A story of a developer who lost confidence in an open source project that was started from scratch and highly praised by the community, but was forked by Microsoft
In open source software development, it is easy to create a 'fork' that is derived from the original, but one individual developer has expressed his feelings that he has lost confidence because his work was forked by large company Microsoft and the copyright notice became ambiguous.
Getting Forked by Microsoft • Philip Laine
Philip Lane is the developer of the open source software ' Spegel '. Spegel is a popular content that has gained more than 1700 stars and 14.4 million pull requests in more than two years since its release, and one day he had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft to talk about Spegel.
Initially, there were enthusiastic discussions, but as time passed, Microsoft's enthusiasm seemed to wane and the discussions died down.
However, when Rain attended a developer event later, he noticed that Microsoft was mentioning software called 'Peerd' that applied Spegel. When Rain looked into Peerd, he found that it was definitely a fork of Spegel, and that the end of the README included a thank you to Rain and Spegel.
There would not have been a problem if they had simply forked it legitimately, but the copyright notice required by the MIT License adopted by Spegel was missing, and some parts of Spegel's code seemed to be quoted verbatim without any reference to Spegel.
Additionally, the introduction of Peerd has caused confusion among new users, who have been asking how it is different from Spegel.
'Microsoft is a huge brand, so it's hard for Spegel to have a presence,' Rain said. 'As an open source maintainer, I've spent a lot of time responding to community requests, bug fixes, and security fixes, but when I saw my project forked by Microsoft, I felt like I was no longer of any use. For a while, I even wondered if it was worth continuing to work on Spegel.'
Fortunately, he is still involved in development, but he questions how a single maintainer can handle cases like this.
Shortly after Rain's report, Microsoft took action, submitting a pull request to 'fix a copyright notice that some of the Peerd developers had overlooked,' with the following comment posted on the social site Hacker News:
'We appreciate your leadership and collaboration on Spegel, and we know your project solves real problems for the community. We should have done a better job with the copyright notice. We will submit a pull request and provide you with attribution. The main reason Peerd was created was to add support for artifact streaming. You told our engineers that artifact streaming might not be in scope for Spegel, and we think you were right. We certainly appreciate Spegel's work and that it was an inspiration for Peerd, but we forgot to attribue it. This was an error and we deeply apologize.'
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in Posted by log1p_kr