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Comment by gwerbret | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. They went to their manager with "hey I've got this great idea" and followed it up with your code a few weeks later. Of course, this only works if they claim they were "inspired" by Spegel to "write their own code".

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> I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet.

It just so happens that the Microsoft engineer who originally changed the license in GitHub went from Senior to Principal engineer at Microsoft in the past two months (according to LinkedIn). So you probably aren't far off.

I wonder if there exists any system in place that this could backfire rapidly if this could be proved on some level. Unfortunately, world needs examples and consequences before anything changes. If this worked for this particular engineer, others will follow and will attempt the same. It will become a norm in big corps.

Causing a legal shitstorm is most likely not a sustainable way to get ahead at big corps.

If this is what happened, I suspect Microsoft will drop this person even quicker than a hot potato, and even quicker than if they told them to rewrite it from scratch but the person took a few shortcuts too many (which would be my guess).

If they wanted to fork it, they could - just keep the attribution and be done with it. The fact that they tried to rewrite it suggests that someone wanted it to be legally not a copy.

Dang, that is too good.

There is definitely a type of person who cheats, lies, throws people/teams under the bus, breaks the rules, and cuts corners to get ahead. The ones who are able to not get caught are rewarded.

This is not only a software phenomenon, but almost all aspects of life.

The commit histories for the LICENSE files in the two repositories are rather interesting. The original author placed a single copyright notice in that file. Microsoft on the other hand published it with their copyright notice and a Apache 2.0 license in place of the original copyright notice and MIT license. They also put copyright Microsoft and license apache 2.0 headers on all files. They then changed the Apache 2.0 license to MIT, but left their copyright notice in place of the original copyright notice in LICENSE:

https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f...

Unless they forked a very early version that did not even have the LICENSE file, such that they never removed the original notice, this looks like copyright infringement to me. That said, I am not a lawyer.

>chore: change to MIT license

What does "chore" mean in this context? Is the license just leftover from some MS open source template? If so there is perhaps some leeway, and the author maybe just didn't realize he needed to use the original MIT license file including the notices and not just a template one grabbed from the internet.

Any other explanation for such a "relicensing" would be extremely worrisome.

"chore" just means the type of change; as opposed to a fix, a feature, refactoring, there are some things that you have to do in the repo that can be called "chores".

I'd say, in this case "chore" means "boring, nothing to see here".

It's interesting, because "chore" to me has strong connotations of "tedious, unpleasant".

Right. It derives from the idea that programmers are supposed to find "solving interesting problems" pleasant. On the other hand, boring, repetitive tasks are called "chores".

I don’t find it appropriate nor useful to place such a sentiment in a commit message, much less as a standard tag.

It's a nerdy colloquialism. ie, it's not that serious

That’s part of the reason why I’d object to it in a commit message, in a professional setting.

Some organizations strongly encourage marking all commits as one of a list of categories such as "feature/fix/chore/...". The tags are then bound to loose all meaning (literal or figurative) very soon.

Unless there was some "conspiracy" to violate the license (my original comment was an attempt at playfully hinting at that possibility, though I don't find it very likely), I'm sure the person who wrote that commit message thought about it for less than three seconds.

"chore" is a common conventional commit message type, see https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

That was my initial guess as well. I am glad that the author chose to take a high ground instead of naming and shaming the people behind this egregious act.

It might be just a decision to own the code as it probably ends up in production, e.g. run codeql and other tools to scan it, have controlled releases and limit access to the repo. They might have had some other stuff to change and did not want to bother doing it in the original repo with unexpected timelines from the repo owner. A fork is a logical step for a company.

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