[cmgriffing]

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.

[frumplestlatz]

> The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there.

That person never learned what plagiarism is throughout their entire academic career, much less once they landed at Microsoft?

[isp]

There are other possibilities, for example, the person may have thought that they were complying with the MIT licence by releasing the new project under the MIT licence too + including a mention of the original project in the README.

This, of course, is incorrect, and a cursory read of the very short licence text would show it to be incorrect.

But I, too, am strongly favouring Hanlon's razor.

[palata]

Most software developers I know have no clue how open source licences work.

Hell, I have been reading a lot about them (including the licences themselves and stuff like the GPL FAQ) many times, and in situations like this it's still not entirely clear to me what Microsoft should do (surely there are different valid ways to handle this).

Would you consider yourself competent as a lawyer regarding open source licences? If not, can I say that "you apparently never learned it" and aren't better than the rest of us?

[Shocka1]

It wouldn't be surprising to me if an expert Leetcoder simply copy/pasted the code, knowing nothing of licensing. What would surprise me though is the engineering team not having at least one open source expert that didn't intervene.