Thanks for the response. Mistakes happen, human or computer, not the end of the world, and I get it. I was just more curious to know if there is a manual process for this type of forking that was not being vetted via the bot, and to bring another example to your attention.
If you read the repo history carefully, you'll see a bot was responsible for rewriting the "LICENSE" file from an Apache license to the Microsoft (c) stamped MIT license. This human commit simply copied that same language to the file named "LICENSE.txt". It's unclear why they did that, but that human was not responsible for introducing the license text into the repo.
? Instead of a software bug, it was a human error. Is it really surprising that with a company of Microsoft's size, some employees fuck up? Likely the employee was trying to say that the contributions in this fork that were not present in upstream are covered by the new license, but failed to do so properly (by leaving the original license intact and identifying precisely which files the new license applied to and which it didn't).
Courts will take a far more generous view than you are here. If Microsoft is not profiting from the change, and fixes it promptly when pointed out, the courts will shrug at any case - no harm, no foul. It's not even clear to me that it's illegal to have the wrong license on GitHub, assuming the shipping product does not violate the correct license. As nobody has pointed to any infringing Microsoft product... What are we talking about?
My guess is that they were going through a checklist of what to do when releasing open source changes, and didn't understand what they were doing.
A lot of why we've had to put some guardrails in our system has been to point people to guidance and training on open source.
I've sent the team that works on this repository an e-mail, but I don't expect to get a response on the holiday.