We’ve just raised a pull request https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110 amending the license …

Maybe as a show of good faith you could send the original creator 10 or 20k usd as a thank you. Talk is cheap

Now that you got caught you are fixing it and writing fancy PR fluff. An org the size of MS should have clear policies and processes of how to handle open source forks like this. Unless we assume “bad faith” here. This is a pretty bad look. I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post? That said, the author of Spegel should have used another license if he wanted more “recognition” or the like.

> but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry. In other words: there exists some responsible person at Microsoft who violated the copyright (yes, removing the attribution is also a copyright violation!) for Microsoft. In consideration how Microsoft has been treating copyyright violators for decades, if Microsoft does not give this responsible person the same crual treatment, it should be considered an honest, clear, implicit official statement from Microsoft's side that they are perfectly fine if hackers violate all of Microsoft's copyright. In other words: it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain. Also, if Microsot does not make make this responsible person pay the caused damage from their own pocket to the original author of Spegel with the same monatery magnitude as if Microsoft would sue other entities …

Not good enough. All previous commits still infringe Spegel's copyright, given they are still available and distributed. I would assume the point release also infringes copyright. You are Microsoft. You can do better.

What about the allegations that people in MS did this for personal gains? Will there be any lessons learned from this?

I think this is a good case for applying Hanlon's Razor. The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there. I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.

Hey how about doing the right thing first time next time instead of waiting until you get ass-blasted on social media?

I might not be up to speed, is naming this behaviour "source of inspiration" a common industry term to accurately represent an unacknowledged fork by the large company over the small? It seems an option to not take free labour to build a commercial cloud largely as a wrapper of open-source, and maybe find other ways to support the creators. If one person's labour is that valuable to a company, maybe it will help someone realize that supporting such individuals monetarily might help create the next thing with time that they can't get to today.