschenorakel @nixCraft I do not recommend anyone using it, it was something I came up recent ago from some similar situation. I would strongly recommend the same licence MariaDB uses for Maxscale, which is the origin of what Elastic, Mongo, Redis and others are going.
@nixCraft There should be community of developers whose work is overshadowed by big tech in a similar way
@nixCraft Rule 0, never collaborate with Microsoft! Ever!
@nixCraft There was a story a few years back with exactly the same pattern about windows package managers. The author of AppGet was in discussions with Microsoft, then all went quiet and later WinGet was released.