How can sole maintainers work with multi-billion corporations without being taken advantage of?
They can’t, thats why GPL is noncommercial. Capitalism is an exploitative system that relies on power imbalance. As soon as MS reached out, he should have made it clear they can’t even look at his code for ideas without a contract and payment. He shouldn’t have told them anything else without a contract. Papers with legal claims on them are the only language business speaks.
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.
The license does not allow removing the original license and purport that the code was created by someone else. It looks as if large parts of the project were copied directly from Spegel without any mention of the original source.
At the bottom of the README there was a thank you to myself and Spegel.
How much credit is needed to be counted as giving credit?
The license says (paraphrased) that you need to keep the original license file, which has the authors name. Even if you re-license it, you leave the old license there without touching it and put your new license next to it.
They did not follow that clause and deleted the original license and the original attribution.
A thanks does not necessarily imply credit.
Hoping that embrace extend extinguish Microsoft would be helping is quite naive I think.
