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Comment by shadeslayer_ | Hacker News Reader

Strange that Microsoft used OP's project in their game, but didn't bother to let him know.

Yes, I was not informed about it. But I think that's fair. I didn't ask them either before I published the project. Please, don't make it a license issue. I developed it for fun.

Well, the MIT license worked exactly as it was written.

What about "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."?

Most likely, it is included in some kind of ThirdPartyNotices.txt that ships with the game. It's actually pretty hard to sneak third party F/OSS under the radar in the company of this size - there's automated code scanners, among other things, and while they can't catch everything, they sure can flag a copy of a public project on GitHub.

What's an example of tool that scans binaries for matches with open source software?

At my previous org, we used black duck for this

https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/security-testing...

I don’t think you’ll find one. Most of these operate on the source code and its declared dependencies.

Pretty sure Black Duck does that

Were the flight simulators you can play on that github page originally MIT licensed?

No, but I was just commenting about the license itself. At any rate, this is obviously not a regular thing to begin with.

I'm pretty sure that declaring https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory/tree/master/data to be MIT-licensed does not actually make it so... (these are disk images of the relevant FS releases, which are still under copyright as well as provided under a proprietary MIT-incompatible license)

TL;DR: A Microsoft contractor basically endorsed piracy, in a weirdly-recursive-enough-to-be-legal way...

In that case - please have more fun ;-)

Thank you - I really enjoyed the flashback to my childhood you provided me just now!

Is the whole emulator your work? That's quite impressive.

Unfortunately, all things must become a license issue if licenses are to be taken seriously. License compliance is a binary condition, you either comply completely or fail.

In this case, since the code was MIT licensed, Microsoft is in compliance.

Maybe Copilot did it ;)

That would be appropriate for a flight simulator.

Microsoft is not the developer here, it has been outsourced to a game studio : https://www.asobostudio.com/games/microsoft-flight-simulator

But the remark still stand, and I hope OP has been correctly credited for it.

Thanks, I have mentioned this fact at the bottom.

Strange that Microsoft's contractor used OP's project in their game, but didn't bother to let him know.

Do you contact the authors of every one of your dependencies before using them in your works?

Why is that strange?

I don't really know the scope of easter eggs, is the whole team supposed to know about them or just the few programmers that introduced them? Maybe they didn't want to spoil the surprise (?)

In any case, congratulations to op for having their project reach the original franchise. It's a sign of a job well done!

I work at Microsoft and unfortunately there is a “no Easter eggs” policy but sometimes they sneak by ;)

I am grateful to the developer for doing this. This is a kind of hidden communication between fans I enjoy.

Just checked, and sadly no X-Clacks-Overhead header on microsoft.com.

To be fair, OP also used Microsoft's project in his game, but didn't bother to let them know.

I agree - even if they're legally allowed to just take his work, it would've been nice to let OP know.

No credit is owed, no thanks are due. This is an unavoidable effect of usuing the MIT license over something like GPL.

Andrew Tanenbaum on choosing MIT for the MINIX project, which was used by Intel + the IC as a base for the Intel Management Engine (emphasis mine):

"The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all."

If you'd like to avoid a large company profiting off your work without attribution, don't use MIT.

Thanks for relaying that ought-to-be canonical example.

It may not be owed/due, but common decency suggests you give a heads up.

In Intel's case I'm guessing there was a contending motive in that they preferred not to draw attention to it.

You can put that clause in your license! Something like:

  If you use this software in a commercial product, you are required to
  make an attempt to send me an e-mail letting me know about it, 
  because it's just nice to know.

Of course that would piss off the lawyers because now if a developer uses your software and doesn't e-mail you, you could sue them. But it's not like big companies always respect licenses anyway :)

> common decency

Large companies don't operate according to human social norms like this. It's important to be reminded of this fact from time to time.

At some point, no matter how big the company is [1], there are humans redacting, validating and applying the policy.

[1] Ok, maybe Google have just bots for this also. ;)

Credit is certainly owed under MIT, a copyright notice must be included.

(I wonder where Intel shows this copyright notice; in principle, it should come with every processor or product based on the processor. Probably in the same place where IME itself lives…)

Tanenbaum, to me, always seems to have a massive chip on his shoulder

Considering they fully own all of the IP present in the OPs work, I would imagine they are within their full rights to just take it without asking. OP is lucky not to get a takedown notice and judging by his attitude he knows it. Good to see people playing nicely together :)

The games were already playable online on archive.org [1]. My project is just focussed on the old flight simulators.

Especially I wanted to have a very light-weight emulator which starts within milliseconds. The major part of the emulator downloads with just 24kB compressed. I suppose I have reached the goal.

[1] https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

It’s MIT licensed. They don’t need to ask. They need to add his name to credits and/or send an email about what they did.

It’s basic courtesy (plus MIT license, if you prefer).

You need to use 3 or 4 clause BSD not MIT if you want to get in credits.

courtesy cannot be enforced, that's the point.

I bet if it was 3 or 4 clause BSD, somebody will say that "open source is open source, I don't care".

This is kind of the nature of open source though; I use tons of open source software and libraries every day, also for my clients, without letting the maintainers of the software and libraries know.

That said, I do advocate for companies doing financial contributions to open source where possible.

Very strange indeed

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