I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post?
That said, the author of Spegel should have used another license if he wanted more “recognition” or the like.
What would you prefer them do? A public flogging? Bring back the stocks?
I agree with the sentiment with these types of comments (I hate PR fluff too), but the aggression when a company has screwed up and not only admits it but tells you their plan going forward is silly. The best case scenario is it does nothing, worst case it encourages them to ignore it next time it happrns.
They say:
> We hear you loud and clear and are going to make sure we improve our processes to help us be better stewards in the open-source community. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention. We will improve the way we work and collaborate in open source and are always open to feedback.
…which is a lot of nice words with absolutely NO accountability. They could write a sticky note “do better” and technically that’s all that’s required from their side. Is that okay with you?
Nobody is expecting this one incident to make Microsoft change. It’s about reputation, which can take a long time to shift, but can be important in the long term.
We don’t have to just accept it when a company issues a statement apologizing for their screwup. It’s perfectly acceptable to say “this apology means little to me, and if you want your reputation to change you need to do more”.
Pretty sure their legal department would have my fork obliterated from the face of the earth and I would be crossing my fingers that all I got was a cease and desist letter instead of a lawsuit in Texas.
This was MIT licensed open source software and an attribution clause was not properly respected. Hardly piracy.
As I wrote in my parallel post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756102): these copyright violations (not giving proper attribution of the license requires it is copyright violation) from Microsoft's side (the more, the "better", and the clearer the message) can be considered de-facto, implicitly stated corporate messages from Microsoft's side that they are from now on officially fine with copyright violations, and thus everybody is from now on free to violate the copyright on every software product that Microsoft has ever produced.
The TL on the project should have done better, but it was a good sign that they had originally taken the time to acknowledge Spegel's author's help. It's very likely that someone else dealt with the actual code and license text and didn't know any better.
The PR text is reviewed by lawyers. The default advice from lawyers is "do not admit any wrongdoing". They probably suggested that the license text be fixed silently with no apology. The PR department likely convinced them that a public apology would be good for optics and it doesn't seem soulless either.
They should have done better. They admitted that. They may or may not change their internal processes, but it's now in the record book. Case closed.
And the author of Spegel should not have used a different license if he wanted "more <<recognition>>". He wanted the recognition specified by the MIT license.
Nope, "the revenge of Clippy" is doing the writing.
I mean they made sure to get all the consent from all authors on github before training on it right
