9 ms·

> 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

by diggan 2y ago

> 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'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 "Microsoft <3 Open Source" but it's never been true, and seems it still isn't, just like "Security is the #1 priority" also never been true for them. Here is the previous time I can remember that they did something similar: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287 - The Day AppGet Died (keivan.io) 1930 points | May 27, 2020 | 550 comments The best advice for open source maintainers who are being approached by large tech companies is to be very wary, and let them contribute/engage like everyone else if they're interested, instead of setting up private meetings and eventually get "forked-but-not-really" without attribution.

vasco 2y ago
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.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Not just a megacorp. Anyone for a commercial purpose
  - freeamz 2y ago
    Hmm, think we ought to judge on a case by case basis. However, for megacorp and especially banks that has almost 0 to 1% access to cost of capital, vs rest of us who at at 20 - 30 % ( for credit card, loan sharks), then there should be a different license for these people. There should be a GLP type license adjusted to the cost of the capital.
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      Why, if they are paying their employees and aim to earn from their enterprise, should so disrespect your time and IP as to attempt to not pay you? Tho pricing tailored to customers works, as long as it's efficient and non-zero.
    - chii 2y ago
      There should not be any difference between small or large entitise in how you deal with them as an opensource maintainer. Just because someone has more money (or less), should not automatically mean you treat them with more leniency or ethics. You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.
      - formerly_proven 2y ago
        > You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes. Why? Most businesses don't entertain standard rates, either. It's case-by-case negotiations ("call us", "request quote"). Why should I, as a private person putting stuff out there for free, set up "my standard" and stick to it?
        keepamovin 2y ago
        Because otherwise it's not a value, it's a whim. But I guess they don't mean set the same price for everyone - but rather stick to your values in what you do.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - keepamovin 2y ago
        This is The Way
      - vasco 2y ago
        Interacting with faceless entities with the power to buy multiple countries the same way you'd interact with some interested independent young person wanting to learn. Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat people differently from corporations, and random small and medium corporations differently than huge megacorps without losing any sleep. Specially in business, charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach.
- buran77 2y ago
  Because they'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's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'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'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.
  - latexr 2y ago
    > especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them? Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply. Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course free to contribute or fork within the constraints of the license.” Scenario 3: Microsoft contacts (…). You reply “sure! I charge $X/hour or I could do a flat rate of $Y for the meeting. Is that acceptable to you?” What basis would they have for taking you to court in any situation? As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
    - MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago
      “Ending up in court” vs “Microsoft suing you.” I think the implication is that if MS simply decided to unilaterally fork the project and change the license, the OS maintainer’s only real recourse is the court system (and the court of public opinion), and that would be expensive.
      - 2y ago
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  It'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't see why they wouldn't pay it. Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.
  - Maxious 2y ago
    Very possible, from the in repo documentation (which credits Spegel yet again) https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md it seems like there was a particular engineer at Microsoft who was working on Azure Container Registry who found it useful to integrate Azure Container Registry. If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably. Considering how often that happens VS how little times stories like that appear on the frontpage of HN, I'd wager a guess that we wouldn't be discussing it like we're discussing the current license violation.
  - evantbyrne 2y ago
    You are supposed to keep the original license for a fork. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license.
    - WD-42 2y ago
      It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.
- dizhn 2y ago
  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't work out, all he thought he could realistically do is start accepting donations.
- delusional 2y ago
  I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world. Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it'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'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'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't currently possible with our legal framework, but we should work to make it possible.
  - luqtas 2y ago
    > We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways like what? continue to use (pay) for their products and wait for regulations coming from lobbyist countries? /s
  - diggan 2y ago
    > Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it'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're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. I agree with you, if we're talking about people acting as individual humans collaborating together on FOSS. But this is really about a for-profit corporation acting in its own interests, using people to do its "deeds". Then I think it makes a lot of sense to treat any "Hey, could we chat to you about your project?" with a great deal of skepticism, because they have a goal with that conversation, it it's unlikely to align with your own goals, in most cases. Ultimately, people from that corporation is reaching out to you because there is a potential/perceived benefit coming out of that conversation that they want to have with you. If it isn't extremely clear to you what that exact benefit is, I'd say the smart thing to do is being cautious, to avoid situations like this which happen from time to time it seems.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  Won't you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ > No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers. > Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help." > They aren'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. > Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit. > They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."
- siva7 2y ago
  Yes, charity. That's exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pknerd 2y ago
    What else can you expect from the company that was founded by Gates?(Ref, SCP,QDOS, IBM)
  - echelon 2y ago
    Open source has been hijacked by trillion dollar hyperscalers. It's time we switch to "fair source" or "equitable source". Put MAU/DAU/ARR/market cap limits in your license. Open to everyone with a market cap under $1B or revenues under $100M. All others, please see our "business@" email. Place viral terms like the AGPL that requires that all other systems touched by your code to be open - especially the backend/server components that typically remain hidden. We're giving away power to these companies for free, and they use their scale and reach to turn our software into a larger moat that ensnares us and taxes us in everything else we do. Your contribution of open source in one area might bubble up as Microsoft or Google's ability to control what you see or how you distribute software to customers. It's intangible and hard to describe these insane advantages and network effects big players like this have to lay people, but I know we as software engineers understand this. Open source has been weaponized against us. They get free labor and use our work to tax us, pin us down, out compete us, and control us. We need to fight back.
    - ashoeafoot 2y ago
      Those companies can produce legal abstraction hacking solutions faster then you can develop shielding ones. You needs something poisonous ,costing money or work with each usage preventing mass adoption without a complete rewrite .
      - 2y ago
- Matl 2y ago
  > Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires. I agree with you 100% but I'm guessing getting approached by Microsoft can be pretty ego boosting, which is what these companies exploit.
- shortrounddev2 2y ago
  Seems more like a networking opportunity personally
phillebaba 2y ago
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.
- brianwawok 2y ago
  Do you think this stops the fork? It’s not like they can’t read the code.
  - phillebaba 2y ago
    Well your license is only as good as you are able to enforce it. Even with the law there is no guarantees. I grew up thinking that people would follow the spirit of open source rather than the specific letter of the law. This is obviously not true, and probably never has been.
    - udev4096 2y ago
      No license stops someone from spinning off an OSS project into their closed-sourced enterprise offering. It's just sad that most corps see nothing wrong with this
      - Ajedi32 2y ago
        GPL definitely does.
        nordsieck 2y ago
        > GPL definitely does. Clearly it doesn't because companies get caught doing it with GPL software all the time. ... and the only recourse is to sue them into compliance.
        2y ago
ixwt 2y ago
Microsoft at it again with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  MIT License.
  - pritambaral 2y ago
    Violated by the removal of author's copyright notice.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Adding the copyright notice to be in compliance, does not change the fact that the author has chosen a licence that allows anyone, including Microsoft, to do whatever they feel like, without giving back. So eventually, with this bad publicity, they will add the copyright notice, and move on with whatever else they are doing, in full compliance.
      - Nemo_bis 2y ago
        Microsoft did not bother to respect even the MIT license, so clearly the license is not the problem.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Not arguing for Microsoft, rather the fact that people put out MIT licenced stuff out there, or similar, arguing how bad GPL happens to be, and then get all up in arms when companies do exactly what the licence allows for. Microsoft might not have fully complied with the licence, adding the copyright notice to fix that, won't change a millimeter from what they are doing.
        Nemo_bis 2y ago
        I don't disagree with the general point but in this case we're looking at what (seems to be) a blatant copyright violation. It would not be any more or less of a violation if the infringed license had been a more or less permissive one, because the license has not been followed. Sure, the MIT is very permissive so it's very easy for Microsoft to correct their repository so that it's in compliance for the future, but they cannot correct the past. (Unless the original authors allow for it.) The MIT license, being so short, does not have a provision about curing infringements. So Microsoft seems to be ok with the risk of being sued for infringement etc. That's not something you can correct with your personal decisions as author.
breggles 2y ago
Reading this made me think of AppGet, too
ghuntley 2y ago
See also https://isdotnetopen.com https://isdotnetopen.com and https://ghuntley.com/fracture https://ghuntley.com/fracture
- johnisgood 2y ago
  @pjmlp, thoughts?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Nothing is new, I have mentioned multiple times that Microsoft management undoes the great work from .NET team. Also as polyglot developer, while I happen to have my preferences in regards to technology, I am not married with any of them. Being MVP, Champion, or whatever program each megacorp happens to have, was never something I saw value in. Never make a specific technology, or company, part of your identity as person.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      I'm only pinging you because I think a couple of days (or weeks, even) ago you or someone else mentioned it is open source (?), so I was wondering what's going on.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        It is licensed as such, with some gaps versus .NET Framework and VS features.
        johnisgood 2y ago
        Hmm, okay. In any case I have a lot of misconceptions about .NET, TBH.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - neonsunset 2y ago
giancarlostoro 2y ago
> The best advice for open source maintainers who are being approached by large tech companies is to be very wary Drop them a consultation fee in the thousands per hour, get something out of it at least. If they're going to reimplement your project, there'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.
Y_Y 2y ago
> Gates: OH, I DIDN'T GET RICH BY WRITING A LOT OF CHECKS. > Gates: ( fiendish laughter ) https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E14/1158256 https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E14/1158256
anonym29 2y ago
Microsoft runs on trust... like a car runs on gasoline
SamuelAdams 2y ago
Another example here, Google forked a GCS fuse driver and the author found out later and posted on HN about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35790223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35790223 Edit: apparently Google did not use the author's codebase, instead using an Apache 2.0 licensed codebase [1] explained here [2]. [1]: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gcp-filestore-csi-driver https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gcp-filestore-csi-driver [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35863944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35863944
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
yownie 2y ago
The cultural amnesia about how these companies have operated in the past and continue to operate just continues to boggle me. It's as if we've learned nothing about exploitative corporation behavior for the last 20-30 years even though it's in the news EVERY other day.
- ohgr 2y ago
  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 …
- pjmlp 2y ago
  What can you expect when the same group of folks has given the control of the Web to Google served on a plate?
redbell 2y ago
> Not sure how people fell so hard for "Microsoft <3 Open Source" but it's never been true I think it's important to highlight that the "Microsoft <3 Linux" narrative deserves some scrutiny too: (https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbp1m8/for_anyone_that_thinks_microsoft_loves_linux/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbp1m8/for_anyone_th...)
- onehair 2y ago
  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
babarock 2y ago
"breaking the licenses"? "without attribution"? Did we read the same article?
- diggan 2y ago
  If you'd care to be a bit more specific, I might be actually be able to explain something to you.
  - palata 2y ago
    I am genuinely interested: everybody here says that they removed the copyright headers. But when I browse through the Spegel sources, they do not contain a copyright header... To me it's the Spegel author's fault: there should be a copyright header in every single file, such that Microsoft would have to keep it.
    - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
      MIT license doesn't require copyright headers. You need to credit the authors even if the files don't have headers.
      - palata 2y ago
        Microsoft does credit the authors on their README. Maybe it's not exactly the right way to do it, but they do it. Now if it's not the right way to do it, what about opening a PR and asking to change it? Instead of writing a blog post to complain about them? Now maybe those engineers thought they did well, will get issues internally because of the bad publicity for Microsoft, and next time they want to use an open source project their legal department will be even more of a pain in the ass because if they aren't, then random people on the Internet use that to do bad publicity for the company. Why not assuming that they are in good faith here? There are enough reasons to hate Microsoft other than this one.
        MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
fidotron 2y ago
It'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 "brain rape" 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.
orochimaaru 2y ago
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.
- robmccoll 2y ago
  You are mistaken. The license explicitly allows it subject to the terms of the license: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Microsoft didn't follow these terms. They copied "substantial portions of the Software" and didn't include the notice.
  - palata 2y ago
    Which notice? None of the *.go source files I have opened in Spegel contain a notice. Microsoft cannot remove a notice that does not exist... In my opinion, it's the Spegel author's fault: they should have added a notice in every single file!
    - tedivm 2y ago
      The "notice" is the literal license file. It is illegal to strip someone else's license from their work. It doesn't matter that they replaced MIT with MIT, because they stripped the author and attribution from it. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE If you read that file you'd think that Microsoft was the copyright holder, but they very clearly aren't.
      - palata 2y ago
        > but they very clearly aren't. Peerd seems very different from Spegel, so Microsoft does hold quite a bit of copyright over Peerd. Now I genuinely wonder if the main LICENSE should say "copyright Spegel and Microsoft", or if somewhere in the repo Microsoft should just have a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file?
noisy_boy 2y ago
> Not sure how people fell so hard for "Microsoft <3 Open Source" Give them a (somewhat) open source IDE and they start believing you are friend of open source in general.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  There's also WSL, .NET Core, they own GitHub and continue to host a lot of stuff for free, and more things I'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's bottom line more than it does open source developers' (isn't it nice that we can now run Linux things right in Windows? How convenient that you don'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
  - trelane 2y ago
    Yep. Microsoft loves open source. Free Software and especially user freedom, not so much.
Tireings 2y ago
Or it was just a team inside Microsoft and he thought "Microsoft" talked to him and saw already dollar signs? Open source license is there for reasons, he can sue them if they did it wrong.
- cestith 2y ago
  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.
lurk2 2y ago
> Seems it isn'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?
- j45 2y ago
  Maybe AI couldn't explain it to them?
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
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. "Luckily, I persisted. Spegel still continues strong with over 1.7k stars and 14.4 million pulls" 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.
zdragnar 2y ago
I think this behavior stems from how big companies do performance reviews and promotions for developers. Contributing to someone else's open source project is for schmucks and juniors. Authoring a "new" open source project in the company's name, getting recognition and solving problems is seen as "leading the industry" and whatever other wankery sophistry they come up with to try to motivate employees with.
akudha 2y ago
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'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?
neonsunset 2y ago
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/messaging framework that was postponed/cancelled not to interrupt the work of other libraries including MassTransit, which is a bit ironic as MassTransit went full commercial later).
j45 2y ago
This feels like the scene from Silicon Valley about brain rape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STfy0QQjJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STfy0QQjJY 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're at the table for a reason (you belong there because you know something they don'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.
j45 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this old thread.

by diggan 2y ago

vasco 2y ago

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.

keepamovin 2y ago
Not just a megacorp. Anyone for a commercial purpose
- freeamz 2y ago
  Hmm, think we ought to judge on a case by case basis. However, for megacorp and especially banks that has almost 0 to 1% access to cost of capital, vs rest of us who at at 20 - 30 % ( for credit card, loan sharks), then there should be a different license for these people. There should be a GLP type license adjusted to the cost of the capital.
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Why, if they are paying their employees and aim to earn from their enterprise, should so disrespect your time and IP as to attempt to not pay you? Tho pricing tailored to customers works, as long as it's efficient and non-zero.
  - chii 2y ago
    There should not be any difference between small or large entitise in how you deal with them as an opensource maintainer. Just because someone has more money (or less), should not automatically mean you treat them with more leniency or ethics. You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      > You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes. Why? Most businesses don't entertain standard rates, either. It's case-by-case negotiations ("call us", "request quote"). Why should I, as a private person putting stuff out there for free, set up "my standard" and stick to it?
      - keepamovin 2y ago
        Because otherwise it's not a value, it's a whim. But I guess they don't mean set the same price for everyone - but rather stick to your values in what you do.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      This is The Way
    - vasco 2y ago
      Interacting with faceless entities with the power to buy multiple countries the same way you'd interact with some interested independent young person wanting to learn. Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat people differently from corporations, and random small and medium corporations differently than huge megacorps without losing any sleep. Specially in business, charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach.
buran77 2y ago
Because they'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's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'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'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.
- latexr 2y ago
  > especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them? Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply. Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course free to contribute or fork within the constraints of the license.” Scenario 3: Microsoft contacts (…). You reply “sure! I charge $X/hour or I could do a flat rate of $Y for the meeting. Is that acceptable to you?” What basis would they have for taking you to court in any situation? As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago
    “Ending up in court” vs “Microsoft suing you.” I think the implication is that if MS simply decided to unilaterally fork the project and change the license, the OS maintainer’s only real recourse is the court system (and the court of public opinion), and that would be expensive.
    - 2y ago
giancarlostoro 2y ago
It'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't see why they wouldn't pay it. Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.
- Maxious 2y ago
  Very possible, from the in repo documentation (which credits Spegel yet again) https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md it seems like there was a particular engineer at Microsoft who was working on Azure Container Registry who found it useful to integrate Azure Container Registry. If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably. Considering how often that happens VS how little times stories like that appear on the frontpage of HN, I'd wager a guess that we wouldn't be discussing it like we're discussing the current license violation.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  You are supposed to keep the original license for a fork. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license.
  - WD-42 2y ago
    It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.
dizhn 2y ago
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't work out, all he thought he could realistically do is start accepting donations.
delusional 2y ago
I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world. Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it'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'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'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't currently possible with our legal framework, but we should work to make it possible.
- luqtas 2y ago
  > We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways like what? continue to use (pay) for their products and wait for regulations coming from lobbyist countries? /s
- diggan 2y ago
  > Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it'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're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. I agree with you, if we're talking about people acting as individual humans collaborating together on FOSS. But this is really about a for-profit corporation acting in its own interests, using people to do its "deeds". Then I think it makes a lot of sense to treat any "Hey, could we chat to you about your project?" with a great deal of skepticism, because they have a goal with that conversation, it it's unlikely to align with your own goals, in most cases. Ultimately, people from that corporation is reaching out to you because there is a potential/perceived benefit coming out of that conversation that they want to have with you. If it isn't extremely clear to you what that exact benefit is, I'd say the smart thing to do is being cautious, to avoid situations like this which happen from time to time it seems.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Won't you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ > No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers. > Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help." > They aren'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. > Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit. > They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."
siva7 2y ago
Yes, charity. That's exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pknerd 2y ago
  What else can you expect from the company that was founded by Gates?(Ref, SCP,QDOS, IBM)
- echelon 2y ago
  Open source has been hijacked by trillion dollar hyperscalers. It's time we switch to "fair source" or "equitable source". Put MAU/DAU/ARR/market cap limits in your license. Open to everyone with a market cap under $1B or revenues under $100M. All others, please see our "business@" email. Place viral terms like the AGPL that requires that all other systems touched by your code to be open - especially the backend/server components that typically remain hidden. We're giving away power to these companies for free, and they use their scale and reach to turn our software into a larger moat that ensnares us and taxes us in everything else we do. Your contribution of open source in one area might bubble up as Microsoft or Google's ability to control what you see or how you distribute software to customers. It's intangible and hard to describe these insane advantages and network effects big players like this have to lay people, but I know we as software engineers understand this. Open source has been weaponized against us. They get free labor and use our work to tax us, pin us down, out compete us, and control us. We need to fight back.
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    Those companies can produce legal abstraction hacking solutions faster then you can develop shielding ones. You needs something poisonous ,costing money or work with each usage preventing mass adoption without a complete rewrite .
    - 2y ago
Matl 2y ago
> Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires. I agree with you 100% but I'm guessing getting approached by Microsoft can be pretty ego boosting, which is what these companies exploit.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
Seems more like a networking opportunity personally

phillebaba 2y ago

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.

brianwawok 2y ago
Do you think this stops the fork? It’s not like they can’t read the code.
- phillebaba 2y ago
  Well your license is only as good as you are able to enforce it. Even with the law there is no guarantees. I grew up thinking that people would follow the spirit of open source rather than the specific letter of the law. This is obviously not true, and probably never has been.
  - udev4096 2y ago
    No license stops someone from spinning off an OSS project into their closed-sourced enterprise offering. It's just sad that most corps see nothing wrong with this
    - Ajedi32 2y ago
      GPL definitely does.
      - nordsieck 2y ago
        > GPL definitely does. Clearly it doesn't because companies get caught doing it with GPL software all the time. ... and the only recourse is to sue them into compliance.
        2y ago

ixwt 2y ago

Microsoft at it again with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

pjmlp 2y ago
MIT License.
- pritambaral 2y ago
  Violated by the removal of author's copyright notice.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Adding the copyright notice to be in compliance, does not change the fact that the author has chosen a licence that allows anyone, including Microsoft, to do whatever they feel like, without giving back. So eventually, with this bad publicity, they will add the copyright notice, and move on with whatever else they are doing, in full compliance.
    - Nemo_bis 2y ago
      Microsoft did not bother to respect even the MIT license, so clearly the license is not the problem.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Not arguing for Microsoft, rather the fact that people put out MIT licenced stuff out there, or similar, arguing how bad GPL happens to be, and then get all up in arms when companies do exactly what the licence allows for. Microsoft might not have fully complied with the licence, adding the copyright notice to fix that, won't change a millimeter from what they are doing.
        Nemo_bis 2y ago
        I don't disagree with the general point but in this case we're looking at what (seems to be) a blatant copyright violation. It would not be any more or less of a violation if the infringed license had been a more or less permissive one, because the license has not been followed. Sure, the MIT is very permissive so it's very easy for Microsoft to correct their repository so that it's in compliance for the future, but they cannot correct the past. (Unless the original authors allow for it.) The MIT license, being so short, does not have a provision about curing infringements. So Microsoft seems to be ok with the risk of being sued for infringement etc. That's not something you can correct with your personal decisions as author.

breggles 2y ago

Reading this made me think of AppGet, too

ghuntley 2y ago

See also https://isdotnetopen.com https://isdotnetopen.com and https://ghuntley.com/fracture https://ghuntley.com/fracture

johnisgood 2y ago
@pjmlp, thoughts?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Nothing is new, I have mentioned multiple times that Microsoft management undoes the great work from .NET team. Also as polyglot developer, while I happen to have my preferences in regards to technology, I am not married with any of them. Being MVP, Champion, or whatever program each megacorp happens to have, was never something I saw value in. Never make a specific technology, or company, part of your identity as person.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    I'm only pinging you because I think a couple of days (or weeks, even) ago you or someone else mentioned it is open source (?), so I was wondering what's going on.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      It is licensed as such, with some gaps versus .NET Framework and VS features.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        Hmm, okay. In any case I have a lot of misconceptions about .NET, TBH.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - neonsunset 2y ago

giancarlostoro 2y ago

> The best advice for open source maintainers who are being approached by large tech companies is to be very wary Drop them a consultation fee in the thousands per hour, get something out of it at least. If they're going to reimplement your project, there'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.

Y_Y 2y ago

> Gates: OH, I DIDN'T GET RICH BY WRITING A LOT OF CHECKS. > Gates: ( fiendish laughter ) https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E14/1158256 https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E14/1158256

anonym29 2y ago

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

SamuelAdams 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

yownie 2y ago

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

ohgr 2y ago
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 …
pjmlp 2y ago
What can you expect when the same group of folks has given the control of the Web to Google served on a plate?

redbell 2y ago

> Not sure how people fell so hard for "Microsoft <3 Open Source" but it's never been true I think it's important to highlight that the "Microsoft <3 Linux" narrative deserves some scrutiny too: (https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbp1m8/for_anyone_that_thinks_microsoft_loves_linux/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbp1m8/for_anyone_th...)

onehair 2y ago
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

babarock 2y ago

"breaking the licenses"? "without attribution"? Did we read the same article?

diggan 2y ago
If you'd care to be a bit more specific, I might be actually be able to explain something to you.
- palata 2y ago
  I am genuinely interested: everybody here says that they removed the copyright headers. But when I browse through the Spegel sources, they do not contain a copyright header... To me it's the Spegel author's fault: there should be a copyright header in every single file, such that Microsoft would have to keep it.
  - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
    MIT license doesn't require copyright headers. You need to credit the authors even if the files don't have headers.
    - palata 2y ago
      Microsoft does credit the authors on their README. Maybe it's not exactly the right way to do it, but they do it. Now if it's not the right way to do it, what about opening a PR and asking to change it? Instead of writing a blog post to complain about them? Now maybe those engineers thought they did well, will get issues internally because of the bad publicity for Microsoft, and next time they want to use an open source project their legal department will be even more of a pain in the ass because if they aren't, then random people on the Internet use that to do bad publicity for the company. Why not assuming that they are in good faith here? There are enough reasons to hate Microsoft other than this one.
      - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago

fidotron 2y ago

It'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 "brain rape" 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.

orochimaaru 2y ago

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.

robmccoll 2y ago
You are mistaken. The license explicitly allows it subject to the terms of the license: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Microsoft didn't follow these terms. They copied "substantial portions of the Software" and didn't include the notice.
- palata 2y ago
  Which notice? None of the *.go source files I have opened in Spegel contain a notice. Microsoft cannot remove a notice that does not exist... In my opinion, it's the Spegel author's fault: they should have added a notice in every single file!
  - tedivm 2y ago
    The "notice" is the literal license file. It is illegal to strip someone else's license from their work. It doesn't matter that they replaced MIT with MIT, because they stripped the author and attribution from it. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE If you read that file you'd think that Microsoft was the copyright holder, but they very clearly aren't.
    - palata 2y ago
      > but they very clearly aren't. Peerd seems very different from Spegel, so Microsoft does hold quite a bit of copyright over Peerd. Now I genuinely wonder if the main LICENSE should say "copyright Spegel and Microsoft", or if somewhere in the repo Microsoft should just have a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file?

noisy_boy 2y ago

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

lucb1e 2y ago
There's also WSL, .NET Core, they own GitHub and continue to host a lot of stuff for free, and more things I'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's bottom line more than it does open source developers' (isn't it nice that we can now run Linux things right in Windows? How convenient that you don'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
- trelane 2y ago
  Yep. Microsoft loves open source. Free Software and especially user freedom, not so much.

Tireings 2y ago

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

cestith 2y ago
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.

lurk2 2y ago

> Seems it isn'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?

j45 2y ago
Maybe AI couldn't explain it to them?

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

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. "Luckily, I persisted. Spegel still continues strong with over 1.7k stars and 14.4 million pulls" 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.

zdragnar 2y ago

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

akudha 2y ago

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'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?

neonsunset 2y ago

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/messaging framework that was postponed/cancelled not to interrupt the work of other libraries including MassTransit, which is a bit ironic as MassTransit went full commercial later).

j45 2y ago

This feels like the scene from Silicon Valley about brain rape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STfy0QQjJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STfy0QQjJY 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're at the table for a reason (you belong there because you know something they don'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.

j45 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this old thread.