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Not just forked. Microsoft stole the code without attribution, violating the license terms. Truly shameful behavior. Best case, it was a single engineer who was tasked with duplicating the functionality, but chose the lazier, fraudulent route and was even too lazy to clean things up entirely. Still, MS should own up, correct the record, and make this right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
MIT doesn't need attribution. Original BSD does, but revised and most widespread BSDs do not. GPL/AGPL would prevented this somehow, requiring proper attribution via mandatory source code release, and allowing to track project origins. This would make it harder to label it as a "a Microsoft Product from Ground Up", and prevent Sherlocking the original application to a greater degree. As a result, this would probably…
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Source: the MIT license. https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
If that's what the license says, why is the author complaining? Microsoft is complying with the license.
That's what you get for not picking the one of the license from the GPL family.
> However, I am not the first and unfortunately not the last person to come across this David versus Goliath-esque experience.
Again, this situation was completely avoidable. Stallman had foreseen this kind of situations literally forty years ago. That's why the Free Software movement exists.
Tangentially related: has anyone notice how the whole Grafana ecosystem is going strong and unaffected by forks and corporate take-overs? I'm pretty sure that the AGPL license is playing a big role into that.
> As a sole maintainer of an open source project, I was enthused when Microsoft reached out to set up a meeting to talk about Spegel. The meeting went well, and I felt there was going to be a path forward ripe with cooperation and hopefully a place where I could onboard new maintainers. Seems it isn't the first time Microsoft leads open source maintainers on, trying to extract information about their projects so they…
> I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive What's good about being "permissive"? I keep hearing this argument, but I still don't understand, what's the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything "permissive". Do you enjoy your project getting forked, walled off and exploited for profit by someone who has never done you any good? AGPLv3 still allows forking, still allows maki…
That said, I fully support larger projects being GPL, which I think is a more reasonable license for projects that involve dozens or hundreds of contributors and are depended on by millions around the world. But the role of the MIT and Apache style licenses has always felt a little more confusing.
Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence and certainly not one that doesn't provide copyleft. This is all very well established at this point and yet somehow the GPL seems to have gone out of vogue.
> Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn't. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put "You must license your project the same as the one you forked from" and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been…
If they're breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven't heard much from them recently).
While Microsoft is certainly in the wrong for removing the copyright notice, I think the author has zero basis for complaint otherwise. If you're going to release software with one of the most permissable licenses, you need to accept that for all it entails. Consider what you're comfortable with and pick an appropriate license relative to your values.
Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence and certainly not one that doesn't provide copyleft. This is all very well established at this point and yet somehow the GPL seems to have gone out of vogue.
> Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn't. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put "You must license your project the same as the one you forked from" and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been…