I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake.
You are right, provided he did not have a notice saying it was MIT licensed elsewhere.
> I’ve contributed to plenty of project that don’t have the per-file copyrights. It’s a choice not a mistake.
I would consider it to be both a choice and a mistake. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is no evidence in the fork that he is the copyright holder of the original code and it looks like Microsoft is. Part of that is Microsoft’s fault, but part of that is the original author’s fault for not including per file copyright notices, such that Microsoft could add theirs and be the sole one listed in every file.
I would not be surprised if Microsoft’s legal department doing a scan of public repositories for stolen code mistook him for infringing on “their code” given that they have no information that he authored it rather than their employee. It sounds absurd, but it has happened. I know for a fact the sg3 utils author added copyright notices to his code examples because he was getting contacted by companies, whose engineers incorporated his code into their projects without attribution, that thought he had stolen their code:
https://github.com/doug-gilbert/sg3_utils
I know that because he told me by email in 2013.
Only because they removed the license and copyright. If they were willing to do that in 1 file, they are willing to do it in many. It's not the authors mistake in any way shape or form.
No: the original author could have made it easier to comply, and you could argue that he acted foolishly in not doing so, but that doesn't make it his fault.
If someone wanted to transplant only a subset of files from one project to another, there would have been no copyright notices to retain.
Absolutely not! This is completely and only M$'s fault, whichever way you look at it. Copying a file and slapping your own license on it, without consideration of the original one, is never acceptable. Don't blaim the victim please.
As for incompetence - well maybe they (M$) need to get better at managing licenses? Accusing others of stealing when the reverse is true only makes everything worse. Let's not try to change the standard way of licensing because some developers can't be bothered to check the license (and even fix typos in comments, apparently).
As an aside, there is no need to add copyright / license to every file. I would even consider it an anti-pattern, because it pollutes the code with noise.
If you look at any major project, you are likely to see license and copyright notices at the top. You even have the Linux foundation pushing to have standardized license notices at the top of every source file:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Package_Data_Exchange...
That said, the engineer who did this is fairly young (7 years out of college) and does not appear to have any experience working on a fork previously:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aviraltakkar/
He probably did not realize he had goofed. It does not take much imagination to guess the sequence of events:
* He copies the source files into Visual Studio Code
* Someone internal tells him he needs a license, so he grabs whatever Microsoft suggests while following internal guidance, without realizing that is only for Microsoft originated code.
* Someone internal tells him to put it on GitHub, so it goes up with the wrong license.
* He realizes that the files already had a license and tries to fix it. Presumably someone told him.
* He misses the copyright notice that he failed to copy in the first place when fixing his earlier mistake.
* People here hear about it.