Azure

peerd

Go2025–2025

Azure / peerd

peerd

Peer to peer distribution of Azure Artifact Streaming.

DevOps & Cloud Networking

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

12Distinct people

14Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

135GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Peer to peer distribution of Azure Artifact Streaming.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

spegel-org/spegel · linked in 4 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by 3-hour interval14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2025-04-21 11:45:09 UTC to 2025-04-23 01:32:57 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Apr 21, 09:00	2025-04-21 09:00:00 UTC	2025-04-21 12:00:00 UTC	2	2
Apr 21, 12:00	2025-04-21 12:00:00 UTC	2025-04-21 15:00:00 UTC	4	4
Apr 21, 15:00	2025-04-21 15:00:00 UTC	2025-04-21 18:00:00 UTC	3	3
Apr 21, 18:00	2025-04-21 18:00:00 UTC	2025-04-21 21:00:00 UTC	4	4
Apr 21, 21:00	2025-04-21 21:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 00:00	2025-04-22 00:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 03:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 03:00	2025-04-22 03:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 06:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 06:00	2025-04-22 06:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 09:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 09:00	2025-04-22 09:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 12:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 12:00	2025-04-22 12:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 15:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 15:00	2025-04-22 15:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 18:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 18:00	2025-04-22 18:00:00 UTC	2025-04-22 21:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 22, 21:00	2025-04-22 21:00:00 UTC	2025-04-23 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 23, 00:00	2025-04-23 00:00:00 UTC	2025-04-23 03:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

14 sources

philsnow·Apr 23, 2025

Reducing costs (and then trying to drum up community goodwill by "releasing" an open source tool) is not the same thing as generating revenue. https://github.com/Azure/peerd does not have a "pricing" section.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

throwaway642012·Apr 21, 2025

Based on the initial commits and the logs after that surely there’s someone unethical person at MS. This might have been brushed under the carpet and due to sheer luck it reached HN frontpage. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5...

In Getting forked by Microsoft

detective_bosch·Apr 21, 2025

They just updated the license and attribution. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110/files . Overall, it does not sit right with me. How can you be at the position you are and make a very obvious non-attribution mistake. I want to side on incompetence and give benefit of doubt but malice (for personal gains) is on the table as well.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

lachie83·Apr 21, 2025

Hi Philip, I'm Lachlan from the Cloud Native Ecosystem team at Microsoft. Our team works in the cloud native open-source community with a goal of being great open-source collaborators in these projects and communities, and I’m sorry that this happened. We appreciate your leadership and collaboration on Spegel and see your project solving a real challenge for the cloud native community. I wanted to thank you for your blog post https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/, let you know what we’re doing, and address a few points. We’ve just raised a pull request https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110 amending the license headers in the source files. We absolutely should have done better here: our company policy is to maintain copyright headers in files – we have added headers to the files to attribute your work. I also wanted

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to share why we felt making a new project was the appropriate path: the primary reason peerd was created was to add artifact streaming support. When you spoke with our engineers about implementing artifact streaming you said it was probably out of scope for Spegel at that time, which made sense. We made sure to acknowledge the work in Spegel and that it was used as a source of inspiration for peerd which you noted in your blog but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry. We hear you loud and clear and are going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention. We will improve the way we work and collaborate in open source and are always open to feedback.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

joshka·Apr 21, 2025

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110 > fix: amend copyright attributions #110 > > This commit amends copyright attributions that were omitted due to an oversight on part of the Peerd authors. Copyright header attributions in a few files have been updated to include "2023 Xenit AB and 2024 The Spegel Authors". The attribution in the LICENSE file has also been updated to reflect the same.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

firesteelrain·Apr 21, 2025

First, if Microsoft used any of the Spegel code then it should provide proper attribution. A best practice is to put the LICENSE file in the root of project (both peerd and spegel do). But also, you need to put the license in the header of each file as a best practice. Like Microsoft did here https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/api/docs.go#L1 spegel did not follow best practices to put the copyright in the file itself: https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/internal/web/... Ideally starting with something like this // SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

In Getting forked by Microsoft

zamadatix·Apr 21, 2025

It matters because the only thing which can be claimed to have been ignored here is missing the line "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" in the main license file. Now that it's brought up https://github.com/Azure/peerd/issues/109 that'll probably be fixed. What remains after full compliance with the MIT license choince will be the bulk of the complaints in the article.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

tedivm·Apr 21, 2025

The "notice" is the literal license file. It is illegal to strip someone else's license from their work. It doesn't matter that they replaced MIT with MIT, because they stripped the author and attribution from it. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE If you read that file you'd think that Microsoft was the copyright holder, but they very clearly aren't.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

croemer·Apr 21, 2025

Yep, there's an issue with 200+ reactions: https://github.com/Azure/peerd/issues/109

In Getting forked by Microsoft

croemer·Apr 21, 2025

Forking might be the wrong word, what happened here looks more like (somewhat obfuscated) plagiarism. I analyzed the 2 repositories for copy/pasted lines using PMD's CPD (copy/paste detector) - using the first commit of peerd and one from spegel that was from around the same time. There are some clear duplications, e.g. 178 lines here: https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5d8... correspond to this: https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/ed21d4da925b9a179c... Also 44 lines here: https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/ed21d4da925b9a179c... and https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/64b8928943ddd73691d0b5d8... but the full files are almost identical, only a few edits that break the complete equality. Also https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/ed21d4da925b9a179c... matches https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/64b8928

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943ddd73691d0b5d8... I haven't looked deep enough to see how much of the differences are obfuscation and how much are meaningful changes. File names are all changed, many structs and variable names as well. See this gist for full list of duplications: https://gist.github.com/corneliusroemer/c58cf0faf957d9001b58...

In Getting forked by Microsoft

Maxious·Apr 21, 2025

Very possible, from the in repo documentation (which credits Spegel yet again) https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md it seems like there was a particular engineer at Microsoft who was working on Azure Container Registry who found it useful to integrate Azure Container Registry. If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably.

In Getting Forked by Microsoft

ryao·Apr 21, 2025

The commit histories for the LICENSE files in the two repositories are rather interesting. The original author placed a single copyright notice in that file. Microsoft on the other hand published it with their copyright notice and a Apache 2.0 license in place of the original copyright notice and MIT license. They also put copyright Microsoft and license apache 2.0 headers on all files. They then changed the Apache 2.0 license to MIT, but left their copyright notice in place of the original copyright notice in LICENSE: https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f... Unless they forked a very early version that did not even have the LICENSE file, such that they never removed the original notice, this looks like copyright infringement to me. That said, I am not a lawyer.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

ryao·Apr 21, 2025

I initially was going to say: Failing to abide by the MIT license is copyright infringement. My advice is to contact these guys: https://softwarefreedom.org/ They likely can file a cease and desist on your behalf. However, I took a closer look at the files in question. The MIT license requires that they retain and provide copyright notices, but you never put copyright notices in your files. The only place where you appear to have placed a copyright notice is in the LICENSE file: https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/commit/23ed0d60f66dd292... Things become interesting when I look at their LICENSE file. They appear to have tried to relicense this to Apache 2.0 before backpedaling and reinstating the MIT license: https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f... Unless they forked from a very early version of the project that d

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id not even have the LICENSE file, they removed the sole copyright notice you had in the repository. That brings us back to my original thoughts, which is that they have committed copyright infringement, and you should contact OSS friendly lawyers about it. I am not a lawyer, but I do contribute to various OSS projects and all of the ones to which I have ever contributed have copyright notice headers at the top of every file to ensure proper attribution is maintained no matter where that code is used. Beyond having that sole missing copyright notice reinstated, I am not sure what else you could expect since none of your files have proper copyright headers in them. The SFLC guys would be in a better position to advise you, as they are actual lawyers.

In Getting forked by Microsoft

Zambyte·Apr 21, 2025

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/LICENSE I don't see "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" (the "above copyright notice" in https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE) anywhere. Where do you see it?

In Getting forked by Microsoft