The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.
Yes, they mentioned Spegel, but only to thank the authors for "generously sharing their insights" -- that's not even close to the required statement that part of the project is owned and copyrighted by the authors of Spegel.
You really think the author is going to then feel 100% better about it?
They are just another data point in the long list of authors who chose a permissive license and are then shocked when a billion dollar company takes advantage of it.
What I'm not OK with is a company doing that without attribution. If XYZ company's product is built on code I wrote, I want to be credited -- both so that I can show it to potential employers, and so that users of XYZ company's product are aware that some of the code in it is something they can use for free and modify for their own purposes. If the attribution wasn't important to me, I would have chosen CC0 instead of MIT.
So yeah, if I was the author, I'd probably feel a lot better about if MS re-added the correct attribution. I'd probably still feel miffed that they tried to pull one over on me in the first place -- but I wouldn't be offended by the fact that they're using my software.
If they wanted a less permissive license, they could have used one.
If you lose open source you lose a major resource. You should be looking for ways to protect these authors instead of explaining how "technically it's all actually their fault for being generous in the first place."
This position is absurdly scummy.
Quite the contrary. The licence does not have many constraints, but this one is important. Volunteer developers let their code being used in closed source commercial programs. Recognition is the only thing they expect and the whole point of the licence.
--Carl Spackler, quoting the Dalai Lama
MIT and BSD type licenses say you can do almost anything you want, but just don't plagiarize, because that would be intellectual misconduct.
In addition to not just removing the copyright notice from sources, the MIT license requires the copyright notice to be present in all derived works. It makes no mention that if you compile a program, the binaries don't have to have copyright notices.
What I see is that Microsoft added headers to their Peerd files. Now they read "Copyright Microsoft", which is correct because Microsoft owns some copyright over those modified files. If those files had had a "Copyright Spegel project" before, Microsoft should have kept it and added their own. But those files did not contain such a header as far as I can see.
Feels like Microsoft was not necessarily trying to steal work (they link the original project in their README).
As I understand it, changing the licensing will do nothing to affect the fork Microsoft already made. It might affect the next megacorp from doing the same thing in the future, but Microsoft can keep working on their fork without giving it a second thought.
This is for sure a cautionary tale for every open source contributor. Choose the original open source license very carefully.
Edit: Might I suggest that when picking the original license, you try to imagine how you might feel if the company that you hate the most (could be Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or other) does the most extreme thing allowed by the license.
Why "to be fair?" This is a trillion-dollar company with enough lawyers on staff to populate a small city.
Why are we cutting Microsoft slack? If anything, it should be held to the highest of standards.
Microsoft got tremendous value for free by forking. Which makes the obligation to deal ethically and honestly very serious.
You don’t get to take something from anyone without meeting the terms they have set for you to take them. That is theft.
(For clarity, I am saying theft of a right. As it does negatively impact the original creator, in terms of competition and lost attribution to the code they wrote, and Microsoft is not paying the “fee” that taking that right depends on.)
And no third person can can ethically speak for the source of the value and state that it’s no big deal for another party to break some part of a contract/license.
How do you know how much this aspect of the license impacted the original creators decision to share their work, their choice of license, or how they feel and and practically impacted about it now!
In this case, we know they clearly feel the violation was harmful to them at some level. They were snubbed, their work left unacknowledged, while Microsoft leached off them, even though doing the right thing would cost Microsoft essentially nothing.
Please don’t socially absolve the powerful from bad behavior toward smaller parties. That’s bad faith, after the fact, and you are not even benefiting from your own disrespect for the license. Always support the (credibly) injured party.
As for offenses against you, you have every right to be generous and overlook those.
(I once took a year sabbatical to work collaboratively on a project, with the presumed (based on what was a clear discussion to me) attributions being a key factor in me deciding it was worth the time and effort, when other factors made that a difficult decision. Only to have my attribution expectations unfulfilled, and no attempt was made by other parties to work things out. The situation was fraught enough that I couldn’t but help feel bitter about it for some time. I am long over it, but I would certainly take the year back if I could.)
