This came out a while ago. The developer used a license that said, "Steal this software, I don't care." Then he was shocked Pikachu when it was stolen.
His problem is the exact reason GPL was created.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Stolen? It was forked as is allowed by the MIT license. With GPL as well there is no „you cannot fork” rule, you can do exactly the same thing. The author misunderstood that „you have to push the changes to upstream”, which is not in any of those licenses.
While I'm usually all for Free software (as opposed to open-source software),
His problem is the exact reason GPL was created.
Nah, his problem is that Microsoft has much billions of dollars and so doesn't give a fuck about any licenses on projects by small developers. They simply ignored even the terms of the MIT license (which required MS to keep the original copyright notice, which they didn't). GPL would've done squat here since it also allows for forking (by design), but also because the US legal system is cooked, and people don't have many rights left when it comes to a dispute with a corpo.
This is clickbait. tl;dr a guy released MIT-licensed software, Microsoft forked and renamed it as they're legally allowed to do. Hell they could even close the source and sell it if they wanted to.
That sounds less like clickbait and more an object lesson in the importance of copyleft to me.
It's clickbait, the title implies that something wrong happened in this situation when no such thing occurred.
Forked it, renamed it, and changed nothing but the license on it.
What's stopping it from becoming the defacto version putting the original into the point where it's no longer worth maintaining, then Microsoft pulls it and sells it as a subscription service?
Nothing, because the author explicitly chose to allow this kind of behavior. Paraphrasing one of the Youtube comments on the video: the author picked a cuck license and then got cucked, what a shock!
It's funny how apropos cuck really is here. We all recognize that a woman (Microsoft) cheating on her husband (the guy in question) is a bad thing, but we no longer view it that way when we learn that the man consented, video taped, and gets off to it. If you really want to stop this kind of thing, simply choose a better license like the GPL that forbids this behavior.
Poor license choice. If you really want to enforce it, don't rely on MIT.
Certainly, but its worth highlighting why we use GPL and similar.
Active Directory and Exchange were both based on open source projects. Embrace, extend, extinguish is Microsoft’s whole jam.
Now I get why rms recommends GPL or a copy left license for bigger projects.
What were they?
As with a lot of 90s software, it’s a bit more complicated than which source code did they download (or, rather, mail order on floppy… because it was the 90s). Not the least of which is due to the fact that many of the projects don’t exist anymore and there weren’t that many copies to begin with.
However, they both embrace and extend LDAP and Kerberos among other open and not open projects of the time. Both choices were related to the results of the Protocol Wars and Microsoft’s attempts, in the 90s, to do to the Internet what Google is doing today.
Same old (50 years and more) M$ bullshit lies.
They stole a lot others already. Winget was prior Appget, before they duped the inventor. And what was the case two months ago?
I was going to mention DOS, but I looked it up in the hopes of not sounding like an idiot and it turns out the history is more complicated than I knew.
I mean they should have given him credit. That's what they owe him (all they owe him) under the MIT license.
They kinda did in the README, though that's not really how you comply with the license
no license is safe, they have fuck you money and will win every time, but especially don't use MIT