Microsoft: Did It Really Fork This Fellow?
May 26, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
Forked doesn’t quite communicate the exact level of frustration Philip Laine experienced while working on a Microsoft project. He details the incident in his post, “Getting Forked By Microsoft.” Laine invented a solution for image scalability without a stateful component and needed minimal operation oversight. He dubbed his project Spegel, made it open source, and was contacted by Microsoft.
Microsoft was pleased with Spegel. Laine worked with Microsoft engineers to implement Spegel into its architecture. Everything went well until Microsoft stopped working with him. He figured the moved onto other projects. Microsoft did move on but the engineers developed their own version of Spegel. They have the grace to thank Laine and in a README file. It gets worse:
"While looking into Peerd, my enthusiasm for understanding different approaches in this problem space quickly diminished. I saw function signatures and comments that looked very familiar, as if I had written them myself. Digging deeper I found test cases referencing Spegel and my previous employer, test cases that have been taken directly from my project. References that are still present to this day. The project is a forked version of Spegel, maintained by Microsoft, but under Microsoft’s MIT license.”
Microsoft plagiarized…no…downright stole Spegel’s base coding from Laine. He, however, published Spegel with Microsoft’s MIT licensing. The MIT licensing means:
“Software released under an MIT license allows for forking and modifications, without any requirement to contribute these changes back. I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive.”
It does require this:
“The license does not allow removing the original license and purport that the code was created by someone else. It looks as if large parts of the project were copied directly from Spegel without any mention of the original source.”
Laine wanted to work with Microsoft and have their engineers contribute to his open source project. He’s dedicated his energy, time, and resources to Spegel and continues to do so without much contribution other than GitHub sponsors and the thanks of its users. Laine is considering changing Spegel’s licensing as it’s the only way to throw a stone at Microsoft.
If true, the pulsing AI machine is a forker.
Whitney Grace, May 26, 2025
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