They have to say what code where is copied from the other project. It can't just be "parts", because that obscures the authorship.
You can open that PR, if you care to identify which parts were copied and label them all. Really, the people who copied the code in the first place should have done so, and really should have known better, given they work for a massive corporation that claims to love open source and has had a massive interest in copyright over the past three decades. It's not just a "mistake", it's unacceptable for a professional programmer for a corporation to take code from a FOSS project without crediting it. That's a level of incompetence bordering on malpractice for a profession that deals so heavily with copyright on a day to day basis.
edit: According to the MIT license, the notice itself just needs to accompany the code, so I was wrong about the specificity needed. Still, it does mean that any further forks would be unable to remove the license without personally identifying if all the original code was removed. It's always better to identify what code belongs to who.
> It can't just be "parts", because that obscures the authorship.
Wait. When I contribute to an open source project without signing a CLA, I keep the copyright over the lines I contributed. Still, I don't add a comment above every single line saying that it belongs to me. Nobody would accept such a contribution. Even for fairly big patches.
Are you saying that every single open source project that does not make contributors sign a CLA is doing it wrong?
Nope, I made a mistake there. It's good practice, when copying code from software with a different license, to call out what code is copied from where, but such a thing is not mandatory.
I'd say one of the things you have suggested. Copying the license file from spegel into a SPEGEL_LICENSE file in the repository would be sufficient. So would be actually crediting the project properly in the README with something like "portions of this code were taken from the Spegel project, under the MIT license" with a following copy of the MIT license.
You could open the PR and it would also be faster than writing all these comments here about opening a PR.
That's not the point, it is not the author's duty to do that and him pointing out Microsoft's wrongdoing is meaningful at least to me because I will be more cautious if I'm ever being approached in a similar way.
> Microsoft's wrongdoing is meaningful at least to me because I will be more cautious if I'm ever being approached in a similar way.
That's the thing: Microsoft approaching the author has nothing to do with the wrong attribution. And I am not sure if the original author here is frustrated because of the wrong attribution or just because they would have hope money and fame from the fact that Microsoft reused their code.
Because it's not like Spegel lacks visibility (given the numbers they shared in the article), the link on Peerd's README is probably not bad for Spegel, and the attention here is publicity again. Probably infinitely more than if Microsoft had done the attribution correctly.
You can open that PR, if you care to identify which parts were copied and label them all. Really, the people who copied the code in the first place should have done so, and really should have known better, given they work for a massive corporation that claims to love open source and has had a massive interest in copyright over the past three decades. It's not just a "mistake", it's unacceptable for a professional programmer for a corporation to take code from a FOSS project without crediting it. That's a level of incompetence bordering on malpractice for a profession that deals so heavily with copyright on a day to day basis.
edit: According to the MIT license, the notice itself just needs to accompany the code, so I was wrong about the specificity needed. Still, it does mean that any further forks would be unable to remove the license without personally identifying if all the original code was removed. It's always better to identify what code belongs to who.