[mdasen]

I'm curious what license you're using (since there's no mention in the readme). It seems clear that you wrote this to be open source and help people. Since there's no license information, third parties (ie, people who aren't you) should assume that they have no right to use it (that it's proprietary since there's nothing offering other rights). You've said it's open source, but under what terms can I (or TaxCloud) use it?

A lot of open source licenses don't require attribution. If you had licensed this under the GPL2 or MIT licenses, would you still consider what they did wrong?

It's crappy (in the plagiarism way) to take someone else's code and try to make people think you wrote it. You haven't explicitly licensed your code under any license and so, to be conservative, third parties should operate under the assumption that the code is proprietary. However, many times open source does allow you to fork something and make it your own. For example, Joomla is a fork of Mambo. The codebase has evolved, copyright notices have been changed, and there isn't credit back to Mambo on the website. If it were a less known project, many people might assume that it all originated with Joomla (and, in fact, with Mambo seemingly dead and it having been quite a while since the fork, I'm guessing a lot of newer people wouldn't find out).

Often times, open source licenses don't require attribution. It might have been that the person at TaxCloud got your email telling them about your open source project and assumed an MIT license for it. One shouldn't assume things like that, but people make more egregious errors.

Anyway, it would be nice to know what license the open source code is governed by (and this is true for many more projects that just don't have a license file) and I hope you're able to resolve the situation in a way which makes things better for you.

[mds_]

How do you define attribution? Both GPLv2 and MIT require you to retain the copyright notice which I would consider a form of attribution (i.e. I wrote it and not you).

[chaostheory]

This should help out everyone else: TDLR for licenses

http://www.tldrlegal.com/

[boop]

"You haven't explicitly licensed your code under any license and so, to be conservative, third parties should operate under the assumption that the code is proprietary"

I would have guessed that without an explicit license, open source is free for anyone to take/modify/reuse. After all, it is open source.

In other words, the default would be the most permissive license. You suggest it is the opposite - that without a license, the code should be considered proprietary. Can anyone more familiar with open source licenses clarify?

[kkowalczyk]

There's nothing to clarify.

Creative work (including source code) automatically falls under "all rights reserved" bucket unless the author specifically states other licensing terms.

In this case the author didn't so his work is still "all rights reserved" and no-one can use it.

You're confusing "source code available" with "open-source".

"Open source" is a shortcut for: "source code available and under open-source license".

What license is an open-source license? OSI has a detailed checklist: http://opensource.org/docs/osd

(nitpicker corner: to the extent a vague term as "open source" can be defined; people disagree as to what exactly it means).

[drewcrawford]

Under the Berne convention, all works produced in any signatory country are automatically subject to copyright: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protec...

Wikipedia says "A typical software license grants an end-user permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise potentially constitute copyright infringement of the software owner's exclusive rights under copyright law." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license

You may be basing your prior belief on e.g. Wikipedia's claim (scroll down) that "A primary consequence of the free software form of licensing is that acceptance of the license is essentially optional — the end-user may use, study, and privately modify the software without accepting the license." IANAL, but this statement seems dangerously incorrect to me. It may be technically correct that you do not "have" to accept the license terms--but then if you are downloading the software, or creating derivative works without a license, you would be violating the law. E.g.

Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution. - http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html#p2p

[178]

It is true in the sense that there are conceivable ways to use FOSS without accepting the licence. There are common ways like dual-licensing (if the license is GPL and the company has all the copyrights they can still sell me a different license) or even fair use (someone could create a parody of FOSS and publish it).

[tisme]

> I would have guessed that without an explicit license, open source is free for anyone to take/modify/reuse.

That would only be true if the copyright holder explicitly places their creation in the public domain.

Open source does not mean 'I get to re-interpret copyright law in a way that suits me'.

[theallan]

How do you know it is open source without a license? Sure you can see the source code, but I wouldn't have said that is what makes it open - its the license that does.

[calpaterson]

The normal rule is actually to assume that all rights are reserved.