Weka Violates MinIO's Open Source Licenses

https://blog.min.io/weka-violates-minios-open-source-licenses/

by tiernano • 3 years ago

90 17 3 years ago

blog.min.io

beckhamc• 3 years ago

Not to be confused with open source ML toolkit WEKA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weka_(machine_learning)

Huh, that's funny, I guess which one came first?

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

I really thought this was about Weka (the ml lib)

shrikant• 3 years ago

I thought this was about the ML toolkit too. I remember trying to use it in a toy project way back in... mid noughties sometime, along with adjacent tools Kettle and Mondrian, so pretty sure that came first!

ssddanbrown2• 3 years ago

Interesting case. Based upon the screenshots, it doesn't looking like they're trying to hide things though. Not like a typical fork and hide-via-rebrand. The web UI still shows Minio, and the CLI example shows the Minio copyright and link to the codebase repo.

I'd be interested to know if the "About" link in show shown WebUI screenshot goes to Minio or Weka. If it goes to Minio, could that be considered (combined with the minio branding) showing attribution? Has a Weka customer been rejected sources upon request for the AGPL works (Or been told they're soley using the apache code)?

There's also an interesting question of how the GPL/AGPL copyleft acts in this mode of distribution. From the screenshot, they're distributed in a single ZIP but the (potential AGPL) works appear to be in their own image. So does that act as separate networked applications, and therefore copyleft does not affect the other images (bit still with a requirement to share sources with the AGPL) or does that count as a single combined works?

y4m4b4• 3 years ago

Attribution needs to be explicit for Open Source Licenses prominently available for customers to look at.

Making money off from another product calling it your own innovation is plagiarism.

https://www.weka.io/blog/cloud-storage/amazon-s3-protocol/

There is never a mention of that it uses MinIO underneath.

ssddanbrown2• 3 years ago

But it explicitly shows that it's using Minio when the application is actually used?

Sure, it's totally uncool to not mention Minio on their site and that's a massive shame but, as far as I'm aware, nothing in the license would require Weka to explicitly mention they're using Minio in their advertising/marketing like the provided link?

Confiks• 3 years ago

Based upon the screenshots, it doesn't looking like they're trying to hide things though.

The screenshots are produced by manually mounting a squashfs, locating a minio binary and running it. It's not a very clear (and completely convincing) demonstration, and IMO could better have been left out.

bdcravens• 3 years ago

The screenshots weren't of Weka's UI, but of Minio's after you manually extract those binaries. I'm not familiar with Weka, but it would be easy enough to stand up the Minio server and communicate internally over the S3 protocol, and never show any native Minio screens.

lopkeny12ko2• 3 years ago

Weka is one such company and as you will find below, they are distributing the entire MinIO binary in their product, without attribution, to implement their object storage functionality.

What's the point of making MinIO an open source product if you subsequently then get mad that someone else is using your open source product? All this article tells me is that MinIO is not truly "open source."

This acts as a great warning to stay away from MinIO. Shame, because I was a big fan in its early days, and actually ran a deployment myself before they started introducing an entire host of anti-features.

qubidt• 3 years ago

did you just learn about copyleft? It's not a new concept

JCWasmx86• 3 years ago

Open source does not mean "I take random projects, integrate them into my product, without any credits, without any acknowledgments". It means "I take projects, integrate them into my product and follow the minor implications of the license"

For example the MIT-License has a rule:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And as far as I can see from this article, there was no acknowledgment. According to tldrlegal (Sadly don't have the time to read through the entire AGPL license): https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-..., you have to include the license and copyright

olliej• 3 years ago

Open source and copy left is explicitly not public domain, which is what you seem to be claiming it is.

Open source and copy left has very well established rules and licensing terms. If you are selling a product using OSS software you are agreeing to the terms of that license. The includes both explicitly acknowledging that you are using said product, but also the source code for the version of the OSS project you are using, as well as the changes you have made to that OSS code, and generally any other software you write on top of it.

If you don’t want to do that, then you would need a different license that you would have to negotiate with all the copyright owners of the project. If you don’t do that then you have no license to use the software at all, let alone to redistribute it.

This isn’t a complicated concept.

lopkeny12ko2• 3 years ago

Oh my sweet summer child, if you think some strings in a file called LICENSE.txt in your repository is going to change how your software is used in practice, I have some bad news for you :) This is something you will learn as you gain more experience in the industry.

8 years ago I put a small C library for an extremely niche product on Github, for my own archival. No license and no intent for it to be used by anyone other than myself. To my surprise, I found out a few years ago it's used in quite a few projects--and in at least one case, used in automotive software you've probably used before ;)

Do I cry and complain that I didn't get credit or a paycheck? No. This is the true spirit of free and open source software. Sharing code with the world for the collective improvement of software everywhere. Open source is not pursuing frivolous lawsuits as MinIO is doing here.

gdamore• 3 years ago

Weka's response to minIO is here: https://www.weka.io/blog/file-system/weka-responds-to-unfoun...

It is well worth reading.

Weka Violates MinIO's Open Source Licenses

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