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Comment by abigail95 | Hacker News Reader

Come on man, the fact he's able to use GPL2 to annoy you is your problem. Just stop hitting yourself.

I will restate what many others have said here, Microsoft has used and interacted with GPL2 code longer than I have been alive. There is GPL2 licensed software in the Windows Store released by Microsoft.

Microsoft is the one doing the "dick move" by requiring special permission for new GPL2 interaction.

If Microsoft can interact with Linux, the biggest GPL2 project ever, they can interact with whatever Casey releases.

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come on, man, the windows Terminal repo includes code that ships with windows and is not the windows Terminal application itself. cmd.exe lives in that repo, for example, along with some of the structure which supports all command-line applications on windows.

they can't adopt GPL in that repo and Microsoft has a very strong policy about segregation between developers who can read and write GPL code and those who cannot. those who cannot interact with GPL code get to work on stuff that ships with Windows, like the stuff in the Windows Terminal repo.

so, no. they can't look at GPL code, including Casey's refterm code. Casey knew all of this when he chose the GPL for that project.

What the repo contains should not be very relevant. Proprietary and GPLed software can be in the same repo/disk/etc. We even see this in the official git repo with non-free firmware. Instead the concern is about what code the terminal application ends up using and what it links with. If his terminal did not link to any weird stuff then it is probably the case that they could avoid it as well. Also don't forget that the GPL contains an exception for system libraries specifically.

As for the segregation policy, it sounds like a self-imposed problem.

This argument is pointless. Microsoft doesn't need a YouTube video to teach its engineers how to do their jobs. They have tons of people in house who can code circles around any famous open source engineer, and who'd be happy to explain how to make cmd.exe great again internally

Like others have said, there are organizational issues causing the company's output to be embarrassing trash. Personally, I blame the Ballmer years of "unregretted attrition", but that's just my pet theory as to how it became a dysfunctional bureaucratic treacherous pirate's den

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