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by frognumber 1370 days ago
That's a very mechanical view of licenses.

I'll approximate: Contract violations are okay if they result in no damages. Courts determine damages by harm done. This comes down to a lot of detailed issues, including things like intent. Licenses are more complex, and I'll ignore issues like statutory damages.

A lot of licenses are GPL-compatible because although the terms differ in phrasing, the GPL has provisions which are substantively the same (e.g. attribution versus copyright notice). Courts won't care.

MIT signals one intent, and AGPL signals another. That's a big difference. I have code under AGPL, GPL, and MIT, and in the case of the AGPL code being ripped off by copilot, it undermines a lot of the purpose of having licensed the code as AGPL if others can use it without that license. For the MIT code, a lack of copyright notice+attribution would typically be mild annoyance at best.

A court would pick up on that, and act accordingly.