6 ms·

Hi Philip, I'm Lachlan from the Cloud Native Ecosystem team at Microsoft. Our team works in the cloud native open-source community with a goal of being great op

Hi Philip, I'm Lachlan from the Cloud Native Ecosystem team at Microsoft. Our team works in the cloud native open-source community with a goal of being great open-source collaborators in these projects and communities, and I’m sorry that this happened. We appreciate your leadership and collaboration on Spegel and see your project solving a real challenge for the cloud native community. I wanted to thank you for your blog post https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/ https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/, let you know what we’re doing, and address a few points. We’ve just raised a pull request https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110 https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110 amending the license headers in the source files. We absolutely should have done better here: our company policy is to maintain copyright headers in files – we have added headers to the files to attribute your work. I also wanted to share why we felt making a new project was the appropriate path: the primary reason peerd was created was to add artifact streaming support. When you spoke with our engineers about implementing artifact streaming you said it was probably out of scope for Spegel at that time, which made sense. We made sure to acknowledge the work in Spegel and that it was used as a source of inspiration for peerd which you noted in your blog but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry. We hear you loud and clear and are going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention. We will improve the way we work and collaborate in open source and are always open to feedback.

dustedcodes 1y ago
[flagged]
- unixhero 1y ago
  I think the response is sincere and adequate.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    It is indeed sincere: > We absolutely should have done better here: our company policy is to maintain copyright headers in files – we have added headers to the files to attribute your work. This is a more than clear corporate statement from Microsoft's side that Microsoft is perfectly fine if copyrights are violated (implicitly including Microsoft's), as long as, if they get caught, people start giving proper credits. This implicitly implies that Microsoft promises that from now on they will only sue for getting proper attribution in case of copyright violations, and not for monetary compensation for damages. I find this implicit statement really nice from Microsoft's side - actually more than what I could ever have wished for. :-)
kyleee 1y ago
Maybe as a show of good faith you could send the original creator 10 or 20k usd as a thank you. Talk is cheap
- rererereferred 1y ago
  10 or 20k USD for Copyright Violation sounds cheap.
- guywithahat 1y ago
  This sounds like a good idea but getting the checkbook out at a company like Microsoft probably takes 3-5 meetings, and saying you want to donate because you accidentally stole their code and put the company at (theoretical) risk of a lawsuit seems like a bad conversation starter with management. I like the thought though
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    Not my experience with MS. They seemed to be pretty low on the "red tape" scale. Maybe they should have 3-5 meetings before forking OSS projects though :)
  - NoahZuniga 1y ago
    Also it seems like in the original comment they already admitted to breaching the copyright, so sending him money doesn't increase the chance of a lawsuit succeeding.
tacker2000 1y ago
Now that you got caught you are fixing it and writing fancy PR fluff. An org the size of MS should have clear policies and processes of how to handle open source forks like this. Unless we assume “bad faith” here. This is a pretty bad look. I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post? That said, the author of Spegel should have used another license if he wanted more “recognition” or the like.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post? As I wrote in my parallel post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756102): these copyright violations (not giving proper attribution of the license requires it is copyright violation) from Microsoft's side (the more, the "better", and the clearer the message) can be considered de-facto, implicitly stated corporate messages from Microsoft's side that they are from now on officially fine with copyright violations, and thus everybody is from now on free to violate the copyright on every software product that Microsoft has ever produced.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - leoqa 1y ago
    Sounds like a very expensive legal gambit.
  - xwolfi 1y ago
    You have to prove the mens rea, and even then, people committing crimes don't automatically deserve crimes committed upon them.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      In reality they do, in some cases, e.g. capital punishment.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry. In other words: there exists some responsible person at Microsoft who violated the copyright (yes, removing the attribution is also a copyright violation!) for Microsoft. In consideration how Microsoft has been treating copyyright violators for decades, if Microsoft does not give this responsible person the same crual treatment, it should be considered an honest, clear, implicit official statement from Microsoft's side that they are perfectly fine if hackers violate all of Microsoft's copyright. In other words: it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain. Also, if Microsot does not make make this responsible person pay the caused damage from their own pocket to the original author of Spegel with the same monatery magnitude as if Microsoft would sue other entities for a violation of copyyright of Microsoft's software, the same statement applies.
- throwaway642012 1y ago
  Based on the initial commits and the logs after that surely there’s someone unethical person at MS. This might have been brushed under the carpet and due to sheer luck it reached HN frontpage. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5d80609a2e134a96c77 https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5...
- 9_ZPK7- 1y ago
  > it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain. You have said many things like this in this thread. I don't think you understand how laws or courts or legal fees work. Good luck defending yourself against MS's army of lawyers during your court proceedings though!
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > I don't think you understand how laws or courts or legal fees work. Good luck defending yourself against MS's army of lawyers during your court proceedings though! I have no hope that the courts currently (!) agree with this. But let us spread the gospel so that as many people as possible know how Microsoft's "real" stance on copyright is. If a lot of people become aware of this and this truth stays in lots of people's heads for a sufficiently long time, the public opinion might change so that juries (representing the public opinion in courts) will indeed begin to judge against Microsoft in the way that I described.
deknos 1y ago
> We hear you loud and clear .. oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D Better do care a lot about it, and use every syllable of the corporate statement against Microsoft. :-) I.e. the principle of some martial arts: use the force that the opponent applies against himself/herself. Addendum: In this particular case > We hear you loud and clear .. can be considered as a very official statement from Microsoft that from now on, they cannot claim anymore that they didn't know of something ..., i.e. the hangman's noose is slowly closing. :-)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
  Probably already approved by the legal department which is working in damage control mode :D
vvillena 1y ago
Not good enough. All previous commits still infringe Spegel's copyright, given they are still available and distributed. I would assume the point release also infringes copyright. You are Microsoft. You can do better.
- wilg 1y ago
  Very silly, they can't rewrite the commit history nor would it be proper to update old packaged releases.
  - vvillena 1y ago
    What do you mean they can't rewrite the commits? They can, they should, and it's really easy to do so. As for the packages, they should be taken offline.
    - wilg 1y ago
      They should neither rewrite the commits nor take the old packages offline. It's not worth a huge potential clusterfuck when the issue has been fixed on the latest version.
      - kassner 1y ago
        They should absolutely do it. They made a serious mistake and should pay for it, even if that means every Microsoft developer having to rebase all their WIP branches. The more expensive it gets the more they’ll pay attention to those things in the future.
        saagarjha 1y ago
        Why not just fire the entire division? Maybe they should shut down the company?
      - vvillena 1y ago
        You might be overestimating how hard this is, because it's not hard at all. It takes less than half an hour to create a script that does it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
throwaway642012 1y ago
What about the allegations that people in MS did this for personal gains? Will there be any lessons learned from this?
cmgriffing 1y ago
I think this is a good case for applying Hanlon's Razor. The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there. I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.
- frumplestlatz 1y ago
  > The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there. That person never learned what plagiarism is throughout their entire academic career, much less once they landed at Microsoft?
  - isp 1y ago
    There are other possibilities, for example, the person may have thought that they were complying with the MIT licence by releasing the new project under the MIT licence too + including a mention of the original project in the README. This, of course, is incorrect, and a cursory read of the very short licence text would show it to be incorrect. But I, too, am strongly favouring Hanlon's razor.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Hanlon's razor can indicate an absence of malice, but that doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong, nor should Microsoft skimp on taking steps so it never happens again.
      - isp 1y ago
        I agree on both points, and with the earlier comment: > I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks. In response to: > ... going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community.
  - 1y ago
DrillShopper 1y ago
Hey how about doing the right thing first time next time instead of waiting until you get ass-blasted on social media?
spiritplumber 1y ago
Do better next time, eh?
j45 1y ago
I might not be up to speed, is naming this behaviour "source of inspiration" a common industry term to accurately represent an unacknowledged fork by the large company over the small? It seems an option to not take free labour to build a commercial cloud largely as a wrapper of open-source, and maybe find other ways to support the creators. If one person's labour is that valuable to a company, maybe it will help someone realize that supporting such individuals monetarily might help create the next thing with time that they can't get to today.
abetancort 1y ago
[flagged]
kjellsbells 1y ago
Kudos for stepping in here, but I think the team at Microsoft need to do some more investigation, no? Microsoft is a large, wealthy corporation has a big target painted on its back, and, consequently, CELA (corporate, external, and legal affairs) are, for good reason, a very strong force inside Microsoft. You can't just grab some code from someplace at Microsoft. Your PM has to run it past your division's CELA rep, look at the terms, assess exposure, etc. Did that happen? If not, that's a big hole and you should probably beg forgiveness from them as you ask for an audit of every other piece of code you've picked up. If it didn't happen, well, I suspect someone in your group just became the new Nelson, the hapless developer, in Microsoft's Standards of Business Conduct videos. You really don't want to be Nelson.
bilbo-b-baggins 1y ago
Give him a share of the money you make off of it.
- dontTREATonme 1y ago
  60% of $0 is still $0.
  - guappa 1y ago
    They wouldn't be doing any of this if they thought it's 0$
- philsnow 1y ago
  Reducing costs (and then trying to drum up community goodwill by "releasing" an open source tool) is not the same thing as generating revenue. https://github.com/Azure/peerd https://github.com/Azure/peerd does not have a "pricing" section.
lemper 1y ago
yea, sure. but at least pay him for the "discussion". also, next time you people approach opensore maintainers, pay them for their time.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  The maintainers are adults too - they can set their price.
mixologic 1y ago
> When you spoke with our engineers about implementing artifact streaming you said it was probably out of scope for Spegel at that time, which made sense. It seems like it would have been a much better strategy to add artifact streaming, submit a pull request and then if the maintainer isn't interested in adding it, proceeding with a fork. "Probably out of scope" sounds like "I dont have time to implement a feature of that scope"
- spongebobstoes 1y ago
  "probably out of scope" sounds like "there would need to be some major refactors and you're the only user who wants it, so I am turning this down for now" try to assume good faith :)
- dmurray 1y ago
  It sounds more like "I don't want to maintain a feature of that scope" or "I don't want to commit to the design decisions this feature would require". Both of those aren't solved by a PR. If you're discussing with potential collaborators and want to communicate that you don't have time to develop such and such a feature but would be open to accepting a PR, it's very natural to say "I don't have time to develop this feature but would be open to accepting a PR".
- palata 1y ago
  > It seems like it would have been a much better strategy Better for whom? Now there is Peerd and Spegel that are different projects. Imagine if Microsoft had opened PRs into Spegel and the maintainer had merged them. Then at some later point Microsoft had decided that they need to have ownership of that project (maybe because they want to have the control over what gets merged into the project because they depend on it). Imagine this ended up with a Microsoft fork of Spegel, becoming more popular than the original one. What would people say? Probably something along the lines of "embrace, extend, extinguish", right?
simultsop 1y ago
These practices have been an ongoing matter since 1975.
zoobab 1y ago
Considering how Microsoft behaved regarding copyright violations in the past, the original author should at least ask damages in court. We could even crowdfund the lawsuit, I am sure he will win.

dustedcodes 1y ago

[flagged]

unixhero 1y ago
I think the response is sincere and adequate.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  It is indeed sincere: > We absolutely should have done better here: our company policy is to maintain copyright headers in files – we have added headers to the files to attribute your work. This is a more than clear corporate statement from Microsoft's side that Microsoft is perfectly fine if copyrights are violated (implicitly including Microsoft's), as long as, if they get caught, people start giving proper credits. This implicitly implies that Microsoft promises that from now on they will only sue for getting proper attribution in case of copyright violations, and not for monetary compensation for damages. I find this implicit statement really nice from Microsoft's side - actually more than what I could ever have wished for. :-)

kyleee 1y ago

Maybe as a show of good faith you could send the original creator 10 or 20k usd as a thank you. Talk is cheap

rererereferred 1y ago
10 or 20k USD for Copyright Violation sounds cheap.
guywithahat 1y ago
This sounds like a good idea but getting the checkbook out at a company like Microsoft probably takes 3-5 meetings, and saying you want to donate because you accidentally stole their code and put the company at (theoretical) risk of a lawsuit seems like a bad conversation starter with management. I like the thought though
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Not my experience with MS. They seemed to be pretty low on the "red tape" scale. Maybe they should have 3-5 meetings before forking OSS projects though :)
- NoahZuniga 1y ago
  Also it seems like in the original comment they already admitted to breaching the copyright, so sending him money doesn't increase the chance of a lawsuit succeeding.

tacker2000 1y ago

Now that you got caught you are fixing it and writing fancy PR fluff. An org the size of MS should have clear policies and processes of how to handle open source forks like this. Unless we assume “bad faith” here. This is a pretty bad look. I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post? That said, the author of Spegel should have used another license if he wanted more “recognition” or the like.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post? As I wrote in my parallel post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756102): these copyright violations (not giving proper attribution of the license requires it is copyright violation) from Microsoft's side (the more, the "better", and the clearer the message) can be considered de-facto, implicitly stated corporate messages from Microsoft's side that they are from now on officially fine with copyright violations, and thus everybody is from now on free to violate the copyright on every software product that Microsoft has ever produced.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- leoqa 1y ago
  Sounds like a very expensive legal gambit.
- xwolfi 1y ago
  You have to prove the mens rea, and even then, people committing crimes don't automatically deserve crimes committed upon them.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    In reality they do, in some cases, e.g. capital punishment.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry. In other words: there exists some responsible person at Microsoft who violated the copyright (yes, removing the attribution is also a copyright violation!) for Microsoft. In consideration how Microsoft has been treating copyyright violators for decades, if Microsoft does not give this responsible person the same crual treatment, it should be considered an honest, clear, implicit official statement from Microsoft's side that they are perfectly fine if hackers violate all of Microsoft's copyright. In other words: it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain. Also, if Microsot does not make make this responsible person pay the caused damage from their own pocket to the original author of Spegel with the same monatery magnitude as if Microsoft would sue other entities for a violation of copyyright of Microsoft's software, the same statement applies.

throwaway642012 1y ago
Based on the initial commits and the logs after that surely there’s someone unethical person at MS. This might have been brushed under the carpet and due to sheer luck it reached HN frontpage. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5d80609a2e134a96c77 https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5...
9_ZPK7- 1y ago
> it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain. You have said many things like this in this thread. I don't think you understand how laws or courts or legal fees work. Good luck defending yourself against MS's army of lawyers during your court proceedings though!
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > I don't think you understand how laws or courts or legal fees work. Good luck defending yourself against MS's army of lawyers during your court proceedings though! I have no hope that the courts currently (!) agree with this. But let us spread the gospel so that as many people as possible know how Microsoft's "real" stance on copyright is. If a lot of people become aware of this and this truth stays in lots of people's heads for a sufficiently long time, the public opinion might change so that juries (representing the public opinion in courts) will indeed begin to judge against Microsoft in the way that I described.

deknos 1y ago

> We hear you loud and clear .. oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D Better do care a lot about it, and use every syllable of the corporate statement against Microsoft. :-) I.e. the principle of some martial arts: use the force that the opponent applies against himself/herself. Addendum: In this particular case > We hear you loud and clear .. can be considered as a very official statement from Microsoft that from now on, they cannot claim anymore that they didn't know of something ..., i.e. the hangman's noose is slowly closing. :-)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
Probably already approved by the legal department which is working in damage control mode :D

vvillena 1y ago

Not good enough. All previous commits still infringe Spegel's copyright, given they are still available and distributed. I would assume the point release also infringes copyright. You are Microsoft. You can do better.

wilg 1y ago
Very silly, they can't rewrite the commit history nor would it be proper to update old packaged releases.
- vvillena 1y ago
  What do you mean they can't rewrite the commits? They can, they should, and it's really easy to do so. As for the packages, they should be taken offline.
  - wilg 1y ago
    They should neither rewrite the commits nor take the old packages offline. It's not worth a huge potential clusterfuck when the issue has been fixed on the latest version.
    - kassner 1y ago
      They should absolutely do it. They made a serious mistake and should pay for it, even if that means every Microsoft developer having to rebase all their WIP branches. The more expensive it gets the more they’ll pay attention to those things in the future.
      - saagarjha 1y ago
        Why not just fire the entire division? Maybe they should shut down the company?
    - vvillena 1y ago
      You might be overestimating how hard this is, because it's not hard at all. It takes less than half an hour to create a script that does it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

throwaway642012 1y ago

What about the allegations that people in MS did this for personal gains? Will there be any lessons learned from this?

cmgriffing 1y ago

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

frumplestlatz 1y ago
> The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there. That person never learned what plagiarism is throughout their entire academic career, much less once they landed at Microsoft?
- isp 1y ago
  There are other possibilities, for example, the person may have thought that they were complying with the MIT licence by releasing the new project under the MIT licence too + including a mention of the original project in the README. This, of course, is incorrect, and a cursory read of the very short licence text would show it to be incorrect. But I, too, am strongly favouring Hanlon's razor.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Hanlon's razor can indicate an absence of malice, but that doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong, nor should Microsoft skimp on taking steps so it never happens again.
    - isp 1y ago
      I agree on both points, and with the earlier comment: > I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks. In response to: > ... going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community.
- 1y ago

DrillShopper 1y ago

Hey how about doing the right thing first time next time instead of waiting until you get ass-blasted on social media?

spiritplumber 1y ago

Do better next time, eh?

j45 1y ago

I might not be up to speed, is naming this behaviour "source of inspiration" a common industry term to accurately represent an unacknowledged fork by the large company over the small? It seems an option to not take free labour to build a commercial cloud largely as a wrapper of open-source, and maybe find other ways to support the creators. If one person's labour is that valuable to a company, maybe it will help someone realize that supporting such individuals monetarily might help create the next thing with time that they can't get to today.

abetancort 1y ago

[flagged]

kjellsbells 1y ago

Kudos for stepping in here, but I think the team at Microsoft need to do some more investigation, no? Microsoft is a large, wealthy corporation has a big target painted on its back, and, consequently, CELA (corporate, external, and legal affairs) are, for good reason, a very strong force inside Microsoft. You can't just grab some code from someplace at Microsoft. Your PM has to run it past your division's CELA rep, look at the terms, assess exposure, etc. Did that happen? If not, that's a big hole and you should probably beg forgiveness from them as you ask for an audit of every other piece of code you've picked up. If it didn't happen, well, I suspect someone in your group just became the new Nelson, the hapless developer, in Microsoft's Standards of Business Conduct videos. You really don't want to be Nelson.

bilbo-b-baggins 1y ago

Give him a share of the money you make off of it.

dontTREATonme 1y ago
60% of $0 is still $0.
- guappa 1y ago
  They wouldn't be doing any of this if they thought it's 0$
philsnow 1y ago
Reducing costs (and then trying to drum up community goodwill by "releasing" an open source tool) is not the same thing as generating revenue. https://github.com/Azure/peerd https://github.com/Azure/peerd does not have a "pricing" section.

lemper 1y ago

yea, sure. but at least pay him for the "discussion". also, next time you people approach opensore maintainers, pay them for their time.

robertlagrant 1y ago
The maintainers are adults too - they can set their price.

mixologic 1y ago

> When you spoke with our engineers about implementing artifact streaming you said it was probably out of scope for Spegel at that time, which made sense. It seems like it would have been a much better strategy to add artifact streaming, submit a pull request and then if the maintainer isn't interested in adding it, proceeding with a fork. "Probably out of scope" sounds like "I dont have time to implement a feature of that scope"

spongebobstoes 1y ago
"probably out of scope" sounds like "there would need to be some major refactors and you're the only user who wants it, so I am turning this down for now" try to assume good faith :)
dmurray 1y ago
It sounds more like "I don't want to maintain a feature of that scope" or "I don't want to commit to the design decisions this feature would require". Both of those aren't solved by a PR. If you're discussing with potential collaborators and want to communicate that you don't have time to develop such and such a feature but would be open to accepting a PR, it's very natural to say "I don't have time to develop this feature but would be open to accepting a PR".
palata 1y ago
> It seems like it would have been a much better strategy Better for whom? Now there is Peerd and Spegel that are different projects. Imagine if Microsoft had opened PRs into Spegel and the maintainer had merged them. Then at some later point Microsoft had decided that they need to have ownership of that project (maybe because they want to have the control over what gets merged into the project because they depend on it). Imagine this ended up with a Microsoft fork of Spegel, becoming more popular than the original one. What would people say? Probably something along the lines of "embrace, extend, extinguish", right?

simultsop 1y ago

These practices have been an ongoing matter since 1975.

zoobab 1y ago

Considering how Microsoft behaved regarding copyright violations in the past, the original author should at least ask damages in court. We could even crowdfund the lawsuit, I am sure he will win.