Dev on the project here - I'll mention that this language is due to corporate boilerplate public preview licensing. It is absolutely available and encouraged for use in commercial etc. activities. The licensing language needs to be fixed.
Are you authorized to do the same on a blog hosted on microsoft.com? A lot of people would treat that as authoritative even if bigger enterprises will wait for the shrink-wrap to be updated.
Good: "Your honor, here's a copy of their official blog where they said the license terms are a temporary glitch but that we're fully allowed and encouraged to use the product."
Not good: "Your honor, an anonymous new account on Hacker News said it's totally fine to use this even though the license forbids it."
I'd cheerfully take my chances with the former. The latter? Not so much.
(As mentioned elsewhere, I don't for a second think MS is going to track me down and sue me for using this against the terms of the license. I'd feel a whole lot better if someone officially put that in writing, though.)
Not only that but it damages the reputation of this community.
You (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all of us) should be welcoming to new users and assume good faith, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's no reason why you can't make your substantive points while doing so. (Edit: you needn't look far for a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074135.)
It might also be good to remember that everyone makes mistakes, that project launches don't always go perfectly, and that HN is for discussing the interesting aspects of a submission.
I'll acknowledge that kstrauser may have done a better job of sounding friendly about it, but I don't think my question was out of line nor even particularly aggressive given the circumstances.
You may not have meant to be haranguing, but intent doesn't communicate itself—at least not in the tiny textblobs which are all we have here. It has to be included in the message.
When I look at your comment from that point of view, I notice that it leads with a hostile personal trope ("You do recognize...?"), followed by a putdown of everything this team is probably hoping for ("no one should use this"), followed by a personal attack ("you shouldn't be encouraging"), followed by a pedantic hammer-blow ("legally the license is the license") that takes the spotlight away from anything new or exciting about their work. That is followed by a sentence that basically shames them for what was obviously just an oversight. How is a newcomer (or anyone, for that matter) supposed to feel when they encounter that?
You're a good HN member and I'm sure you didn't intend to condemn or humiliate anyone. The problem is that people routinely underestimate the provocation in their own comments and overestimate the provocation in others'. If the error is 10x in each direction, that's a huge skew [1]. That's why it's hard to track the impact that one's posts have—especially the righteously indignant sort of post [2].
I suppose one of the moderators' jobs is to step in and try to articulate that explicitly, in the hope of persuading enough users to generate a bit of a system correction.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] which, by the way, I can feel a bit of in my own comment just now, and I'm probably underestimating it too.
That is a huge overstatement that you can't really use to justify the haranguing. They just popped in to address the potential issue and let people know they're trying to sort it out. Nobody is giving legal advice and nobody is going to end up in legal trouble because Microsoft messed up their license boilerplate for a bit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
If it helps at all, there's also this: "Assume good faith" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes they are a new user, but they appear to have made the account just to make that comment.
People making accounts so they can talk about their work is one of the best reasons for people to make an account and a big part of what makes HN threads interesting.
people claiming to be official advocates that could do real damage to your company if legal wanted to bone you.
That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.
Uhuh but coming in to give bad legal advice as your first comment for the benefit of the largest most litigious corp on the planet, is that what makes HN threads interesting?
> That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.
That wasn't a statement towards the individual. That was a statement of what could befall someone who took their advice.
That wasn't a statement towards the individual. That was a statement of what could befall someone who took their advice.
No, I don't think that's true - it's just a catastrophizing rationalization for reflexive dickishness. We all suffer from reflexive dickishness so of course it happens and it's not that big of a deal but trying to pass it off as some sort of virtue is a mistake.