Adding the copyright notice to be in compliance, does not change the fact that the author has chosen a licence that allows anyone, including Microsoft, to do whatever they feel like, without giving back.
So eventually, with this bad publicity, they will add the copyright notice, and move on with whatever else they are doing, in full compliance.
Not arguing for Microsoft, rather the fact that people put out MIT licenced stuff out there, or similar, arguing how bad GPL happens to be, and then get all up in arms when companies do exactly what the licence allows for.
Microsoft might not have fully complied with the licence, adding the copyright notice to fix that, won't change a millimeter from what they are doing.
I don't disagree with the general point but in this case we're looking at what (seems to be) a blatant copyright violation. It would not be any more or less of a violation if the infringed license had been a more or less permissive one, because the license has not been followed.
Sure, the MIT is very permissive so it's very easy for Microsoft to correct their repository so that it's in compliance for the future, but they cannot correct the past. (Unless the original authors allow for it.) The MIT license, being so short, does not have a provision about curing infringements.
So Microsoft seems to be ok with the risk of being sued for infringement etc. That's not something you can correct with your personal decisions as author.
That doesn't mean that they would have completely ignored all implications of any other license. The author of the code chose a license that explicitly allows exactly what happened, other than Microsoft did not include a text file that nobody is going to read.
Everybody claims they removed the author's copyright notice. I checked many source files in Spegel, and none of them contain an MIT header with copyright.
I don't think Microsoft removed the copyright notice. I think that the original author did not add one...
Why are you doing this? Posting in a way that suggests purposely confuses/obfuscates the difference between the general concept of a copyright notice and the practice of putting a copyright comment at the top of every file in a project, then immediately get corrected, then post basically the same intentional misunderstanding on someone else's comment elsewhere in the thread.
You:
> I don't think Microsoft removed the copyright notice. I think that the original author did not add one...
Direct quote that from the file containing and requiring the copyright notice in derivative works that was not included in Microsoft's fork. This was also included in a comment which you have replied to:
> The above _copyright notice_ and this permission notice...
They removed the attribution to the original authors and replaced it with their own name. So the copyright notice is not preserved. They could comply with the licence by adding back that attribution.
I've been downvoted for it before, but I still say that permissive licenses are charity to megacorps. If you want your work to get turned into a proprietary program without any compensation to you, use a permissive license. If you want to at least have a chance they'll contribute back & maybe pay you for a proprietary license, pick a free-software license.
If you pick a corporate charity license, don't act surprise when corporations take the charity!