Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.
> 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.
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.
It’s why con contributor licenses agreements exist in most open source popular projects.
Did they remove the copyright? All the source files I checked in Spegel don't have a copyright header. To me it feels like it's the author's mistake.
This is not that though. Seems to be exactly what the maintainer is asserting and that's not OK. :/
It's not the money, it's the red tape. Setting up a new vendor, finding the right account, getting the PO approved. Even in a company where that stuff is relatively easy, it's way more friction than a simple meeting where you don't have to ask anyone for permission for anything.
Oh I do.
The person that wanted to setup the meeting likely has no budget control. Big corps like to keep the ability to pay for stuff out of the hands of individuals and isolated in bureaucratic nightmares.
You'd be more than reasonable to demand "$1000/hr with 1 hour minimum" for such a consulting and I'd see HR in MS doing an immediate "hell no" to that.
I'd say my experience is exactly the contrary. Middle managers in my experience in mega corps have a lot of expense latitude for these kinds of things, expedited approvals, corporate credit cards. At least in the finance and tech world.
Except that they did not do that. They forked it (as the MIT licence permits), added an attribution to their README, and added their own header to the files with their own copyright. It's not their fault if the original author did not add a header in the first place...
Or where do you see that they actually removed a copyright header from the author? None of the source files I checked in Spegel have one.
I have seen plenty of dev managers refuse to pay for something if they didn't have to.
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.
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.
I’m still tweaking the execution of the license, but in principle my thinking is, “if you’re using my software to make money, and you’re making a lot of money, you should probably be paying me to use my software”.
"Open source" was literally created as a corporation-safe neutered form of "free software".
Most software isn't hard to reverse-engineer, and most people aren't exceptional; if a group is big enough to create a GPL-licensed product that competes with Microsoft's, they're big enough to create an MIT-licensed product that competes with Microsoft's.
I like GP’s comment “don’t discuss anything in private and/or offer priority support without being paid”. Also:
- Ensure you get attribution, and support others who deserve attribution
- Develop open-source alternatives to paid programs
- Donate to others who write open-source
I disagree that open-source contributed much to companies becoming so rich. I believe it was more that people gave them (money and) private data, e.g. made posts and interactions that only exist on their locked-down platform. I doubt a lack of open-source and accessible development tools would’ve prevented Google and Facebook; if anything, they would've been founded by richer or more networked people. And it certainly won't prevent them now.
That would also mirror what they do with tools like Visual Studio, which is free until you hit a certain number of developers or revenue.
> Open source has been weaponized against us.
This was always going to be the case. We Free Software advocates have been saying this for decades.
And you're not even to the most important part: this isn't about you, me, or megacorps. It's about users.
A shame though it is, helping everybody the same amount is not likely to get your much gratitude from anyone. But that's the job.
You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.
Tho pricing tailored to customers works, as long as it's efficient and non-zero.
I agree with you 100% but I'm guessing getting approached by Microsoft can be pretty ego boosting, which is what these companies exploit.
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."
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.
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.
He was hoping for a fruitful collaboration and offered the help towards this goal. MS taking whatever they wanted anyway just proves that they had no intention to cooperate, let alone to pay handsomely for something that was already free.
Ending up in court means you need to sue the megacorp to enforce the license. This makes it a free lunch for a megacorp.
With every single scenario MS takes whatever they need. They don't have to pay, don't need the help to read code, and you can't afford to force them to respect the license.
P.S.
> 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.
There's a guy rotting away in a El Salvadorian prison with a lot of press to keep him comfort. Not sure your letter will capture the world's attention like you think it will.
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.
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.
You’re not bilking Ed’s Garage, you’re a rounding error on their petty cash account.
like what? continue to use (pay) for their products and wait for regulations coming from lobbyist countries? /s
