So if both versions use the same MIT license, the only difference is the line parent highlighted...

Define “substantial”?What percentage of copying is “substantial”?That’s the problem with concisely written licenses, the legal world thrives on definitions and terms of art, and when you leave something open to interpretation you invite the probability that a nefarious (or even sufficiently amoral actor like a large corporation) actor will point to the language you use and interpret it differently.To win any argument in a court of law you must now spend time and money to win the argument. Something an open source maintainer likely doesn’t have, and since the license doesn’t specify damages, there’s no way to even write in a penalty for failure to adhere such that a court of law would consider it under contract law, and then you have to prove damages.At least in Virginia, each party pays their own lawyers fees, even if they win. You can only collect lawyers fees when statutes allow you to, or there has been sufficient bad faith from the other side that the court uses its own power to sanction.Oh, and let’s say you win and somehow you are able to prove damages. Now you have to spend money to collect on the judgment. That’s money you’re not getting back.The point here is that we’ve written software licenses as contracts that assume good faith and do not punish bad actors, when we would need to treat corporations as if they are bad actors and write licenses accordingly.

What they likely mean is that MS says &quot;Good luck enforcing this. Have you met our legal team?&quot;
Nothing they can&#x27;t walk around, or drown you in legal fees while they smile.

&gt; Unfortunately the MIT license doesn&#x27;t do much to prevent thisSeems both you and Microsoft needs to actually read through the MIT license, it isn&#x27;t that long or complicated :)&gt; The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.That part is even in it&#x27;s own paragraph and everything, really hard to miss for anyone who even glances at the license.

Licenses absolutely matter, that’s the whole point of using them! Big corps will absolutely not risk being sued over infringement, it’s not worth it to them. For the litigation cost they’ll throw a couple engineers and redo your project from scratch.Sorry it happened to you but it seems like you just picked the wrong license.

Any copies of the code should include the notice according to the MIT license. I do agree that I could have used a less permissive license, and it is something that I am now considering to change.The reality is that licenses do not mean anything unless you are actually able to enforce it. So I really do not think the license would have mattered in this case.

Hey, this sucks. Unfortunately the MIT license doesn&#x27;t do much to prevent this and (I think?) their licensing transgression is they haven&#x27;t kept &quot;Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors&quot; in the LICENSE file. I suspect if you call them out on it that&#x27;ll be the remediation.Did you manage to reach out to any of the people at MSFT you originally spoke to to ask wtf?

Not just a megacorp. Anyone for a commercial purpose

Because they&#x27;re hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source.It&#x27;s like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you&#x27;ll end up face down in a ditch and authorities will look the other way. Megacorps have stolen, copied, reverse engineered, replicated, etc. things since forever and it always worked out for them.In this case MS didn&#x27;t need any help. They could very well take everything and face no real repercussions (this is the reality when the majority is uneducated, and their elected representatives are greedy and spineless). So playing along gives some chance to get something positive out of it.

It&#x27;s also very possible they had been working on it already and wanted to compare notes, I certainly would if I were working on something internal and found a similar project, but I agree, ask them for a consultation fee. I don&#x27;t see why they wouldn&#x27;t pay it.Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They&#x27;re both MIT licensed.

Probably expectation of some monetary gain. At the very least getting hired to keep working on the same thing. I do not blame him at all for this. Though when things didn&#x27;t work out, all he thought he could realistically do is start accepting donations.

I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world.Normal people aren&#x27;t constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you&#x27;re going to make money off of my idea when talking to you.Asking everybody to be constantly vigilant of possible exploitation by megacorps puts an undue burden on individuals. We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways.What I&#x27;m saying is that this sort of copying should be criminal (not just illegal, but criminal) and Microsoft, the legal entity, should be held accountable and fined. I acknowledge that this isn&#x27;t currently possible with our legal framework, but we should work to make it possible.

Won&#x27;t you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zedshaw.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zedshaw.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons&#x2F;</a>&gt; No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers.&gt; Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads &quot;Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help.&quot;&gt; They aren&#x27;t holding people up at gun point. Rather they hold out their Rolex encrusted hand and beg, plead, and shame open source developers until they get free labor.&gt; Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit.&gt; They&#x27;re ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, &quot;Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser.&quot;

Yes, charity. That&#x27;s exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.

&gt; Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.I agree with you 100% but I&#x27;m guessing getting approached by Microsoft can be pretty ego boosting, which is what these companies exploit.

Seems more like a networking opportunity personally

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

Do you think this stops the fork? It’s not like they can’t read the code.

I agree, after this happened to me I learned of a few other situations where the same thing happened to other friends.On my end if was a mix of naivete and flattery which made me want to take the meeting. I suspect it is the same case for others. I will not make the same mistake the next time it happens.

Microsoft at it again with Embrace, Extend,  Extinguish.

Reading this made me think of AppGet, too

I&#x27;m curious why are you still maintaining the first one where it clearly links to Miguel&#x27;s comments who is less than fond of .NET nowadays and is advocating for Swift of all things? Moreover, it speaks more of the tools teams management and management outside of .NET than .NET itself and you should be very well aware of that. It&#x27;s been a link people repost ad-nauseam here with no constructive dialogue whatsoever whenever .NET is suggested as an arguably better tool for solving problems it&#x27;s good at solving.

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isdotnetopen.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isdotnetopen.com</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghuntley.com&#x2F;fracture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghuntley.com&#x2F;fracture</a>

&gt; The best advice for open source maintainers who are being approached by large tech companies is to be very waryDrop them a consultation fee in the thousands per hour, get something out of it at least. If they&#x27;re going to reimplement your project, there&#x27;s absolutely 0 you can do, they will just hire an intern and tell them the requirements for what you have built without having to meet you, ask them for expenses out of your day covered.

&gt; Gates: OH, I DIDN&#x27;T GET RICH BY WRITING A LOT OF CHECKS.&gt; Gates: ( fiendish laughter )<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frinkiac.com&#x2F;caption&#x2F;S09E14&#x2F;1158256" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frinkiac.com&#x2F;caption&#x2F;S09E14&#x2F;1158256</a>

Microsoft runs on trust... like a car runs on gasoline

Another example here, Google forked a GCS fuse driver and the author found out later and posted on HN about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35790223">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35790223</a>Edit: apparently Google did not use the author&#x27;s codebase, instead using an Apache 2.0 licensed codebase [1] explained here [2].[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kubernetes-sigs&#x2F;gcp-filestore-csi-driver">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kubernetes-sigs&#x2F;gcp-filestore-csi-driver</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35863944">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35863944</a>

Yeah. I remember the big hoo haw on here a few years back that Satya turning up was the table turning event that would fix all evils. Literally rainbow unicorn shit levels of brigading. I got downvoted to oblivion for suggesting we hold off judgement.And here we are …

What can you expect when the same group of folks has given the control of the Web to Google served on a plate?

The cultural amnesia about how these companies have operated in the past and continue to operate just continues to boggle me.It&#x27;s as if we&#x27;ve learned nothing about exploitative corporation behavior for the last 20-30 years even though it&#x27;s in the news EVERY other day.

Well it does love open-source, it lives free access to source code it would otherwise had to put money into developing the same thing xD

&gt; Not sure how people fell so hard for &quot;Microsoft &lt;3 Open Source&quot; but it&#x27;s never been trueI think it&#x27;s important to highlight that the &quot;Microsoft &lt;3 Linux&quot; narrative deserves some scrutiny too: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;lbp1m8&#x2F;for_anyone_that_thinks_microsoft_loves_linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;lbp1m8&#x2F;for_anyone_th...</a>)

If you&#x27;d care to be a bit more specific, I might be actually be able to explain something to you.

&quot;breaking the licenses&quot;?&quot;without attribution&quot;?Did we read the same article?

It&#x27;s very similar to being on the receiving end of what purports to be seeking an acquisition.Both myself and my other half have separately been directly on the receiving end of the &quot;brain rape&quot; by major companies that everyone here will have heard of, both of which went nowhere except for the supposedly interested acquirer to become ever more angry that the crown jewels were simply not offered up on a plate.This situation is surprising in that he did get an acknowledgement at all. These companies are not good actors, and have a casual disregard for the IP of everyone else that should be immediately obvious.

You are mistaken. The license explicitly allows it subject to the terms of the license:&gt; The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.Microsoft didn&#x27;t follow these terms. They copied &quot;substantial portions of the Software&quot; and didn&#x27;t include the notice.

Don’t entertain meetings without compensation from megacrop. But the project is open source. The author provided the right for them to take it in any way possible and copy it. If I’m not mistaken the MIT license allows what they did.I’m assuming the complaint is more about Microsoft duplicity in asking for information as opposed to the forking of the code. The latter is fine - the license explicitly allows it.

There&#x27;s also WSL, .NET Core, they own GitHub and continue to host a lot of stuff for free, and more things I&#x27;m forgetting. I think the IDE was the least of it frankly. People do seem a bit too gullible because all of these things serve Microsoft&#x27;s bottom line more than it does open source developers&#x27; (isn&#x27;t it nice that we can now run Linux things right in Windows? How convenient that you don&#x27;t need to dual boot and boot out of Windows rather than using WINE to run Windows things on Linux..!), but to say that it was all because of the electron IDE version named after a much better IDE is misrepresenting the situation

&gt; Not sure how people fell so hard for &quot;Microsoft &lt;3 Open Source&quot;Give them a (somewhat) open source IDE and they start believing you are friend of open source in general.

Generally a court likes for a plaintiff to try to resolve a dispute before suing. The author should contact the Peerd team at Microsoft and point out that they seem to have overlooked their obligations under the license. Only if they refuse to do anything would it be worth considering a lawsuit.

Or it was just a team inside Microsoft and he thought &quot;Microsoft&quot; talked to him and saw already dollar signs?Open source license is there for reasons, he can sue them if they did it wrong.

Maybe AI couldn&#x27;t explain it to them?

&gt; Seems it isn&#x27;t the first time Microsoft leads open source maintainers on, trying to extract information about their projects so they can re-implement it themselves while also breaking the licenses that the authors use.Can’t they just read the source themselves? Why do they need the maintainer?

NO, just NO!And this is done by the owners of Github. Throw away open source licenses, create your own, make anyone who forks your code perpetually pay for your work, or ask money for your work.&quot;Luckily, I persisted. Spegel still continues strong with over 1.7k stars and 14.4 million pulls&quot;Yeah, your time is your most precious resource and what you get in return? Recognition? virtual stars, pulls, essentially numbers, essentially nothing. And then you get robbed.WAKE THE FUCK UP PEOPLE.

I think this behavior stems from how big companies do performance reviews and promotions for developers.Contributing to someone else&#x27;s open source project is for schmucks and juniors. Authoring a &quot;new&quot; open source project in the company&#x27;s name, getting recognition and solving problems is seen as &quot;leading the industry&quot; and whatever other wankery sophistry they come up with to try to motivate employees with.

The most depressing thing about such behavior from MegaCorp is that they are too lazy to even pretend to care. We meet lots of people in life who would appear sincere, talk sweetly etc, but it is all just a show, just acting. Now it is a different discussion on which is worse (acting like you care or just flat out being a dick) but acting takes some effort. These companies with near infinite money can&#x27;t be bothered to even put in the slightest bit of effort - how much effort would it be to give a shout out to Keivan when they copied AppGet to make WinGet?

Yeah, at this point I feel .NET could benefit from being made into a proper marketed as independent foundation (and not the failing .NET foundation that does very little).Because all these actions will get associated with .NET teams even if the latter go to great lengths to collaborate with community and ensure that new feature work does not step onto the toes of existing popular community libraries (for example Swashbuckle or eventing&#x2F;messaging framework that was postponed&#x2F;cancelled not to interrupt the work of other libraries including MassTransit, which is a bit ironic as MassTransit went full commercial later).

This feels like the scene from Silicon Valley about brain rape.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_STfy0QQjJY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_STfy0QQjJY</a>Also, many large orgs are known to do this.Billion dollar companies are not hanging out with you to be your friend, even if you&#x27;re at the table for a reason (you belong there because you know something they don&#x27;t).When speaking with big companies, you are not there to impress them.Speak for impact + meaning, they are so big and brilliant and rich and should already know how.There are examples where a large corporation simply sponsored the developer and development of an open source project. This should be the way.

&gt; As a sole maintainer of an open source project, I was enthused when Microsoft reached out to set up a meeting to talk about Spegel. The meeting went well, and I felt there was going to be a path forward ripe with cooperation and hopefully a place where I could onboard new maintainers.Seems it isn&#x27;t the first time Microsoft leads open source maintainers on, trying to extract information about their projects so they can re-implement it themselves while also breaking the licenses that the authors use. Not sure how people fell so hard for &quot;Microsoft &lt;3 Open Source&quot; but it&#x27;s never been true, and seems it still isn&#x27;t, just like &quot;Security is the #1 priority&quot; also never been true for them.Here is the previous time I can remember that they did something similar:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23331287">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23331287</a> - The Day AppGet Died (keivan.io) 1930 points | May 27, 2020 | 550 commentsThe best advice for open source maintainers who are being approached by large tech companies is to be very wary, and let them contribute&#x2F;engage like everyone else if they&#x27;re interested, instead of setting up private meetings and eventually get &quot;forked-but-not-really&quot; without attribution.

MIT doesn&#x27;t need attribution. Original BSD does, but revised and most widespread BSDs do not.GPL&#x2F;AGPL would prevented this somehow, requiring proper attribution via mandatory source code release, and allowing to track project origins. This would make it harder to label it as a &quot;a Microsoft Product from Ground Up&quot;, and prevent Sherlocking the original application to a greater degree.As a result, this would probably forced Microsoft to develop a new one from scratch, because they&#x27;re allergic to GPL, because if they have breached GPL, they would be forced to comply, since GPL is court tested already.So, write Free Software. Not Open Source. Esp. for your personal projects.

Is this really true? Whats the point of even licensing our repo then?

&gt; Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose?If they&#x27;re breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven&#x27;t heard much from them recently).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwarefreedom.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwarefreedom.org&#x2F;</a>

MS has internal tools that scan dependencies etc and flag them against legal team if anything is fishy. License choice matters quite a bit, they will not risk litigation.

If you worked at a megacorp you’d know they care a whole lot about not allowing GPL code anywhere near their propertiary repos; this is usually enforced by IT security (NOT engineering) with dedicated scanners, confirmed matches are at least highest priority bugs.

It matters because the only thing which can be claimed to have been ignored here is missing the line &quot;Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors&quot; in the main license file. Now that it&#x27;s brought up <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;peerd&#x2F;issues&#x2F;109">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;peerd&#x2F;issues&#x2F;109</a> that&#x27;ll probably be fixed.What remains after full compliance with the MIT license choince will be the bulk of the complaints in the article.

It matters because the GPL has been upheld in US courts.

I may be a hobbyist developer but I do have access to lawyers and I&#x27;m not afraid of using them. People get sued over the smallest matters every single day. Corporations should be no exception.

&gt; MIT requires attribution, but they didn&#x27;tI&#x27;m confused how you and others reach this conclusion.
No, it doesn&#x27;t.The MIT license is one of the shortest free license that exists:Copyright (c) &lt;year&gt; &lt;copyright holders&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and&#x2F;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 &quot;AS IS&quot;, 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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIT_License" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIT_License</a>No where does that require attribution. It has basically one condition: perpetuate the license.Maybe the author didn&#x27;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&#x27;s all that&#x27;s needed.

&gt;You surely could have put &quot;You must license your project the same as the one you forked from&quot; and they still would have ignored it,No, they would have found something else that wasn&#x27;t a pain to steal.

&gt; Don&#x27;t use one of the most permissive licenses in existenceDoes it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn&#x27;t. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put &quot;You must license your project the same as the one you forked from&quot; and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been.

&gt; somehow the GPL seems to have gone out of vogue.Which GPL is that? The GPL 2 and 3 are incompatible with each other, making cross contribution between different FOSS projects practically impossible. The &quot;v2 or later&quot; licensing model does nothing to remedy the problem. See Rob Landley&#x27;s talk on this topic.

And there is not only the GPL. MPL and EUPL are great, too!

Don&#x27;t use one of the most permissive licenses in existence and certainly not one that doesn&#x27;t provide copyleft.  This is all very well established at this point and yet somehow the GPL seems to have gone out of vogue.

Oh boy, credits that only work in their cloud. That’ll cover rent.

This might as well be a LLM generated ad roll performance

Forked up the wazoo.That said, Microsoft provides extremely generous Startup Assistance (to the tune of &gt; 150K of Azure credits). Disclaimer: I&#x27;m not affiliated with MS but I did their program, also did the Gcloud and AWS programs back in the day. No negative comparisons, but off the top of my head the Azure program is awesome. I really enjoyed working with Azure, and it does what it says on the tin.You can apply here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;startups&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;startups&#x2F;</a>Or here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundershub.startups.microsoft.com&#x2F;signup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundershub.startups.microsoft.com&#x2F;signup</a>

And just to be really clear -- it&#x27;s not actually a solution to cloud providers not reusing the code for profit (which I assume is the context you&#x27;re implying, could be wrong here), because AGPL is free software, so people are free to reuse your code for commercial purposes. AGPL at least prevents making private improvements to open source networked code without contributing back.I think in this situation it might have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it&#x27;s Microsoft. Also, they&#x27;re well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc.I think another important point might be that &quot;free software&quot; aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.

The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don&#x27;t exist for me.I also don&#x27;t understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache&#x2F;PHP&#x2F;MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.

I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.

What would be the goal of this? I ask because I think the nice thing about the current system is that the goals are well represented&#x2F;easy to sum up and defendable.What would be the goal of a license between AGPL and SSPL on the spectrum? Seems like such a license would at the very least be non-free? (which is perfectly ok)

We need an updated&#x2F;modernized AGPL that more explicitly delineates what is dependent software.  SSPL is probably too far, but it has the right idea.

The extra baggage in AGPL is what makes it work for the purposes that OP wants it. LGPL takes the GPL a step towards MIT, where AGPL takes it the opposite direction.

LGPL is sufficient (without the extra baggage of AGPL).

What&#x27;s wrong with CLA?
I&#x27;ve contributed to project with CLA. Have been using them and then wanted a feature and the project accepted my patch.
Ther are still many people contributing to project with CLA.

AGPL without CLA, to be precise. AGPL with CLA is a trap.

Whenever I see AGPL project, I close the page, and I believe many others would do the same.

I dont see how that would’ve helped with authors complaints in this case

I have to say every thing mentioning the license or GPL or variants is getting instantly downvoted. Not a good look HN.

The future continues to be AGPL<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vadosware.io&#x2F;post&#x2F;the-future-of-free-and-open-source-is-agpl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vadosware.io&#x2F;post&#x2F;the-future-of-free-and-open-source...</a>

Mostly no, but I read the overall piece as a complaint that they got a fork when they were hoping to get a collaborator.

Yes, he complains in the last few paragraphs that he feels like this form is a competitor. Says that users sometimes come to him asking for help with the Microsoft fork, etc. Those all very much fall into the domain of &quot;what did you think MIT meant exactly&quot;, imo at least.

If the author has ethical concerns with companies using their work there&#x27;s a simple way to make that explicit and unambigious – the license. No one can read their mind otherwise.

No legal basis. They still might have an ethical basis regarding Microsoft&#x27;s behavior, because law != ethics.

&quot;fantasizing about a collab&quot; sounds like the world of sneakers, not software.  What does that even mean in the world of software?

In a reply from an Microsoft employee who&#x27;s familiar with the situation, some group in Azure wanted support for some Azure-specific APIs. The spegel dev decided that was too far out of their wheelhouse, so they didn&#x27;t want to add support in spegel for that Azure-specific API. The Azure subteam went ahead and added that support into their fork of spegel.Other changes removed the spegel project&#x27;s LICENSE and added in Microsoft&#x27;s LICENCE file and copyrights on all files.see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43755745">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43755745</a>

I think it&#x27;s weird they didn&#x27;t mention anything about Peerd or their plans on how to use Spegel to the author. They could&#x27;ve atleast said &quot;btw we plan to do xyz&quot; instead of leaving the author fantasizing about a collab.

Licenses communicate your intent; if you choose the most permissive one possible that is also implicitly communicated.

The author said that in the last line.Highlight the part of the essay where he is claiming MS didn&#x27;t have a right to do what they did.The point of the article was that MS showed interest in his work, asked him about his designs. Said nothing about internal plans to fork it or use it. Then he shows up to a talk and sees them discussing his work.Reading between the lines, it is 100% clear they didn&#x27;t feel like telling him they planned to fork his software, and they danced around it. They didn&#x27;t reach out to him afterward and say &quot;thanks, we are building a fork and your free time was really useful&quot;.The essay isn&#x27;t claiming a legal issue. It&#x27;s pointing out a substantial, practical issue with OSS that didn&#x27;t exist nearly as prominently in the pre-cloud era: megacorps forking software and cutting out the OG developers.

While Microsoft is certainly in the wrong for removing the copyright notice, I think the author has zero basis for complaint otherwise. If you&#x27;re going to release software with one of the most permissable licenses, you need to accept that for all it entails. Consider what you&#x27;re comfortable with and pick an appropriate license relative to your values.

This makes no sense, you want to make sure software gets updated in the future, however small. Permissive licensing allows companies to hide improvements and this in the long term erodes the original. Individuals on the other hand are not bound by legal teams and can work with GPL and similar.

But they wouldn&#x27;t be under any obligation to you. They would be under obligation to whoever they distribute their modifications of your code. That&#x27;s it.

I don’t mind sharing my software with others, even folks who want to make a profit. Of course, that’s easy for me to say since I’ve only released a few small projects open source. But when I do, I make my projects fully public domain. I’m not interested in feeling any sense of obligation to those who try the software out, so I free them from any obligation to me as well.That said, I fully support larger projects being GPL, which I think is a more reasonable license for projects that involve dozens or hundreds of contributors and are depended on by millions around the world. But the role of the MIT and Apache style licenses has always felt a little more confusing.

My conspiracy theory: Stallman&#x27;s &quot;rough edges&quot; were deliberately highlighted and blown out of proportion to discredit GPL and his overall ideology.On one hand we have a guy, who just pointed out that the age of consent is a culture-dependent concept. On the other we have a guy who literally visited Epstein&#x27;s island to fuck minors (as defined by his country of residence).One is now considered &quot;a bit of a problem&quot;. The other is a beloved public figure.

&gt; The GPL and the free software movement is borne out of an earlier era, GenX and younger boomers who lived through seeing their hard work exploited and stolen from them.There may be something to that, but speaking as a GenX&#x27;er myself, I release most of my OSS code using the Apache License. I really don&#x27;t care if anybody - from a single student in a 3rd world country, to a Fortune 50 megacorp - uses the code, so long as they abide by the license.I&#x27;m not going to say there&#x27;s NO circumstance where that might ever change. But to date, that&#x27;s been my approach and I don&#x27;t particularly see it ever changing.

I think attitudes on license reflects on the whole a generational attitudes towards corporate use because the younger generation of software nerds grew up in epoch-boom-times.During ZIRP-boom-times, having a successful popular open source project could be a ticket to kudos and a high paying job and a certain level of responsibility and satisfaction. BigCos spread the money around, and your job as a SWE ended up being gluing together a bunch of these open source pieces to solve corporate problems. And on the whole people felt like their corporate jobs were giving a fair deal, and a decent dividend for the open source work they were doing.In that context why would you pick a license that your generous employer couldn&#x27;t use?The GPL and the free software movement is borne out of an earlier era, GenX and younger boomers who lived through seeing their hard work exploited and stolen from them. Or corporate entities that cut budgets, laid people off en masse, exploded in stock market crisis, etc and suddenly the good will was lost.I think we&#x27;ll see a bit of a resurgence in the GPL, as some people try to protect the work they&#x27;ve done.(I do thnk the personality of Stallman himself has become a bit of a problem to be associated with)

I think the better approach would have been to give the author a choice of what happens.i.e. they could have emailed the author to ask:1. &quot;Would you rather us fork your project (new name), or would you rather donate your project to us under its original name, as well as give us the ability to rename it (which we will)&quot;2. &quot;Would you like a $300 microsoft store gift card as thanks for writing some code we&#x27;re planning to use?&quot;3. &quot;Would you be open to providing a paid ($600 microsoft gift card) 1-hour consulting meeting to ramp our engineers up on your codebase? We won&#x27;t actually listen since our engineers can in fact read, but we&#x27;ll pay you&quot;4. &quot;Also, just in case you don&#x27;t know who microsoft is, we do have a careers page over here, and our team doesn&#x27;t have headcount but other teams do &lt;link&gt;&quot;It sounds like microsoft didn&#x27;t do any of that, which as you say is well within their right, but emailing to ask is polite.

MS would have gone nowhere near said project if it had a GPL license on it. Simply because those companies have fears of virality.

I initially had the same reaction to the MIT license; but it sort of looks like the GPL (or AGPL) wouldn&#x27;t have really prevented this behavior. Microsoft (it sounds like) is making the code available; they&#x27;ve just extended and renamed the project. They could have done exactly the same thing (fork, rename, release under the same license), with the same effects he&#x27;s complaining about (free-loading the consulting time, confusing the community) if he&#x27;d made it AGPL.I mean, consider an alternate timeline. It&#x27;s clear MS had their own, strong vision for the project, that overlapped with but wasn&#x27;t identical to his. Is it actually that much more considerate to show up with two dozen new developers suddenly flooding a single-maintainer project with pull requests, some of which completely restructure the code and re-orient it towards a new vision that the original maintainer might not want?Either the maintainer is now doing loads of unpaid labor for MS, and is the bottleneck; or he ends up having to step back and let the new MS developers bulldoze the project and take it over anyway.What would have been a better approach?

At this point I&#x27;d include some of the code as binary blobs and &quot;pay me for the source!&quot;. In addition to GPL!

Right, dual license is the way in such cases.Give downstream how much they are willing to give upstream.

I released a fun personal project under GPLv3 and the first filed issue was someone saying I should change the license to something friendlier to business interests.Hell no. If they want to profit off my work, pay me. This is something I&#x27;m doing for fun, on my own terms. It’s Free for anyone to use as they want, so long as they keep it Free, too.

(A)GPLv3 does not prevent their projects from being used.That&#x27;s the point!GPL family of licenses would&#x27;ve made a difference in this aspect for libraries (because afair if you link to GPL code, you must be GPL). But for an app? You can use it, fork it, modify it...
Just make sure you make your changes available under the same license. Seems very fair to me.

&gt; what&#x27;s the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything &quot;permissive&quot;.The incentive is generally that people enjoy having their projects used, be that by commercial companies or otherwise.

Only for the next developer. They can do whatever they want, but they aren&#x27;t obligated to contribute anything back.

&gt; And I want others to be able to remix what I make as needed. The more limitations added on a license, the less open it is.It&#x27;s unintuitive, but permissive licenses are not the best way to acheive this. GPL&#x27;s &quot;limitations&quot; are designed to maintain the right and abilty to remix code for the end user. So if say Microsoft forks your library and its fork becomes more popular, they can&#x27;t make it proprietary after capturing the market and effectively stop people from remixing what you made.

I would like a relatively permissive software license which forbids any profiteering (CC-NC but then strictly software).I&#x27;m fine with people using my code, not fine with companies profiteering off my work. If you want to use it commercially, pay for it.

I always choose permissive licenses for personal project, and I often avoid depending on other projects that aren&#x27;t permissive. If I want to know that, if I need to, I can grab the code and change something. And I want others to be able to remix what I make as needed.The more limitations added on a license, the less open it is.

Yeah, as far as I can gather the only thing MS did wrong here is not explicitly crediting the project they forked the code from, and I don&#x27;t get the impression the author would find adding that one sentence to the docs to be adequate redress. I don&#x27;t get why you would take personal offense at a big company forking your code so they can mold it to their purposes - the license allows that. Now whether that&#x27;s the right way for a &quot;friend of the OSS community&quot; to behave is a different question entirely, but anyone who ever bought that horseshit from them has had their head in the sand.

In the present case of Spegel, it wasn&#x27;t in accordance with the license, because the fork removed the attribution.

Note that in this case Microsoft has not been following the license, as they removed the copyright notice<pre><code> Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors
</code></pre>
To replace it by their own. Despite the license says&gt; The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Because the “payment” that you get for its permissive use is the attribution (which can be personal gratification or it can professionally boost your profile&#x2F;opportunities). MSFT robbed them of that.

Ignoring that Microsoft isn&#x27;t following the MIT licensing requirements, this is my same approach with using the MIT license. I create open source software for the benefit of everyone, for profit or not for profit. The only thing I do wish in return is acknowledgement. That&#x27;s why in this case, I&#x27;d reach out to Microsoft to fix that issue, and nothing more.

I’ve released some utility libraries under permissive libraries. I like it when they get used. Even when it’s part of a large company’s closed-source app. Many people don’t like that, and that’s perfectly fine, that’s why there are different choices available.What I’ll never understand is people who release their project with a permissive license and then get upset when a big company distributes their own version of the project in accordance with the license. If you don’t want that sort of appropriation then you need to pick a license that doesn’t allow it.

Remember EEE.Very likely, you&#x27;ll end up with a $MegaCorp-backed competitor driven by goals very different from yours.

&gt; I keep hearing this argument, but I still don&#x27;t understand, what&#x27;s the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything &quot;permissive&quot;.My JS canvas library is licensed using MIT. From my personal perspective, I wouldn&#x27;t have any problem with some $MegaCorp coming along and forking it, and even claiming it as their own creation. But ... why? Because one of the main drivers for my development of the library over the past few years is to proof-of-concept the idea that 2D Canvas API based infographics and interactives can be made - with the help of a JS library - performant, responsive and (most importantly!) as accessible to every end user as reasonably possible. My ideal outcome would be to embarrass other JS canvas library maintainers into taking canvas responsiveness and accessibility seriously. If that needs a $MegaCorp to come along and fork the library to bring my dream closer to reality then I ain&#x27;t gonna stand in their way!Of course I&#x27;d still continue to develop my version of the library - it&#x27;s become my passion and obsession and there&#x27;s always improvements to be made, new ideas to be explored.

Maybe many MIT license users want a big company to take in their projects.Big companies have resources to mimic it anyway, right? If they really want some tech, they can reproduce it.Having a good idea flourish, whether it is in Microsoft&#x27;s hands, manifested within Clojure, or in any other fruitful form, is good enough.There is no license for a raw idea anyway. For the essence of it. Seeing it used means success, it means &quot;you were right&quot;.The secret counsel of idea honor keepers will eventually figure it out and make some kind of repairs.

In this case, there&#x27;s an open source maintainer who was fine with a MIT license, and even helping onboard people from a big tech firm, only to realize that even attribution was too much to ask.Since the terms of the license were violated, there&#x27;s not much to learn about which license was chosen. The only lesson to learn is that big tech will steal everything that isn&#x27;t nailed to the ground, and then some.

Have to agree with this. There&#x27;s an endless list of open source maintainers who publish an MIT-licensed project then are surprised when it is treated as an MIT-licensed project. If you want rights, assert them. No one else is looking out for you. Especially not Microsoft.

To this I can&#x27;t relate at all.If you can&#x27;t use a library because it&#x27;s GPLv3, then the company would need to invest some time and money into reimplementing the features they want. Guess who gets more paid work?

Still that enough isn&#x27;t working for most of my customers, without an assessment from legal and IT, many times getting a commercial one is much easier.

While working for companies, many devs have had the frustrating experience of finding a library that perfectly solves their problem, only to discover that it’s GPL3 or similar and thus strictly off limits due to company policy. Especially if repeated a few times that’s enough to inspire use of permissive licenses, to help avoid that frustration for their future selves (should they change employers) as well as other fellow corporate devs.

If the project is good, the license is hardly ever an obstacle for adoption.At least I can&#x27;t recall any such cases.Do you have any examples?

&gt; Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good?By far the biggest risk for most projects is &quot;nobody notices it and nobody uses it&quot;.And if someone &quot;takes&quot; your project and uses it - you&#x27;ve usually still got it. Software is funny like that.

As @diggan wrote[0] elsewhere in the thread, the issue is not that MIT is permissive but that Microsoft did not honor the requirements of the license (despite it being permissive!):&gt; 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&#x27;t. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put &quot;You must license your project the same as the one you forked from&quot; and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43750670">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43750670</a>

Hi!  Do you work for Microsoft?  There is nothing &quot;non-permissive&quot; about the GPL.  You can use the code however you want.  &quot;Viral&quot; is a perjorative description that Microsoft pioneered the use of to describe the GPL.  The GPL is not a virus that latches onto any code it gets near, without anyone&#x27;s permission. You should not use that term.

One could argue that GPL is very permissive. If you need to use it in a proprietary way in your own company for internal purposes, no problem; if you release software that others use, you have to release the code as well.  I dont want to be using black boxes in this day and age.

One should choose a license that fits them. The problem with GPL licenses is they are viral and non-permissive. As a developer, as soon as I see the GPL I just click away to another repo no matter how good the lib is. I don&#x27;t want people doing that to my projects, so I use Apache&#x2F;MIT or whatever the permissive license that is most prominent for the language I&#x27;m using.

I&#x27;m sorry, but you are way off base.  Use is not restricted by GPL licenses.  People have expressed desires to restrict use of GPL code (what if terrorists or pedophiles or Republicans use this code??) and Stallman and it&#x27;s defenders have not allowed any restrictions of use.

&gt; I don’t care if someone makes a mountain of money by forking my permissively licensed code, that is in some sense the objective and I lose nothing by it.What if your code is used to actively make the world worse? Is that part of your goal? There&#x27;s no shortage of corporations making mountains of money doing exactly that, after all.

The great thing about permissive licenses is that it maximizes the utility of the code. I don’t care if someone makes a mountain of money by forking my permissively licensed code, that is in some sense the objective and I lose nothing by it.This strain of rent-seeking behavior by some that open source their code but then believe they are entitled to compensation or forced contributions if the wrong people use it per license is distasteful and a bad look. It highlights the extent to which for many people the motivations behind their “open source” are not actually, you know, open source. For many, open source is about the utility of the source code and nothing more.Licenses like AGPLv3 aren’t just about the utility of open source, they try to litigate concepts like fairness and justice at the same time, and open source isn’t a great venue for that.

You might not care, but your downstream users might care about being locked in.

&gt; What&#x27;s good about being &quot;permissive&quot;?it is good if you do not plan to go for violators anywayI made some photos and published them on Wikimedia Commons (say, of random bicycle infrastructure).I am fine with people using them without attribution, I expect that their use overall furthers my goals rather than damages it and if I would release it on CC-BY-SA 4.0 or similar I would not go to court over missing attribution.Therefore I selected CC0, no reason to make things more complicated only to people following license.I selected AGPL&#x2F;GPL for some software where I would be happy to burn pile of money in case of license violation, up to and including litigating it in court for 10 years.

&gt; What&#x27;s good about being &quot;permissive&quot;?For me personally, because I believe in freedom and permissive licenses grant more freedom than others do. I don&#x27;t really care for licenses which attach unnecessary strings to what recipients can and cannot do with the software.

well, it&#x27;s worth noting that since microsoft is also releasing the source code, the same thing could have happened with GPL. Though I suspect the author would be even less happy if they had done all the same stuff (minus removing the copyright notice, even) and then not released the source, so that&#x27;s not me arguing against the GPLI also think in practice microsoft would have been less likely to actually take the code, and probably would just have reimplemented the ideas in it if it was GPL

It&#x27;s bizarre to me how, despite people criticizing the GPL and GNU as too ideological, the people you refer to - the permissive people - somehow seem even MORE ideological. The GPL to me seems pragmatic - sure technically a minimal license like WTFPL (ignore all its legal issues for now) is some kind of minimalist idea of pure objective freedom. But the GPL has some key &quot;restrictions&quot; that aren&#x27;t really restrictions and produce an ecosystem that WORKS. Meanwhile the permissive ecosystem is just waiting to be scooped up by bigcos at their whim.

These days there is almost nothing good with permissive if your project gets used by mega corps specifically. They don’t want your opinions, your expertise, they don’t want to share anything back, they won’t pay you, and they will even avoid giving credit – the lowest of the low. And somehow we’re still worrying about inconveniencing megacorps as if that mattered, at all!I would love a license that says if your company has a physical presence in 10+ countries, one of its executive owns a yacht, or even is publicly listed, you need to purchase a license from the owners. (As a bonus, if the company is primarily selling subscriptions, the license should be in subscription form in return). Free (GPL&#x2F;MIT&#x2F;whatever) for everyone else.Even such a crude stupid license would be an improvement over today for many. Most importantly I think a large amount of code is already closed today, because of the risks. This results in worse technical solutions, eg SaaS instead of libs &amp; docker images that are easy to fix yourself. I don’t understand the fear mongering about licenses that Amazon and Microsoft don’t like. At the absolute minimum, contribute the changes back.

&gt; What&#x27;s good about being &quot;permissive&quot;?They want widespread usage of their project, but always decry not like that when Amazon or Microsoft is responsible for the usage.

The author didn&#x27;t seem to request payment in monetary form but expected some kind of contributions back which would have helped both sides. It would probably be difficult to include some guarantees about upstream contributions into the license but interesting takeaway.

This is the reason why I am so confused by the strain of open source thought which says that large companies exploit OSS maintainers and ought to pay them.Maintainers often pick permissive licenses specifically because they want companies to use the code. They want their project to grow and be adopted, and they reason that GPL would stifle adoption.I don&#x27;t really like the tactic of making your code as convenient as possible for anyone to grab off the shelf when they want to use it, and then later turning around and saying they should pay you. Why not do the payment part up front (by GPL-licensing the code and then selling dual licenses to interested companies)? Because then you wouldn&#x27;t have any takers. Better to wait until people have integrated it into their systems before informing them that they ought to pay you.

I think for me, I’ve been a beneficiary of using MIT licenses (in minor ways, no large or famous projects) and so when I publish code I prefer sharing as MIT.Maybe I should reconsider, but I never thought anyone would remove an MIT license. That sounds like plagiarism (though they did put a thank you in their repo)

&gt; Most contributionsHow did you count?&gt; most popular librariesHow did you measure?I agree this is the case for Linux kernel, for example. 
But I don&#x27;t know if it applies to entire ecosystem.&gt; Yes, that&#x27;s the whole point of open source?I think it&#x27;s a gross oversimplification. For some reason there is not much code in public domain.People do want different things in exchange for their work. Hence different licenses. Some want to receive credit for their work, some want to enrich the opensource ecosystem, make it more sustainable. Which brings me to my final point.&gt; are from employees on their paid corporate time to begin withIt&#x27;s natural for companies to open their code under permissive licenses. Very often such code is just a first free sample of whatever they are selling: consulting services, a SaaS, etc.. So it makes sense to have an attitude &quot;do whatever with the code, just please-please-please use it&quot;.For an individual developer working on a one-man project the incentives structure can&#x27;t be similar to one of a company. Hence my trouble understating why people pick MIT&#x2F;Apache&#x2F;BSD for their projects.

&gt; exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any goodYes, that&#x27;s the whole point of open source? Most contributions to the most popular libraries and frameworks (not necessarily end products) are from employees on their paid corporate time to begin with.

It&#x27;s very simple, the reason people favor a more permissive license is generally the same reason they open source their code: You want other people to use your project.Obviously, a more permissive license is going to let people do whatever they want with &quot;your&quot; code, as it doesn&#x27;t really belong to you anymore. If you want tight control then it&#x27;s a bad choice, but a more permissive license is almost always going to mean your project is more widely used, for better or worse.

It means that more people and companies can use your software. Plenty of orgs will avoid GPL and especially AGPL software out of an abundance of caution or because they legitimately need to link and customize the software for it to be useful for their business case, but do not want to release these (often very small &amp; customer dependant) modifications.

Permissive licenses are about contributing to the trade as a whole, rather than individualism.Some of us don&#x27;t believe that the code we write is &quot;ours&quot; in any meaningful way, and don&#x27;t think strangers using it have any obligation to us just because we typed it once long ago.Personally, I am happy if my code is of use. If people are using it for evil I&#x27;ll fight the evil, not try to withhold good things from the world to avoid that possible case. It is an approach that is rooted in sufficiency mindset, rather than capitalistic notions of false scarcity.My project being forked doesn&#x27;t cost me anything at all, but caring about it being forked or enforcing a license would cost me time and energy I have no desire to spend. Permissive licenses accurately communicate the levels of fucks I give, while keeping assholes from trying to sue me over having used my contributions to the collective wealth of the profession.If I make the world better for everyone, of course a bunch of people who never did anything for me are going to be a part of &quot;everyone&quot;, basically by definition. What is wild here is that Microsoft didn&#x27;t follow the extremely minimal requirements of the permissive license.

Because when people start an OS project, they want to help people and grow. MIT license is the best license if your goal is to help other people. It&#x27;s the worst license for building a business, but that&#x27;s usually not what people think about when starting a project

Due to some quirks of software developer hiring practices, people write OSS not because they want to write OSS, but because they want the kudos of having written OSS. The downside is someone might use their OSS.

&gt; I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissiveWhat&#x27;s good about being &quot;permissive&quot;?I keep hearing this argument, but I still don&#x27;t understand, what&#x27;s the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything &quot;permissive&quot;.Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good?AGPLv3 still allows forking, still allows making profit (if your business model is sane). But it is at least backed by some prominent figures and organizations, and there are precedents where companies were forced to comply.

Microsoft does, it because they know they can get away with it.  Its in Microsofts DNA in my opinion. The company has a long history of such practices, decades. Occasionally they meet someone who has a enough clout to hold them to account.  Sometimes they have even tried to copy patented information and get away with it. ( Example Microsoft tried to steal the idea of product activation. The owner had deep pockets enough for the court case cost ~$15M and won several hundred million from Microsoft.)  Also, Many companies that disclosed information to Microsoft under NDA found Microsoft developed very similar products

Leaving off the attribution makes it stolen. They stole credit for the code, in violation of its license.

Stole.When you download a movie from torrents, you don&#x27;t submit it for an Oscar nomination claiming you&#x27;ve made it. You just copy a file to your computer intending to kill a few hours of your time while playing it back.Microsoft®™, however, not only copied the code, but claimed it&#x27;s theirs.

The term &quot;research theft&quot; is widely accepted in academia:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;116th-congress&#x2F;house-bill&#x2F;8356&#x2F;titles?overview=closed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;116th-congress&#x2F;house-bill&#x2F;8356...</a>The original researchers still have their ideas and work, it was &quot;just&quot; copied. Still, we call it stealing and theft.In this case, code was taken and the credit was stolen.

Do you own the word?<pre><code> 2 (transitive, of ideas, words, music, a look, credit, etc.) To appropriate without giving credit or acknowledgement.
</code></pre>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;steal#Verb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;steal#Verb</a>

Copied, not stole. It&#x27;s unfortunate that the two are so often conflated.

<pre><code> “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
</code></pre>
― Bill Gates

Not just forked. Microsoft stole the code without attribution, violating the license terms. Truly shameful behavior. Best case, it was a single engineer who was tasked with duplicating the functionality, but chose the lazier, fraudulent route and was even too lazy to clean things up entirely. Still, MS should own up, correct the record, and make this right.

Could people say they used &quot;AI&quot; to build the new code?

Yep. This is called a commercial license.What people who want such things really are after is the leverage to dictate a form of morality - if you dont have money, you are allowed to use the project for free, and give back advertising&#x2F;clout. But if you have money, or could get a lot of money for said project, then they want their pay day.

&gt; I wish an even stronger license existed which allowed the original author to dictate who can build on top of the projectSuch licenses exist. They&#x27;re just not Free or Open Source. They can&#x27;t be, by definition.

Have you seen the license of llama models from Meta?&gt; 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the 
monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, 
or Licensee&#x27;s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the 
preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta...ref: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meta-llama&#x2F;llama&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;LICENSE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meta-llama&#x2F;llama&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;LICENSE</a>But again, not open source...

I wish people would seriously consider (A)GPL for their projects more often. It hasn&#x27;t happened here, though has certainly happened in the past without anyone knowing - (A)GPL would make it hard for them to make a closed source &quot;fork&quot;.In fact, I wish an even stronger license existed which allowed the original author to dictate who can build on top of the project to avoid exactly these kinds of situations where a powerful actor completely disempowers the authors while technically following the license (I assume MS will &quot;fix&quot; their error by fixing the licensing information but will continue to compete with Spegel with the intent to make it irrelevant).

No there aren&#x27;t. You can make changes to AGPLv3 software without publishing it anywhere. The only requirement is that you make your changes available in source form to anyone that you distribute changes to, which may be entirely private, or involve no one besides yourself.

A bit. There are licenses that require people to publish their changes, though, and that is almost certainly what the poster meant.

&gt; Most opensource licenses are that you are required to publish your changesThis isn&#x27;t true either. You can privately fork AGPLv3 software without violating the license. You only have to provide the source (on demand!) to people who you provide the software to in executable form (where &quot;executable form&quot; includes network based access to the services executing the software in the case of the AGPL).

To provide changes upstream, the maintainer must accept the change.
Most opensource licenses are that you are required to publish your changes. But not upstream.
As you wrote, there is no license that forces any &quot;pull requests&quot;.The MIT license is the &quot;easiest&quot; license because there are no responsibility for the maintainer..

&gt; Software released under an MIT license allows for forking and modifications, without any requirement to contribute these changes back.This sentence is true but a bit confusing, because there are no licenses that require anyone to contribute changes back upstream.

if only you had kept reading 2 more sentences after the one you quoted you&#x27;d know:<pre><code> &quot;The license does not allow removing the original license and purport that the code was created by someone else. It looks as if large parts of the project were copied directly from Spegel without any mention of the original source&quot;</code></pre>

Exactly.  Microsoft has been doing exactly this kind of crap since their very founding.  The counter to it has existed for decades: GPL.  And now AGPL for web stuff.  How do you think the Linux kernel and GNU runtime have survived this long without the MS Embrace and Extend?  GPL.

&gt; Spegel was published with an MIT license. Software released under an MIT license allows for forking and modifications, without any requirement to contribute these changes back.If that&#x27;s what the license says, why is the author complaining? Microsoft is complying with the license.That&#x27;s what you get for not picking the one of the license from the GPL family.&gt; However, I am not the first and unfortunately not the last person to come across this David versus Goliath-esque experience.Again, this situation was completely avoidable. Stallman had foreseen this kind of situations literally forty years ago. That&#x27;s why the Free Software movement exists.Tangentially related: has anyone notice how the whole Grafana ecosystem is going strong and unaffected by forks and corporate take-overs? I&#x27;m pretty sure that the AGPL license is playing a big role into that.

The best you could hope for in these situations is perhaps a job. It&#x27;s not uncommon to see not just in open source but in business in general that the large player will try to extract business knowledge and reimplement themselves. The code isn&#x27;t the value, it&#x27;s the people maintaining it and the community or customers using it. I&#x27;ve seen it happen with Google and a real business also. So I think ultimately cooperation turns into coopetition where you&#x27;re going to compete until some agreement can be reached. In a business case, Google fell flat on its face and acquired the company I was working at. In the case of open source I&#x27;ve raised seen it turn into an acquisition as we&#x27;ve seen the forks are really about code ownership for something they run as as managed services or use internally. They&#x27;re rarely buying it for the people or community.

It&#x27;s that a lot pof people want to use the &#x27;free couch&#x27; label to attract a crowd, but when they spot someone rich, they want those marks to pay.

Almost, except the sign said &quot;Couch provided courtesy of Philip Laine as long as this sign is kept intact&quot;. And Microsoft removed the sign and replaced it with their own &quot;Free couch from Microsoft&quot; sign.

If you don&#x27;t want people to fork your code, don&#x27;t explicitly give them permission to fork your code. Its like if you put your couch on the curb with a sign on it saying &quot;FREE COUCH&quot; and then coming home and freaking out because your couch is gone.

To add some missing context: the MIT license is so small I can embed it into this post.Here it is:<pre><code> Copyright (c) &lt;year&gt; &lt;copyright holders&gt;
 
 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining 
 a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), 
 to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation 
 the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, 
 and&#x2F;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 &quot;AS IS&quot;, 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.

</code></pre>
Further reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIT_License" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIT_License</a>

That&#x27;s why you release projects like these under restrictive licences.Far too many times big company&#x27;s take what they choose and give you nothing. Use licenses for your advantage, heck dual license if needed. Not sure what the desire is of a Eutopia open source world view, where not everyone has the vision or plays by the rules anyway.

It is a fairly standard practice in at least some open source communities to add copyright notices to files that people have changed significantly, although there is no well defined minimum threshold for how much permits them to add a copyright notice. Thus, someone else can come along, fork the project, add copyright notices to all of the files and then give the impression that they wrote them, since there is no attribution aside from the one LICENSE file that you wrote. The git history might show the truth, but if they copy the files into a fresh git repository, that metadata will be lost. Projects take files from one another all the time, so there is no guarantee that they will preserve your commit history and then anyone curious who wrote the code needs to do digital archaeology.That said, file level copyright notices are not perfect (since only the VCS shows who added what lines and that might not be preserved), but it is better than nothing and it is something that is guaranteed to persist as long as people are abiding by licenses. If they are not, that is copyright infringement and the copyright holder can do things like send cease and desist notices in response to the copyright notices being removed.Also, I must emphasize that I am not a lawyer, but one might argue that it was not willful infringement if someone removed a copyright notice from 1 file by claiming it had been a mistake. However, if they remove it from all files, then nobody is going to believe it was not willful.

Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files.Technically if there&#x27;s no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.

I would say: absolutely no (ianal). But I&#x27;ve had stand up arguments with colleagues in the recent past that I was unable to win. They wouldn&#x27;t even ask the legal team for an opinion. But it&#x27;s nice to see some evidence here that I was correct.

It&#x27;s not required, but it&#x27;s generally safer to put a notice saying who owns the copyright and what license the file is released under at the top of each file. Some licenses like MIT, the BSD licenses, Zlib, etc are short enough that you can include the full license text in the notice, and others like GPL provide sample copyright header text to include. Here&#x27;s an example of this from a random file in the SDL source code: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libsdl-org&#x2F;SDL&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;src&#x2F;video&#x2F;SDL_blit.c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libsdl-org&#x2F;SDL&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;src&#x2F;video&#x2F;SDL_bl...</a>Obviously Microsoft is still committing copyright infringement and in the wrong here. However, if the author had copyright notices in each file and then Microsoft stripped them out or changed the copyright information, it would make it harder for them to brush it off with &quot;oops, we forgot to commit the correct LICENSE file&quot; like I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll do here.

&gt; but you never put copyright notices in your files.I thought having a LICENSE file in the project&#x27;s root directory was sufficient. Is it not the case?

He had a top level license file that presumably applies to all files. He would not be the first to do that and will not be the last.That said, if Microsoft had forked before the LICENSE was added or stated somewhere, they were reusing all-rights-reserved code, which is definitely copyright infringement. Again, I am not a lawyer.

Just the absence of a license generally means the creator has all right reserved by default. You don’t need a license in every file because in much of the world copyright is given by default to the creator. A licensed file is permission to do something with that copyright material.

I am not a lawyer, but I imagine a lawyer would find it alright if they just restore the missing notice. I do not imagine there is much else that can be done here since he cannot really claim to have been significantly damaged by the absence of a single line, but these matters are best discussed with attorneys.

It says &quot;copyright microsoft&quot; in that license file. Just because THAT file is MIT is irrelevant. They didn&#x27;t retain the original license file. They should have APPENDED to it, keeping the original copyright holder name, otherwise it&#x27;s just blatant copyright infringement that coincidentally is released under the same license.

&gt; 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.&gt; 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 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 the original author’s fault for not including per file copyright notices, such that Microsoft could add theirs and be the sole one listed in every file.I would not be surprised if Microsoft’s legal department doing a scan of public repositories for stolen code mistook him for infringing on “their code” given that they have no information that he authored it rather than their employee. It sounds absurd, but it has happened. I know for a fact the sg3 utils author added copyright notices to his code examples because he was getting contacted by companies, whose engineers incorporated his code into their projects without attribution, that thought he had stolen their code:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;doug-gilbert&#x2F;sg3_utils">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;doug-gilbert&#x2F;sg3_utils</a>I know that because he told me by email in 2013.

If they forked from before the author had a license, it’s worse. MS had no right to use it.I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake.

I initially was going to say:Failing to abide by the MIT license is copyright infringement. My advice is to contact these guys: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwarefreedom.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwarefreedom.org&#x2F;</a> They likely can file a cease and desist on your behalf.However, I took a closer look at the files in question. The MIT license requires that they retain and provide copyright notices, but you never put copyright notices in your files. The only place where you appear to have placed a copyright notice is in the LICENSE file:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;spegel-org&#x2F;spegel&#x2F;commit&#x2F;23ed0d60f66dd2923ca03611c592d33e61e5ffee">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;spegel-org&#x2F;spegel&#x2F;commit&#x2F;23ed0d60f66dd292...</a>Things become interesting when I look at their LICENSE file. They appear to have tried to relicense this to Apache 2.0 before backpedaling and reinstating the MIT license:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;peerd&#x2F;commit&#x2F;473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f0b8924c05a95dbe144">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;peerd&#x2F;commit&#x2F;473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f...</a>Unless they forked from a very early version of the project that did not even have the LICENSE file, they removed the sole copyright notice you had in the repository. That brings us back to my original thoughts, which is that they have committed copyright infringement, and you should contact OSS friendly lawyers about it.I am not a lawyer, but I do contribute to various OSS projects and all of the ones to which I have ever contributed have copyright notice headers at the top of every file to ensure proper attribution is maintained no matter where that code is used. Beyond having that sole missing copyright notice reinstated, I am not sure what else you could expect since none of your files have proper copyright headers in them. The SFLC guys would be in a better position to advise you, as they are actual lawyers.

&gt;chore: change to MIT licenseWhat does &quot;chore&quot; mean in this context? Is the license just leftover from some MS open source template? If so there is perhaps some leeway, and the author maybe just didn&#x27;t realize he needed to use the original MIT license file including the notices and not just a template one grabbed from the internet.Any other explanation for such a &quot;relicensing&quot; would be extremely worrisome.

The commit histories for the LICENSE files in the two repositories are rather interesting. The original author placed a single copyright notice in that file. Microsoft on the other hand published it with their copyright notice and a Apache 2.0 license in place of the original copyright notice and MIT license. They also put copyright Microsoft and license apache 2.0 headers on all files. They then changed the Apache 2.0 license to MIT, but left their copyright notice in place of the original copyright notice in LICENSE:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;peerd&#x2F;commit&#x2F;473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f0b8924c05a95dbe144">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;peerd&#x2F;commit&#x2F;473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f...</a>Unless they forked a very early version that did not even have the LICENSE file, such that they never removed the original notice, this looks like copyright infringement to me. That said, I am not a lawyer.

It might be just a decision to own the code as it probably ends up in production, e.g. run codeql and other tools to scan it, have controlled releases and limit access to the repo. They might have had some other stuff to change and did not want to bother doing it in the original repo with unexpected timelines from the repo owner. A fork is a logical step for a company.

I wonder if there exists any system in place that this could backfire rapidly if this could be proved on some level. Unfortunately, world needs examples and consequences before anything changes. If this worked for this particular engineer, others will follow and will attempt the same. It will become a norm in big corps.

Dang, that is too good.There is definitely a type of person who cheats, lies, throws people&#x2F;teams under the bus, breaks the rules, and cuts corners to get ahead. The ones who are able to not get caught are rewarded.This is not only a software phenomenon, but almost all aspects of life.

&gt; I suspect that what&#x27;s happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone&#x27;s leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet.It just so happens that the Microsoft engineer who originally changed the license in GitHub went from Senior to Principal engineer at Microsoft in the past two months (according to LinkedIn). So you probably aren&#x27;t far off.

That was my initial guess as well. I am glad that the author chose to take a high ground instead of naming and shaming the people behind this egregious act.

I suspect that what&#x27;s happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone&#x27;s leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. They went to their manager with &quot;hey I&#x27;ve got this great idea&quot; and followed it up with your code a few weeks later. Of course, this only works if they claim they were &quot;inspired&quot; by Spegel to &quot;write their own code&quot;.

I actually worked on an open source project, the maintainer was convinced by microsoft to relicense the project for &quot;collaboration&quot; - I left the project for this reason and as far as I can tell msft never did anything for them except for keep giving them the &quot;honor&quot; of being a microsoft mvp.

If you want to have the copyright license put into it do a DMCA take down. They&#x27;re in breach of your copyright license and therefore do not have rights to distribute your copyrighted material.

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&#x27;t fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free.I guess the concept is playing by the same rules?

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&#x27;t really exclude businesses from using it. There just aren&#x27;t enough installations outside of commercial spaces for it to be relevant.

As someone commented above, commercial use is an issue. Creative commons is good, but the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. It seems to be that the crucial issue here is the duplication of the project by forking.I am unclear of where the boundaries could and should be, but in essence we want money to flow into community source projects. Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. If they don&#x27;t want to pay, they should not be able to profit from the work of the community.

So only hobbyist software? NC applies to use as well as contribution.

&gt; My personal thought is that we need a new kind of license: community open source. No corporations, just community.It exists: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativecommons.org&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;by-nc-sa&#x2F;4.0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativecommons.org&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;by-nc-sa&#x2F;4.0&#x2F;</a>

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 at any cost. They may collaborate as long as their interest in profit is served, but otherwise, it is back to &quot;Embrace, Extend, Extinguish&quot; [1].This lack of community ethic is endemic in corporations. It is also an existential threat to our community. Profit at any cost is not collaboration. It is predatory.And yes, I know, corpies and other greedist will vote this down, blah, blah, blah.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.#:~:text=Microsoft%20Corporation%2C%20253%20F.,such%20as%20Netscape%20and%20Java." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...</a>[edit clarity]

Getting forked by Microsoft