-1

If other people fork VSCode and create a new editor with custom features, should copyright info of VSCode be reserved to show that the editor is not a work of his/her own?

e.g. Egret Wing, an editor created by a Chinese company based on VSCode, in which no info about VSCode is reserved.

Just wondering if this is ok.

alexkuang
  • 11
  • 3
  • Welcome to Stack Overflow. What is the purpose of this question - is it to alert us to someone violating a copyright, or to ask how to proceed? You should look at the type of the VSCode license, and see what it says about preserving copyright notices - then you will know if they are in violation or not – Mikkel Aug 16 '17 at 15:28
  • @Mikkel I saw the author of Egret Wing(an editor based on vscode) promoting his product in a Chinese Quora-like community without mentioning vscode and his words obviously mislead the reader to think that the product is created by him(or his company) from scratch. and I previously tried his product and found nothing mentioning vscode in it. On the official site of this product, there's only vscode logo(still not mentioning vscode) on the bottom of the page and marked as a partner of Egret. [link to the homepage](https://www.egret.com/products/wing.html) – alexkuang Aug 16 '17 at 16:45
  • @Mikkel I often see open source licenses preserved in the 'about' of other softwares and I don't think it's appropriate that Egret Wing doesn't mention vscode. So I'm just confirming if it's an legal or moral issue before pointing it out to him. – alexkuang Aug 16 '17 at 16:49
  • I agree with you, I suggest you get your facts right before you say anything. Look up the terms of whatever license it's under, and check if he is in violation of those terms. – Mikkel Aug 16 '17 at 20:20

1 Answers1

0

Since StackOverflow won't let me Comment, https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt is the link to their License.

Which states: MIT License

Copyright (c) 2015 - present Microsoft Corporation

All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

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

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

So, I think they might be in violation, as their software doesn't seem to be opensource? I'm not a lawyer though. They also have a Github, https://github.com/egret-labs but it does not have this product on it, meaning you would have to install the product in order to figure out if it has this license information included with the install or not.

This company just seems really shady though, due to them advertising VSCode features as if they are specific to that editor. It looks like the have added some minor features, specific to their project, that allows the user to create projects, for their special project format... but the way their white paper describes it, makes it sound like they wrote it by hand, which i'm sure they didn't, as it's an exact clone of VSCode. http://edn.egret.com/cn/docs/page/936

Adam Pine
  • 387
  • 2
  • 7
  • thanks and btw it's ok for the fork versions of projects licensed under MIT not opening source. my point is the issue of copyright display as I tagged so i think it's not appropriate nor legal to get rid of all the copyright info no matter what open source license the project is under. anyway thx a lot – alexkuang Aug 17 '17 at 10:58
  • Yea, I actually just did more reading as of late about MIT, and under MIT you can just, take the code and run, as long as you post the warranty along with it, in the final product. It's the same license that is used for Bootstrap, and a lot of other Javascript libraries, so, sadly, they can't really stop these guys from doing what they are doing, as MIT does not require your project to be open source. The only reason I don't like what they are doing, is they are advertising things that the VSCode community made, as if they made it themselves. At least acknowledge the source! >. – Adam Pine Dec 21 '17 at 18:18