Tell HN: Microsoft forks MIT licensed repo, and changes the copyright to them

• cups

  13 9 3.3 C

  OpenPrinting CUPS Sources (by microsoft)

  

I was talking not only about this specific instance of it happening, but Microsoft had similar mistakes throughout the past 6 months. Here's the one from CUPS, a Linux printing library:

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/ad69bcc78bdea3fea3f...

It used to be Apache License, then it became "MIT License (c) Microsoft Corporation". Thanks to the attention that this thread got, it has now been fixed:

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/3859d70160010c61fd7...

But that source code was online with the wrong license for more than 6 months. Imagine if you had hosted Windows source code with a misattributed MIT license for 6 months... They would also bring out the pitchforks ;) Or even worse: well-paid lawyers.

• grpc_bench

  13 13 0.0 Shell

  Various gRPC benchmarks (by microsoft)

  

So sure, this is far from a good look. But the verdict is still out on if this is an unfortunate mistake or malicious.

It's far from the first time I see this kind of reaction and, IMO, rather than everyone spending time on piling on the flamewar, how about opening the door for MS to set this straight and do the right thing? Assume good faith even if you personally don't sincerely believe it? Give them an easy way to save face rather than having everyone dig their trenches deeper? If you'd prefer MS not to screw people over, it helps no one to solidify them in doing just that.

It took me all of 1-2 minutes to make this PR[0], probably less than any of the meme pictures in that commit thread. Let's see how it goes. Last time it went through[1].

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/grpc_bench/pull/1

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683471

• SurveyJS

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• cups

  30 889 9.1 C

  OpenPrinting CUPS Sources (by OpenPrinting)

  

Apparently that's a commit made by a human re-assigning copyright of a forked FOSS project [0], presumably without attribution of the original authors.

[0] https://openprinting.github.io/cups

• opensource-management-portal

  2 478 8.9 TypeScript

  Microsoft's monolithic, opinionated Open Source Management Portal enabling enterprise scale self-service powered by the GitHub API 🏔🧑‍💻🧰

  

FYI: when linking to a line of code, simply press Y on your keyboard to have Github switch from the _branchname/path/to/file.xyz_ URL to the _sha1/path/to/file.xyz_ URL. The former can result in your URL pointing to unrelated code if lines are added or removed in future commits on the referenced branch.

https://github.com/microsoft/opensource-management-portal/bl...

• opensource.microsoft.com

  13 736 7.5 HTML

  This is the source code to the Microsoft Open Source site featuring projects, program information, and "get involved" pages. This site is published at opensource.microsoft.com and managed by the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office (OSPO).

  

• TypeScript

  1,305 97,944 9.9 TypeScript

  TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output.

  

>> They changed the copyright holder on this fork, but left the MIT license in place. How does this harm anyone?

Here you go:

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript

Just fork TypeScript, change the copyright holder to yourself, and do what you want with it. I sure Microsoft won't mind.

• vscode-gradle

  2 109 8.3 Java

  Manage Gradle Projects, run Gradle tasks and provide better Gradle file authoring experience in VS Code

  

Seems like a mistake to me. Microsoft recently adopted one of my Open Source projects and part of the agreement was they would keep the original license. This was a request on their part, I had no choice in the matter. They know what they're doing, I don't think they would do this deliberately. (Licence here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-gradle/blob/main/LICENSE...)

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• glibc

  45 1,203 9.8 C

  Unofficial mirror of sourceware glibc repository. Updated daily. (by bminor)

  

Does their ToS give them additional rights to the code uploaded to GitHub? There are several unofficial copies of projects like glibc [1] uploaded by people who definitely do not have the authority to grant additional rights to the code.

[1]: https://github.com/bminor/glibc

• ippsample

  2 1 0.0 C

  IPP sample implementations. (by microsoft)

  

• huggingface-transformers

  2 25 0.0 Python

  🤗Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing for Pytorch and TensorFlow 2.0.

  

• health-cards-tests

  3 5 0.0 TypeScript

  Fork to provide additional tests on SMART Health Cards Framework

  

• vscode-python

  77 4,213 9.6 TypeScript

  Python extension for Visual Studio Code

  

• repo-templates

  1 53 5.9 JavaScript

  Default templates for Microsoft repos across all GitHub organizations: helping providing for collaborative communities, SECURITY.MD, Code of Conduct, and other files...

  

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened.

We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide.

The bug was caused by a bot that was designed to commit template files in new repositories. It's code that I wrote to try to prevent other problems we have had with releasing projects in the past. It's not supposed to run on forks.

I'm going to make sure that we sit down and audit all of our forked repositories and revert similar changes to any other projects.

We have a lot of process around forking, and have had to put controls in place to make sure that people are aware of that guidance. Starting a few years ago, we even "lock" forks to enforce our process. We prefer that people fork projects into their individual GitHub accounts, instead of our organization, to encourage that they participate with the upstream project. In this situation, a team got approval to fork the repository, but hasn't yet gotten started.

To be as open as I can, I'd like to point out:

- The templates we apply on new repositories live at https://github.com/microsoft/repo-templates

• xnu

  47 1,353 3.5 C
  

Releases of all open source things Apple uses, by OS: https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

These mostly link to their GitHub organization: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/

Apple's open source projects: https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

• azuredatastudio

  29 7,442 9.8 TypeScript

  Azure Data Studio is a data management and development tool with connectivity to popular cloud and on-premises databases. Azure Data Studio supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, with immediate capability to connect to Azure SQL and SQL Server. Browse the extension library for more database support options including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.

  

Please consider https://github.com/microsoft/azuredatastudio/issues/102#issu...

>SQL Operations Studio was built on the back of many open source projects that all use the MIT License for a reason: it's the right way to keep moving the community forward, empowering your users to do cool stuff and build useful things for the community.

>We're just asking SQL Operations Studio to use the same license that Visual Studio Code does.

• jiq

  5 900 0.0 Go

  Discontinued jid on jq - interactive JSON query tool using jq expressions

No, you cannot.

I'd advise you to fixup any forks on GitHub, e.g. https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq/blob/master/LICENSE, which are currently in breach of license.

You'll need to inform anyone who forked your code, too.

• rushstack

  11 5,596 10.0 TypeScript

  Monorepo for tools developed by the Rush Stack community

  

To late to edit or delete my comment above but just to set it straight I just learned that the whole lerna debacle linked above was a nothing-burger aka “fake news”.

https://github.com/microsoft/rushstack/issues/673#issuecomme...

• grpc_bench

  58 850 8.4 Dockerfile

  Various gRPC benchmarks

Jeff's reply needs no addendum.

But as for some background: I am a PM for Microsoft Build of OpenJDK and from late last year to around May this year I made contributions to the gRPC_bench repo as a Microsoft employee for some experiments we have been working on, to evaluate and improve different ways of implementing gRPC exchange in Java. [1]

This fork was intended for newer experiments, one of them being about coding and running these benchmarks on GitHub Codespaces. For that, I needed the repo on an org where we, as employees, have Codespaces enabled.

The rest is HN history (back to Jeff's reply above).

Merry Christmas all!

[1] https://github.com/LesnyRumcajs/grpc_bench/commits?author=br...

• STL

  154 9,698 9.6 C++

  MSVC's implementation of the C++ Standard Library.

  

> The thread would have been a lot more fun

The Microsoft STL issues are usually quite fun and entertaining, at least if you don't have to use it: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/1603

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