Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn't. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put "You must license your project the same as the one you forked from" and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been.
What remains after full compliance with the MIT license choince will be the bulk of the complaints in the article.
So if the author instead used GPL, this wouldn't have been a problem? Call me pessimist, but I don't think Microsoft would have cared if it was MIT, GPL or even missing a license (so copyrighted by the author), they would have made the same choice as they just now did.
I'm sorry, but it's really hard to understand what you mean here, how choosing GPL would have somehow lead to a different outcome.
I do agree for the author to be _fully_ happy they would probably have wanted something even more restrictive than any traditionally "open" license like GPL, but about any choice would have better aligned with their desires than MIT.
But reading the article, the author appears to be more disgruntled by the fact that a behemoth forked his project than the mishandling of the copyright that can be fixed with one PR (he is right to be pissed about that, but that's an easily solvable problem, I doubt Microsoft will stand against it).
If they're breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven't heard much from them recently).
I'm confused how you and others reach this conclusion. No, it doesn't.
The MIT license is one of the shortest free license that exists:
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
No where does that require attribution. It has basically one condition: perpetuate the license.
Maybe the author didn't actually use an MIT license, despite claiming to? But as far as the MIT license is concerned, as long as the other party provides the same license for the fork, that's all that's needed.
> I'm confused how you and others reach this conclusion. No, it doesn't.
| Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders> | | ... | | The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The copyright notice that must be preserved includes the copyright holders' names, and that is a form of attribution.
No, they would have found something else that wasn't a pain to steal.
GPL/AGPL would prevented this somehow, requiring proper attribution via mandatory source code release, and allowing to track project origins. This would make it harder to label it as a "a Microsoft Product from Ground Up", and prevent Sherlocking the original application to a greater degree.
As a result, this would probably forced Microsoft to develop a new one from scratch, because they're allergic to GPL, because if they have breached GPL, they would be forced to comply, since GPL is court tested already.
So, write Free Software. Not Open Source. Esp. for your personal projects.
Source: the MIT license.
There's a copyright line, check. There's the permission notice, check.
The rest is just goodwill and ethics, which is not a very valuable currency in software in these days.
You’d need to patent your idea to stop that.
Citing myself from my comment:
> As a result, this would probably forced Microsoft to develop a new one from scratch, because they're allergic to GPL, because if they have breached GPL, they would be forced to comply, since GPL is court tested already.
So, we seem to agree here.
