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by SquishyPanda23 1643 days ago
I'm just curious, is Microsoft actually in violation of the MIT license here?

All future changes to this repo are copyright Microsoft, so Microsoft's copyright should be in the statement.

Arguably there should be an additional statement indicating that LesnyRumcajs holds copyright to bits of code that Microsoft hasn't changed.

But

(1) exactly which bits have LesnyRumcajs's copyright would have to be verified by examining source control history. Since LesnyRumcajs's copyright statement is visible on any commit where LesnyRumcajs holds copyright, this setup makes actually makes it easy to verify which portions LesnyRumcajs has copyright claims on.

(2) Including LesnyRumcajs's copyright statement in repo history seems to be all that the MIT license requires. The license doesn't forbid there being another more easily accessible copyright notice that doesn't list all copyright holders. It only requires that LesnyRumcajs's statement be included in all copies of the software, which it currently is.

1 comments

What you're saying doesn't make any sense. If what you're saying was true you could take any MIT repro, fork it and replace the license with a fully proprietary copyright claim or any other license. You absolutely can't take code and just change the license to anything more permissive without the original copyright holders permission.

It's definitely the case that at a given snapshot of the repository which has copyrighted code owned by someone else the copyright notice has to be there at that same revision.

The license wasn't changed. But yes, generally you can make changes to MIT code that aren't released under the MIT license.

> It's definitely the case that at a given snapshot of the repository which has copyrighted code owned by someone else the copyright notice has to be there at that same revision.

This isn't in the license. Where is this laid out?

MIT license is very permissive but the original author retains copyright and one of the very few restrictions is that you must maintain the original authors copyright notice. So you can use MIT code in a GPL project but you can't remove the original copyright notice and MIT license text.

I don't quite follow your thinking about removing the notice but having it somewhere in history; a given snapshot/ revision will be a distribution where someone can show up and download just the master branch newest state and not the full git history. In which case you surely have distributed a copy of the copyrighted MIT licensed code without complying with the terms of the license, right?