The commit histories for the LICENSE files in the two repositories are rather interesting. The original author placed a single copyright notice in that file. Microsoft on the other hand published it with their copyright notice and a Apache 2.0 license in place of the original copyright notice and MIT license. They also put copyright Microsoft and license apache 2.0 headers on all files. They then changed the Apache 2.0 license to MIT, but left their copyright notice in place of the original copyright notice in LICENSE:
Unless they forked a very early version that did not even have the LICENSE file, such that they never removed the original notice, this looks like copyright infringement to me. That said, I am not a lawyer.
What does "chore" mean in this context? Is the license just leftover from some MS open source template? If so there is perhaps some leeway, and the author maybe just didn't realize he needed to use the original MIT license file including the notices and not just a template one grabbed from the internet.
Any other explanation for such a "relicensing" would be extremely worrisome.
"chore" just means the type of change; as opposed to a fix, a feature, refactoring, there are some things that you have to do in the repo that can be called "chores".
Right. It derives from the idea that programmers are supposed to find "solving interesting problems" pleasant. On the other hand, boring, repetitive tasks are called "chores".
Some organizations strongly encourage marking all commits as one of a list of categories such as "feature/fix/chore/...". The tags are then bound to loose all meaning (literal or figurative) very soon.
Unless there was some "conspiracy" to violate the license (my original comment was an attempt at playfully hinting at that possibility, though I don't find it very likely), I'm sure the person who wrote that commit message thought about it for less than three seconds.
https://github.com/Azure/peerd/commit/473a26c808907f2d9f7b7f...
Unless they forked a very early version that did not even have the LICENSE file, such that they never removed the original notice, this looks like copyright infringement to me. That said, I am not a lawyer.