What I’ll never understand is people who release their project with a permissive license and then get upset when a big company distributes their own version of the project in accordance with the license. If you don’t want that sort of appropriation then you need to pick a license that doesn’t allow it.
Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors
> The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
To me, licenses like MIT or BSD pretty much imply "do whatever you want with this" I know it's not exactly that but if you really care to keep some control over what others do with the code, you need a more restrictive license (and even then people are still going to copy it, especially in the LLM era).
You can't just cherrypick the things you like about a license. All of the conditions of the license apply.
You're thinking about what people can do with the code, like copying, editing, and distributing. This is not it. We're talking about giving credit to the original author, as per the license.
It certainly would be better.
Forks tend not to have -perfect- relationships and tend to cause a bit of mutual annoyance. But attribution is important-- it's the most basic step.
When this maintainer is asked how the projects are related, it'd sure be nice if both projects are telling the same story, instead of one illegally lying about it.
In this context, not "citing the original author" in the copyright statement, labeling the repository as a "fork" on GitHub, clearly crediting the original author in a way that clearly describes the fact that a significant portion of their code is used in the new project isn't just a violation of the license, it's plagiarism.
So in that sense it could be better potentially.
Whether the MIT license is the right one to choose is probably a different debate.
I have the same reasoning as to why I pick the AGPLv3 license as the default for my new projects. I want any benefits from my code to continue to benefit everyone, even if someone is profiting off of it.
Make sure you pick a license that reflects what you want, then.
The MIT licence already requires attribution, and that is what the author picked.