How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something About It

I'm curious what license you're using (since there's no mention in the readme). It seems clear that you wrote this to be open source and help people. Since there's no license information, third parties (ie, people who aren't you) should assume that they have no right to use it (that it's proprietary since there's nothing offering other rights). You've said it's open source, but under what terms can I (or TaxCloud) use it?

A lot of open source licenses don't require attribution. If you had licensed this under the GPL2 or MIT licenses, would you still consider what they did wrong?

It's crappy (in the plagiarism way) to take someone else's code and try to make people think you wrote it. You haven't explicitly licensed your code under any license and so, to be conservative, third parties should operate under the assumption that the code is proprietary. However, many times open source does allow you to fork something and make it your own. For example, Joomla is a fork of Mambo. The codebase has evolved, copyright notices have been changed, and there isn't credit back to Mambo on the website. If it were a less known project, many people might assume that it all originated with Joomla (and, in fact, with Mambo seemingly dead and it having been quite a while since the fork, I'm guessing a lot of newer people wouldn't find out).

Often times, open source licenses don't require attribution. It might have been that the person at TaxCloud got your email telling them about your open source project and assumed an MIT license for it. One shouldn't assume things like that, but people make more egregious errors.

Anyway, it would be nice to know what license the open source code is governed by (and this is true for many more projects that just don't have a license file) and I hope you're able to resolve the situation in a way which makes things better for you.

TaxCloud posted sample code for Zencart in December 2010, and it appears to me that the variable names were already established. Some of it is below.

  // func.taxcloud.php

  function verifyAddress($address, &$err) {

    global $client;

    // Verify the address through the TaxCloud verify address service
    $params = array( "uspsUserID" => USPS_ID,
           "address1" => $address->getAddress1(),
           "address2" => $address->getAddress2(),
           "city" => $address->getCity(),
           "state" => $address->getState(),
           "zip5" => $address->getZip5(),
           "zip4" => $address->getZip4());
  [...]

Post: http://dev.taxcloud.net/2010/12/30/taxcloud-example-code-rea... Code: http://morecarts.taxcloud.net/cartcode/

How do you define attribution? Both GPLv2 and MIT require you to retain the copyright notice which I would consider a form of attribution (i.e. I wrote it and not you).

This should help out everyone else: TDLR for licenses

http://www.tldrlegal.com/

"You haven't explicitly licensed your code under any license and so, to be conservative, third parties should operate under the assumption that the code is proprietary"

I would have guessed that without an explicit license, open source is free for anyone to take/modify/reuse. After all, it is open source.

In other words, the default would be the most permissive license. You suggest it is the opposite - that without a license, the code should be considered proprietary. Can anyone more familiar with open source licenses clarify?