Comment by SpaceNugget | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpaceNugget | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The file titled LICENSE contains a copyright notice. That's what a license file _is_ in the context of software a LICENSE to use someone's COPYRIGHTed software. You must abide by the terms under which you are granted the license, otherwise you don't have access via the license, and are thus violating the copyright. They aren't two unrelated concepts.

Anything else is noise, they violated the license. They blatantly copied copyrighted works. They can't "oopsie" that away or claim it as a mistake, honest or not. You simply are not allowed to do that.

Suggesting that they "could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README." is wrong. They MUST include the copyright notice and the rest of the license. They don't get to choose whether or not to respect the license. And they don't need to remove the link, That's got nothing to do with the copyright issues. No one at Microsoft thought that call out was somehow the legally required attribution clearly explained in the MIT license.

> Suggesting that they "could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README." is wrong. They MUST include the copyright notice and the rest of the license.

You do realise that those two statements are not incompatible? If they include the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README, they are still including the copyright notice and the rest of the licence.

The MIT licence does NOT say that you MUST have it at the root of your repository in a file called LICENSE. It does not say that you must clearly identify the parts of the code for which you don't own the copyright or anything like this.

You can read it here: https://opensource.org/license/mit

The part I was indicating was incorrect was your usage of "could" It's not something they "could" do, it's something they MUST do.

Like saying I choose to not be the richest person in the world. Sure it could be technically true, but the statement is incorrectly implying that it's up to me, or within my power to make the alternative choice.

It's very strange that you keep using these intentionally awkwardly phrased, misleading-adjacent statements.

The rest of your comment is attempting to refute something no one made a case for in the first place, which coupled with the rest of it makes it seem like you are just trying to argument-bait, so I'll tap out here.

> It's not something they "could" do, it's something they MUST do.

Well, maybe I just can't English :-).

They must include the copyright notice and the permission notice. Now I can imagine different ways to achieve that. They could use one or the other, as long as what needs to be included is included.

Depending on how they do it (while staying in the realm of what they MUST do, i.e. include the copyright and permission notices), it gives more or less visibility do Spegel. My point was that linking to Spegel in the README arguably gives more visibility to Spegel than alternatives that they COULD choose. And to make it very very clear: what I consider alternatives that they COULD choose are those that honour the licence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com