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Comment by acrispino | Hacker News Reader

Is releasing software for free under the GPL-2.0 a "dick move" ?

> Is releasing software for free under the GPL-2.0 a "dick move" ?

it is when you know that Microsoft employees are forbidden from looking at GPL code because they may unconsciously recall it and use it in a Microsoft codebase.

Casey knew that at the time and admitted to licensing it GPL for that exact reason.

That is a “dick move” to me. maybe i’m wrong. you be the judge, i guess.

As you say, Casey is experienced and his code is valuable. MS should pay him if they want to look at his code! He said as much in his tweets… I mean, why should he be doing charity for MS by fixing their products for them?

> Casey is experienced and his code is valuable. MS should pay him if they want to look at his code! He said as much in his tweets… I mean, why should he be doing charity for MS by fixing their products for them?

so difficult that he wrote it so he could demonstrate how easy it is.

he gladly showed the rest of us how to do it, and he intentionally took action which prevented anything he did from being used within Microsoft. Microsoft is so shitty because they don’t know [thing] so i’m going to show everyone but them how to do [thing].

he could have chosen to help. he chose to not help. he chose to complain and ridicule while intentionally avoiding doing anything to change the situation he was unhappy with.

Casey did choose to help - explaining the issue and potential solution on github. It was only after his solution was dismissed, then catching the microsoft engineers using his solution and making a blog post about it that he complained.

they didn't use his solution. they began to adopt his approach. began to. they are still not even close to done with it all, and the changes they would need to make to fully line up with Casey's approach can't happen because of other things the code does.

they were not caught using his solution. they published a blog entry describing that they were made aware of performance problems and they didn't mention him. it was rabid fans of Casey that started foaming at the mouth then, even though Casey publicly stated he didn't want or need credit, because the idea wasn't his to begin with.

This version of events sounds too simplified

For anyone interested about the blog post drama check https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522468481135902725 (hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419)

Personally I think that he owes them nothing, especially after the way he was treated in https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 so I can't comprehend statements which claim that he was an asshole for using GPL.

He owes them nothing, you're right. I made no claim that he does.

I'm saying he could have helped the situation, and he deliberately chose to not only avoid helping, but to hinder anyone at Microsoft who wanted to look at that code and contribute to Windows Terminal. That was a choice he made intentionally.

He could have taken the high road, there. He chose not to. It's his choice, don't get me wrong, he was well within his rights. I just disagree with that choice. that's why I call that a "dick move". And if you disagree with me, that's fine. "Dick move" means different things to different people at different times.

Microsoft hires consultants sometimes to better understand Windows. They hire people to come lecture to them about their own software. (I'm not making fun of them, it's a good idea.) If they can't pony up for a few consulting hours to help their developers learn how to write the software they should have written, that's really on them.

The way Casey handled this issue was... not good. He's been a jerk about it and generally dragged this whole dumb argument on way longer than needed (I can't believe we're still talking about it).

He was right, but he does not seem remotely pleasant to work with and has been remarkably adversarial. Hasn't exactly fostered a "let's hire him as a consultant" relationship.

it's easy, so Microsoft should write it themselves or pay for it.

and now you've justified all non-free software.

> Microsoft employees are forbidden from looking at GPL code because they may unconsciously recall it and use it in a Microsoft codebase

Isn't that exactly what Copilot does?

this is a fucking meme at this point, the amount of assumption around this.

no, that is not what copilot does unless you check the box (or fail to uncheck the box) that allows exact matches of code from public repositories.

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/configuring-github-copilo...

If Copilot can look at GPL code and use that to synthesize new code, why can't a Microsoft employee?

Because the lawyers haven't caught up with Copilot yet. Legal has been hounding developers for decades at this point.

bingo

eh not really. it's more about being able to reasonably testify in court that no GPL code was introduced into a codebase that they want to license with a non-GPL license and not be lying.

How is it a meme? Copilot can throw verbatim licensed code.

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

the meme is that you can turn off the verbatim stuff and no one ever remembers that they are told about this, or that it is in the documentation, or that poking around the copilot settings you will see the setting in question.

actual users of copilot seem to know this little bit of information; commenters who like to make comments about things they have never used always overlook details like this, and perpetually restate the things they learned about the topic months or years prior, even when those details were incorrect at the time, and are still incorrect today.

>the meme is that you can turn off the verbatim stuff

I see. But the setting (which surprises me that is opt-in) merely checks whether the output is an exact match and forces the system to produce a new output. The system can and does (as seen on the tweet) output verbatim code. So the question that parent commenter asked is legit.

It is nice to be a dominant position like Microsoft because if they weren't they would have put aside their "feelings" and hired Casey to help them out. But they don't need to. Feelings of Microsoft seem more important than feelings of all their users who will just have to bear with it.

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