[cmgriffing]

I think this is a good case for applying Hanlon's Razor. The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there.

I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.

[frumplestlatz]

> The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there.

That person never learned what plagiarism is throughout their entire academic career, much less once they landed at Microsoft?

[isp]

There are other possibilities, for example, the person may have thought that they were complying with the MIT licence by releasing the new project under the MIT licence too + including a mention of the original project in the README.

This, of course, is incorrect, and a cursory read of the very short licence text would show it to be incorrect.

But I, too, am strongly favouring Hanlon's razor.

[saagarjha]

Hanlon's razor can indicate an absence of malice, but that doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong, nor should Microsoft skimp on taking steps so it never happens again.

[isp]

I agree on both points, and with the earlier comment:

> I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.

In response to:

> ... going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community.

[palata]

Most software developers I know have no clue how open source licences work.

Hell, I have been reading a lot about them (including the licences themselves and stuff like the GPL FAQ) many times, and in situations like this it's still not entirely clear to me what Microsoft should do (surely there are different valid ways to handle this).

Would you consider yourself competent as a lawyer regarding open source licences? If not, can I say that "you apparently never learned it" and aren't better than the rest of us?

[frumplestlatz]

Compliance here is simple — preserve the original license and copyright.

This isn’t complicated, but if you truly don’t understand it then you should speak to a lawyer before incorporating someone else’s code into your or your employer’s project.

[palata]

> Compliance here is simple

Have you read the threads here? My feeling is that there are many mutually exclusive interpretations of what can/should be done.

I don't know if it's simple or not, but what I see is that it's obviously not 100% clear for everybody (me included).

[frumplestlatz]

Ignorance is not a surprise or a fault. Anyone choosing to act from ignorance very much is.

I reiterate that this is not complicated. If you still find it complicated, then you need to speak to an attorney or someone else qualified to give you direction before attempting to use someone else’s code.

We have been doing this for nearly 60 years. Correct examples abound if you’re willing to do basic research.

[palata]

I will reiterate that most developers I know have almost no idea how open source licences work.

[Shocka1]

It wouldn't be surprising to me if an expert Leetcoder simply copy/pasted the code, knowing nothing of licensing. What would surprise me though is the engineering team not having at least one open source expert that didn't intervene.