Getting Forked by Microsoft

General Developer Forum In The News
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Three years ago, I was part of a team responsible for developing and maintaining Kubernetes clusters for end user customers. A main source for downtime in customer environments occurred when image registries went down. The traditional way to solve this problem is to set up a stateful mirror, however we had to work within customer budget and time constraints which did not allow it. During a Black Friday, we started getting hit with a ton of traffic while GitHub container registries were down. This limited our ability to scale up the cluster as we depended on critical images from that registry. After this incident, I started thinking about a better way to avoid these scalability issues. A solution that did not need a stateful component and required minimal operational oversight. This is where the idea for Spegel came from.

Read in full here:

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Reading this article again and I can’t help but be disappointed by the way Microsoft literally screws over indie developers and their projects all in the name of “Open source”.

Their modus operandi is simple and similar:

  1. They see an exciting and useful project that’s run by an individual.
  2. They invite their individual over all in the name of collaboration and open source. 3. They hold a series of meetings to pick the brains of the individual/creators while holding promise of long term collaboration.
  3. Radio silence. The ghost of Microsoft at work.
  4. They release an open source or official version of a project similar to the one run by the invidual/creators that they had been sweet talking.
  5. The indie creators are shocked and users are confused.
  6. Microsoft’s project gains dominance while the other one dies and life goes on.
  7. Repeat process.

This is not the first time this has happened. If I’m not wrong, I recall something similar happened with the creator of Chocolatey unfortunately Microsoft’s package manager was not able to dethrone him or his project.

It’s a tough world out there. So, be safe: protect yourself at all times.

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I fear this might become more of a problem in future. Would not surprise me if people go back to releasing under different license like ‘free-to-use’, where they retain ownership of the project but allow anyone to use freely..

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It’s not just a problem in the future, it is now.

CockroachDB changed its license terms after Amazon forked it and began offering a hosted service at a price.

Same reason why ElasticSearch changed its license. It’s an almost similar issue with Terraform.

OpenSource was great until it stopped being great. Now the question for most maintainers and creators is: why should others profit off the back of my labour while I get nothing?

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Thanks for the info Alvin! Do you know of any blog posts or announcements they made that might be worth a read?