The Corgi event doesn't seem particularly notable. There are similar features implemented in the most bog standard way that those features can be implemented using the pattern that AFAIK Github pioneered with a 'Danger Zone'. Both parties are using the same upstream components so it ends up looking the same.

I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community (seeing as I wasn't around when Bill Gates famously asked for money first or whatever). To think that a past OpenOffice would have been considered unconscionably close to a copy of an old MS Office of the era twenty years ago.

In some way, The Corporations Won, because it turns out software engineers turned into IP maximalists. Thinking back to when I first installed Tux Kart decades ago I never could have imagined that we'd get to this stage. Really wild, man.

"I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community"

It's not copyright maximalism, it's just bog-standard rationalization. I don't like what this company is doing, it looks like I can hit them with the "copyright" stick, so I will. One day later, I like playing abandonware games and that should be legal and copyright is stopping me so copyright bad, grrr argh.

At least, at the HN gestalt level. Individuals may say one or the other of those things from a principled perspective, but I perceive a lot of rationalization in these discussions overall.

There's not a lot people coming at this from any sort of principled position. I think one measure of that is that the modal principled position right now ought to be something fairly close to "I don't know". AI has kicked a lot of the foundation out from underneath copyright and I don't think anyone serious has more than a first draft of what the plan moving forward should be. Even if you can get two people to agree on the goals we should shoot for, which is already a tough ask even in a pre-AI era, getting them to agree on how to achieve those goals will be a long shot... and that's entirely separate from the question of whether the actions would in fact end up accomplishing the goal, which I don't trust anyone to have a good bead on right now.

Nominally, the principle of copyright has been to preserve creativity. Ten years ago we all had a reasonably similar idea what that meant, but we don't even have that now.

> Both parties are using the same upstream components so it ends up looking the same.

I had a look at the 4 screenshots in the post, and definitively it's not just using the "same upstream components", it's a verbatim copy.

Don't know about the rest of the app and the actual code, but I won't be surprised to find out it's basically the same.

> The Corporations Won, because it turns out software engineers turned into IP maximalists

Yeah, it's always bothered me that developers are eager to get legal to patent something they were involved in at Company™ put their name on patents so they can include them in their promotion docs.

It's like we're slowly defrauding ourselves and ensuring companies have the maximum legal standing against individual makers. Almost like a prisoner's dilemma where we're building the things that will/have be used against it us and those that come after in exchange for a little personal gain.

Did you even look into the situation?

Corgi was spending 10K/yr for DocSend. They decided to build their own and the LLM took UI from PaperMark, an open-source alternative. I’ve implemented features that exist in open-source and LLM has never blatantly ripped off the UI.

Corgi has raised $106M but won’t pay for DocSend? Fine. Wants to build their own version based on Open-source? Fine. Keep it closed source and then try to monetize your version? That’s treacherous.

How is Microsoft Office vs Open Office a good parallel to this?

> I don't know

it is abundantly clear from the post, agree

> Bill Gates

MSFT declared open source a "cancer" and "a threat to American Values" .. later, almost the entire Internet is run fundamentally on OSS.

What motivations might MSFT have had in 1998 ? Are there clear lessons from the extremes of the past that could be applied now?

Do authors have a right to LICENSE software they write? which ones, only Linus or Daniel Stenberg ? are there others? does a LICENSE mean anything ?

##-- related

From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject: Microsoft and the Big Lie Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:47:38 -0400 ...

In the last three months, Jim Allchin and Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer ... have described it (open source code ed.) as "un-American", "a destroyer", and "a cancer". They have deliberately confused the GPL with non-infectious open-source licenses, and they have deliberately confused active combination of code with passive aggregation of data.