Ask HN: someone infringes my code on GitHub, what should I do?
3 comments
MIT license requires attribution ("The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.") so removing you copyright violates the license.
Realistically, there's not much you can do.
You could sue that person but it would be costly (lawyers fees) and the outcome is unknown (those things usually are not litigated so there's little case law to fall back on).
You could send them an e-mail to the effect of "I noticed you've removed my name from your fork of my project. It's not cool and violates the attribution clause of MIT license. I would appreciate it if you restored my copyright attribution.". The important thing would be to not be too forceful or else you might end up with the opposite result (i.e. they'll just dig in).
Or you can just let it go.
Realistically, there's not much you can do.
You could sue that person but it would be costly (lawyers fees) and the outcome is unknown (those things usually are not litigated so there's little case law to fall back on).
You could send them an e-mail to the effect of "I noticed you've removed my name from your fork of my project. It's not cool and violates the attribution clause of MIT license. I would appreciate it if you restored my copyright attribution.". The important thing would be to not be too forceful or else you might end up with the opposite result (i.e. they'll just dig in).
Or you can just let it go.
IANAL, but it seems like it would break the "The above copyright notice ... shall be included in all ... substantial portions of the Software."
Put in a pull request?
I built a fairly popular project licensed under MIT and hosted on GitHub. Someone forked it, made some changes and gradually removed my name in each revision.
At first, he changed the author name in the copyright notice, manifest files etc. to his name and leaved an attribution with link to my repo in the readme. In the most recent commit, he removed that attribution. Now the only way somebody knows this is my work is looking at the tiny "forked from..." line in GitHub (guess he hasn't figured a way to remove it, yet).
At this moment, his repo is basically a refactoring of mine (both code and documentation) with some features he added. If he sells or distributes this software, the audiences would never know I'm the original author.
While I'm make no money (zero dollar) from this software, I feel very upset because the least I would expect from someone who builds something from both my idea and code is an attribution. Otherwise I would have released the software under the public domain.
My questions are: * Is this a violation of the MIT license? * What should I do about it? (I don't want to lawyers, again, I'm not making money from this project.)
Any opinion is much appreciated.