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Comment by MyOutfitIsVague | Hacker News Reader

MIT license requires attribution, not "a copyright header". It's not concerned when headers, or with sources being pristine, but with people being credited. If I release my software MIT-licenced, but don't have copyright headers, you are not free to copy files without crediting me.

And no, their note in the readme is not an attribution. It's thanking them for "sharing their insights", which in no way is code attribution.

Microsoft violated copyright here, bar none. There is no other reasonable interpretation.

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Right, they should copy the LICENCE file somewhere in their repo. Why not opening a PR, before writing a blog against Microsoft?

They actually thanked the project, it doesn't feel like they were trying to steal it. Maybe they will just accept such a PR and that's all.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I refuse to believe that Microsoft doesn't understand how attribution, copyright, or open source licenses work, though. I believe this is a mistake, but it's a very egregious one that showcases a lack of respect for the communities that Microsoft is exploiting. This mistake should not be possible from an entity like Microsoft.

Maybe the engineers did not go through a 12 months process with their legal department and did it wrong.

And with the bad publicity coming back to Microsoft, maybe those engineers will now understand that they should just avoid re-using open source projects when possible. And the next HN post will be about "BigTech reinvents the wheel in order to have control".

We're all nitpicking here: they mentioned the original project in the README. Peerd is quite different from Spegel, it's not just a copy with a small patch.

Sure, they should do it right. But really, a polite, small PR fixing that would probably be a good first step.

You don't need a 12 month process with a legal department to not take code without giving credit. This is not untrodden ground.

> they mentioned the original project in the README

They thank them for their "generous insights". That's not the same thing. If I take chapters unmodified from Harry Potter and thank Rowling for her "generous insight", that's still not okay.

> Peerd is quite different from Spegel, it's not just a copy with a small patch.

Nobody said it was. It does, however, copy functions and other entire blocks of code with comments directly from Spegel without giving attribution. That is wrong. That is plagiarism.

> You don't need a 12 month process with a legal department to not take code without giving credit. This is not untrodden ground.

Well, I have been in big companies where it takes a lot of time for the legal department to check those things. Not because it's fundamentally hard, but because the queue of things they have to do is pretty big.

> They thank them for their "generous insights". That's not the same thing.

Sure, it's wrong. But it's not "purposely stealing without giving any credit at all" either. It feels like an engineer did that, tried to give credit and did it wrong. And now we go on and on saying how this engineer is evil.

It's not that an engineer is evil, it's that this mistake should not be happening in a company like Microsoft. It's professionally incompetent at the very best. No trained and professional programmer should be accidentally plagiarizing code.

> No trained and professional programmer should be accidentally plagiarizing code.

In this case I still feel like they are more attributing incorrectly (there is a link to the original repo with a "thank you" note) than plagiarizing.

If there was no mention of the original project at all, then I could call it "accidental plagiarism".

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