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0 pointspalata11mo ago0 comments

> This isn't a case where a new community member forked or copied code into their first open source project. This is one of the biggest companies in the world with a well-known history of taking and using OSS without proper attribution.

Next time you work in a big company and you feel that the legal department is a PITA and slows you down, remember how people react when they are not, like here :-).

0 comments

ygjb11mo ago

I don't know why you are trying so hard to carry water for a team of engineers at a company that has the history to know better.

The team that built peerd had the good sense to consult with the author of Spegel before moving forward with their project. A simple note to their business line lawyer (or whatever they call them at Microsoft) at work to say "hey, we are going to use some of this code from this open source project, what do we need to do?" would have taken less time and effort than setting up the meeting with the Spegel person/folks. That is assuming there isn't an easy to find page on how to consume open source software on Microsoft intranet. Every major company I have worked for (HSBC, Mozilla, Amazon, Fastly, Cisco, to name some) has had this going back to 2005. This isn't rocket science.

You also don't need to be a legal expert to comply with most open source licenses, and the MIT license in particular is really easy to comply with. Just copy the code, and whatever file you copy the code into gets an attribution comment at the top.

palataOP11mo ago

I'm all for going against leadership when they purposely abuse people (like Zuckerberg telling his engineers to torrent copyrighted data for their LLM).

I would be in favour of checking what small companies do with licences. In my experience, the vast majority of startups blatantly abuse open source all the time.

But here it seems like it's all about an engineer who did some kind of attribution, but didn't do it correctly. And people are happy to say that it's all part of a big evil plan by Microsoft to take over the world.

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