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I wish the author actually substantiated his claims a bit better.
Based on this description, it sounds like an employee committing plagiarism in order to defraud their boss. Retroactive editing of the commit history is particularly suggestive; it implies someone tried to cover their tracks.
Are you sure that it wasn't Microsoft, the corporate person? They are a company of 35,000 people and I'm quite sure that they always act in unison. Also, when some random blogger contacts Microsoft and asks Microsoft to do something about something, then Microsoft better stop what they're doing and listen! Enjoy your Microsoft-hate-train all. yawn
Obviously the license was broken by removing the copyright notice of the original author, but it also doesn't sound like the author really did anything to try and handle the issue properly so now they are posting a rant.
Here is the extent of what the author did, "So I reached out to people I knew at Microsoft. This was probably a year ago now. They were shocked and apologized. But since then nothing has happened."
We don't know who those people are, what they're roles are, but I suspect they are not involved with the Rush project nor is it their job to handle potential copyright violations for all of Microsoft.
The author could have posted an issue to the repo expressing their concern. If this was ignored then they could issue a DMCA takedown notice through GitHub. If this was not successful then the author could contact Microsoft legal or file a lawsuit.
There isn't a single link to a commit, file or repo that shows the similarities between the two code bases, let alone alleged plagiarism. It is conceivable that they truly are two different projects that happen to be developed around the same time. It's not the first time that has happened. I wish the author actually substantiated his claims a bit better.
The only instances of lerna being mentioned are people who use or work on rush mentioning differences between the two projects.
Assuming the lerna author is accurate, why just the angry blog post? If I had contacted MS and raised the issue via email, and nothing happened, I would have started raising issues on the project GitHub and making pull requests to rectify the situation. Not only could that actually work to resolve the issue, but the discussion would be public.
I just dug around in the rush GitHub, and was surprised to find no pull requests by the author of Lerna trying to rectify the missing copyright ("Hey guys, you forgot to keep my copyright in there since this is a fork of Lerna, so here's a pull request"), or any issues raised ("The copyright of my MIT-licensed project is missing. What's up with that?"). The only instances of lerna being mentioned are people who use o…
a pull request would be the same as an email or blog post at this point. it is just a way to communicate. why is a PR better then what they are doing now?
I just dug around in the rush GitHub, and was surprised to find no pull requests by the author of Lerna trying to rectify the missing copyright ("Hey guys, you forgot to keep my copyright in there since this is a fork of Lerna, so here's a pull request"), or any issues raised ("The copyright of my MIT-licensed project is missing. What's up with that?"). The only instances of lerna being mentioned are people who use o…
You are assuming someone who is scrambling to change function names and hide git logs will be going back to the code they stole to re-check for an update license? a pull request would be the same as an email or blog post at this point. it is just a way to communicate. why is a PR better then what they are doing now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, someone should be fired for violation of these (serious) policies?
If what the author says is true then yes. Unfortunately they really bungled their case by trying to reach out through unofficial channels first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But both included the MIT license
The copyright notice is what must be included. The license states this very clearly.
The original BSD license did have a credit clause which led to considerable trouble and controversy, so they don't do that any more. IANAL, and this is extremely bad manners on someone's part, but no laws were broken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The copyright notice is what must be included. The license states this very clearly.
The "above copyright notice" must be included; i.e. the general MIT license itself, without credit to any author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License The original BSD license did have a credit clause which led to considerable trouble and controversy, so they don't do that any more. IANAL, and this is extremely bad manners on someone's part, but no laws were broken.
That's the copyright notice. The license text is "this permission notice". So no, you can not leave the original author name off.
The BSD license differs in that it requires the resulting software to display the credits, not just the source code to contain it. (Which is why e.g. phones or cars have somewhere deep in the menus a point where they show license information, to fulfill the BSD requirement)