> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
It needs to appear somewhere regardless of where exactly the license was placed in the source repository.
They can still do it now, and probably they should (someone can even open a PR?).
You can open that PR, if you care to identify which parts were copied and label them all. Really, the people who copied the code in the first place should have done so, and really should have known better, given they work for a massive corporation that claims to love open source and has had a massive interest in copyright over the past three decades. It's not just a "mistake", it's unacceptable for a professional programmer for a corporation to take code from a FOSS project without crediting it. That's a level of incompetence bordering on malpractice for a profession that deals so heavily with copyright on a day to day basis.
edit: According to the MIT license, the notice itself just needs to accompany the code, so I was wrong about the specificity needed. Still, it does mean that any further forks would be unable to remove the license without personally identifying if all the original code was removed. It's always better to identify what code belongs to who.
Wait. When I contribute to an open source project without signing a CLA, I keep the copyright over the lines I contributed. Still, I don't add a comment above every single line saying that it belongs to me. Nobody would accept such a contribution. Even for fairly big patches.
Are you saying that every single open source project that does not make contributors sign a CLA is doing it wrong?
It may not be perfect for all cases (e.g. if some sort of dependency is linked but not present in the source tree it is naturally not really accounted for by Debian copyright files) but then there is always the options of either adding copyright information to every source code file (I don't like that style for redundancy but it is for sure a very clear way to do it) or to hand-craft a human-readable variant similar to the Debian approach but less formally.
In any case it seems that nothing is new aobut this and developers working with FOSS software should very well be aware of these concepts.
