There's a matter of politeness/good practice that goes beyond license terms. And in some contexts (e.g. academia) there's absolutely an expectation that you cite others' work whether or not you're legally required to do so.

That said, I basically agree with you. If you have specific expectations of whoever uses your code, you should absolutely pick a license that requires the behaviors you want. (With the understanding that fewer people may use your code as a result.)

Of course there are implicit expectations and etiquette. What I’m saying is that corporations are less likely than individuals to follow them so if one doesn’t want to be screwed they have the opportunity to do it with the license.

You speak of academic code, and precisely some projects require (or at least ask for) citations in their license file if use in a research context.

> License is Apache 2.0 which does not require acknowledgment.

Incorrect. See clause 4, especially 4.c.

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#redistribut...

> c. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and

In the case of WinGet attribution was theoretically not required because the code was not copied directly, so a copyright license was not needed and the Apache License did not come into play. (Of course if AppGet's creator had Microsoft-level lawyering available, he could quite possibly persuade a court that copyright infringement did occur.)

But the Apache License 2.0 absolutely does require acknowledgment!

There's a difference between ethical and legal. You can do a lot of things that don't break any law but make you a terrible human being.

Of course you can copy someone's design and not acknowledge it unless it's patented. You're going to be a dick then, not a criminal.

Is it really being a dick when someone explicitly, through choice of a license, allows it? What is this post from Microsoft except an explicit and public thank you? Which seems like it should certainly appease the "not a dick" criteria to me...

If that's all they did it wouldn't be so bad. However, they also discussed the project, future improvements, etc with the strong implication that they would hire him or pay for his work so far. This could have been well intentioned but you can't tell from the outside and people tend to default to assuming bad things about actions taken by large companies.

Microsoft isn’t a human being, terrible or otherwise.

The employee writing the announcement for the project is a person though. "Microsoft" hasn't done that.

I am going to go against other answers and say that legally OR morally you don't need to acknowledge the author if you don't want to. But that wasn't the issue here at all, the issue was Microsoft interviewing the candidate (to pick up his brain?), then ghosting him, THEN copying his solution. It's about how they treated the original author, not about just copying the solution.

Actually I agree that Microsoft move wasn’t fair to the author. The thing is, we read more and more posts here about people disappointed by open-source, with project they started and put lot of effort into and then didn’t get anything back when a company serves itself. But that what they allowed to happen in the first place. If I were to open source the main project I’m working on, I would think for a while to the kind of licensing (possibly dual) that would allow me to reap some benefits in case of success, by the project itself or its use by a company.

Sure, agreed. The problem with dual licensing is that it does limit the project's potential, so unless it's a truly groundbreaking project (vs an iterative improvement) the adoption would be trickier IMHO.

You choose no acknowledgement licenses when your goal is to quietly make the world better. Thus what Microsoft did was a feature not a bug.

Of course if your goals are different it is the wrong license, but that isn't the fault of the license or Microsoft from using it as intended.

Note, I have not read the apache license in a while. I might not have the exact details of what it encourages wrong. The point should stand anyway.

given that the code wasn't actually forked in the first place, it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway. no?

It's not about the license, it's about the whole conversation, job-offer and so on.

Good point - wondering if open source projects that copy commercial products should be liable for copyright infringement.