Don't use one of the most permissive licenses in existence and certainly not one that doesn't provide copyleft. This is all very well established at this point and yet somehow the GPL seems to have gone out of vogue.
Does it matter what license you use if they actively ignore the terms in the license you did chose? MIT requires attribution, but they didn't. Why would any other terms be different? You surely could have put "You must license your project the same as the one you forked from" and they still would have ignored it, not sure what the difference would have been.
GPL/AGPL would prevented this somehow, requiring proper attribution via mandatory source code release, and allowing to track project origins. This would make it harder to label it as a "a Microsoft Product from Ground Up", and prevent Sherlocking the original application to a greater degree.
As a result, this would probably forced Microsoft to develop a new one from scratch, because they're allergic to GPL, because if they have breached GPL, they would be forced to comply, since GPL is court tested already.
So, write Free Software. Not Open Source. Esp. for your personal projects.
Source: the MIT license.
There's a copyright line, check. There's the permission notice, check.
The rest is just goodwill and ethics, which is not a very valuable currency in software in these days.
That way anyone touching the project can just add their own line on top.
Done.
EDIT: Example: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE
A more complicated way to do it is to add a folder that contains the original LICENSE file or files. Sometimes there is more than one license, or the license texts differ. In that case, you must preserve all the different variants, even if they all call themselves MIT.
Then, you can optionally add your additional own LICENSE file * only iff* it is compatible with all existing LICENSES. In the case of the MIT license, you may relicense, sublicense, or use a different license in addition, provided it is MIT-compatible. With e.g. GPL you can't. Note that you still have to preserve all the original LICENSE files in the repo.
https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/blob/unstable/COPYING
Third party licenses retained in a THIRDPARTY file in MariaDB
https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/main/THIRDPARTY
Only two good examples I could quickly find.
Once you change the copyright line, you no longer include "the above copyright notice". At that point you're violating the license.
You are also not allowed to change the copyright notice or license text in any way (you may however add to the license, which is a loophole other licenses such as GPL fix.)
Substantial is subject to (legal) debate as the Oracle vs. MS case has shown. Whole functions or large parts of files however should always be considered substantial, as the software would otherwise not work.
I'm seriously flabbergasted at how bad reading comprehension seems to be among coders.
Sorry to deflate your amazement, but I made the remark because I have never seen a permissively licensed repository which changed hands and had multiple copyright lines in the last 20 years or so.
Maybe it's not my reading comprehension (and English is not my native language to begin with), but the behaviors of other coders to begin with.
Maybe we shouldn't point fingers to others and not forget that three are pointing towards ourselves. Eh?
But yes, many people are not complying with the license literally, and it's frustrating to see. I know it basically doesn't matter unless you go to court over it, but still it irks me and screams a sort of carelessness about the rules and social contract.
Sorry for criticising your reading comprehension, I did not mean it as a personal insult.
It's just that I see these types of responses so often, basically every time any licensing question comes up. Twice in this thread. And all that's required is to just read the very short and basic MIT license text itself, no lawyering required.
I can understand the native speaker part, but just know that I myself am not a native speaker either. But I understand that's a huge barrier.
But even native speakers on HN with serious software engineering jobs and skill don't understand it, or don't want to understand. I think it's a bit like when people see math proofs, they mentally just skip over it.
That's the part that continues to amaze me.
I don't see "Copyright (c) 2024 The Spegel Authors" (the "above copyright notice" in https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE) anywhere. Where do you see it?
The hacker news post reached someone high enough up at Microsoft to have things changed. They ended placing a combined copyright notice that is a mixture of both versions into the repository to play it safe.
You’d need to patent your idea to stop that.
Citing myself from my comment:
> As a result, this would probably forced Microsoft to develop a new one from scratch, because they're allergic to GPL, because if they have breached GPL, they would be forced to comply, since GPL is court tested already.
So, we seem to agree here.
If they're breaking the license, go talk to a lawyer. You might start by approaching the SFLC [1] (although I haven't heard much from them recently).
> Why I (A/L)GPL
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
Always choose AGPLv3 no matter what it is you're doing. If they want it, AGPLv3 gives you the leverage to negotiate a licensing deal. You sell them permission to violate it. I even emailed Stallman asking what he thought of this strategy. He thinks it's a net good.
What remains after full compliance with the MIT license choince will be the bulk of the complaints in the article.
So if the author instead used GPL, this wouldn't have been a problem? Call me pessimist, but I don't think Microsoft would have cared if it was MIT, GPL or even missing a license (so copyrighted by the author), they would have made the same choice as they just now did.
I'm sorry, but it's really hard to understand what you mean here, how choosing GPL would have somehow lead to a different outcome.
But reading the article, the author appears to be more disgruntled by the fact that a behemoth forked his project than the mishandling of the copyright that can be fixed with one PR (he is right to be pissed about that, but that's an easily solvable problem, I doubt Microsoft will stand against it).
There is a large difference between "they didn't put in a sentence that they needed to," and "we have 30 users who didn't get the source code that they were required to receive."
I do agree for the author to be _fully_ happy they would probably have wanted something even more restrictive than any traditionally "open" license like GPL, but about any choice would have better aligned with their desires than MIT.
I'm confused how you and others reach this conclusion. No, it doesn't.
The MIT license is one of the shortest free license that exists:
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
No where does that require attribution. It has basically one condition: perpetuate the license.
Maybe the author didn't actually use an MIT license, despite claiming to? But as far as the MIT license is concerned, as long as the other party provides the same license for the fork, that's all that's needed.
> I'm confused how you and others reach this conclusion. No, it doesn't.
| Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders> | | ... | | The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The copyright notice that must be preserved includes the copyright holders' names, and that is a form of attribution.
No, they would have found something else that wasn't a pain to steal.
Which GPL is that? The GPL 2 and 3 are incompatible with each other, making cross contribution between different FOSS projects practically impossible. The "v2 or later" licensing model does nothing to remedy the problem. See Rob Landley's talk on this topic.