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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

In this particular instance the elancer might have violated the license. But if they were more careful about preserving attribution (and a few other cosmetics), it seems like everything would technically be above board.

Before you use an open source licence, especially the MIT style licences, you should ask yourself, if you are OK with a random stranger profiting off your work commercially.

In any case, I advice against suing, since it's unlikely you are going to see any money. (IANAL.) I also doubt that a random elance developer will be able (or willing) to finish your work for 500 USD.

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But he should atleast ask github to ban this fraudsters, worst case senario sue github for supporting users who violate such licenses. Maybe sending a leagal notice to github would get you results. Atleast there is no doubt that he violated the license

Yes, sending a friendly note to github seems like a good idea. But don't expect too much apart from the satisfaction of seeing his current account banned.

Yes, but moraly we should all mark these individuals and there emails and other info, so they are banned for ever. This individual is probabely using this work to show off on his resume. This is fraud, we all should take this very seriously.

Do message Github+Elance, but also message this person. Request them to stop.

Maybe they just don't understand that you could sue them.. and that, if they broke the terms of the license, you would almost definitely get all of their profits if it were successful.

> we should all mark these individuals and there emails and other info, so they are banned for ever.

This seems a bit over the line. So the elancer has no way to right this wrong? OP should just message the person. If he doesn't fix it then contact the site admins, etc. But hosting code with MIT license as others have already mentioned is permissive. I'm not a big fan of the online witch-hunt when someone messes up. If they learn from it and move on they're still a target and have already been banned forever but what should be an evolving community.

Github should ban this guy... from linking to OPs github repositories? How should that work?

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