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by pjmlp 416 days ago
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.
1 comments
Nemo_bis 416 days ago
Microsoft did not bother to respect even the MIT license, so clearly the license is not the problem.
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pjmlp 416 days ago
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.

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Nemo_bis 416 days ago
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.

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ComplexSystems 416 days ago
The point is that the author would not really be much happier if Microsoft had added a few lines admitting substantial portions of code were taken from Spegel. They probably will do this, but I doubt he will be satisfied with the result either way.

The comment above, which I mostly agree with, is that the point of the MIT license to permit anyone, including large corporations, doing this kind of thing. Since this doesn't seem like an outcome the author is happy with, maybe a different license would be better.

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fkyoureadthedoc 416 days ago
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.
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