Because all the author wanted was credit, and there's no appropriate license for that. The 4 clause BSD license has dropped out of favor for several good reasons and nothing else has taken its place.
I haven’t been keeping up with what licenses are popular, but I’m curious about this because The BSD license was my favorite a few decades ago. Can you please elaborate why it dropped out of favor?
The BSD license is still popular, but in its 3 clause or 2 clause form, without the attribution clause.
The main reason it was dropped was because it created an incompatibility with the GPL. The other reason was because operating systems became an unwieldy mess of attributions.
You know that licenses are able to be written and rewritten right? If someone wanted attribution, someone could hire a lawyer and make a license (or make an edit/fork of an existing license) that does what someone needs.
Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers who make open source licensing function is also a thing.
He wrote some code and gave it away freely, and all he wanted was a thank you. You say he should have hired a lawyer to write his own license. This is absurd.
If that's what he wanted what stopped him from adding one more paragraph to the licence saying something similar to:
"The USER is required to publicly thank AUTHOR, and make the thanking reproducible in every copy of the derived work that uses this software."
You don't need a lawyer for that. And if someone wants to use his work without attribution, they are free to negotiate a copy with different licence terms directly with the author and provide a compensation.
The whole point of these highly permissive licenses is that we don't want to constrain independent hackers, or put people in a position where they are unsure if their fork might expose them to liability.
It is undoubtedly discourteous of AWS to release an OSS fork as a new feature without crediting the original author. It is not the end of the world. It is not a reason to go and change your licenses to make things more difficult for the other 95% of developers. But it is a reason to say "some people at AWS are just dang ol' jerks."
Companies want to take and exploit free/opensource licenses in exactly this way.
By putting in a clause for attribution for example, you winnow away the companies like Amazon who would totally want to fork and re-release without crediting you.
If a company doesn't want to credit you, and your license is dissuading them from forking your project, then the non-standard license has achieved its goal.
You can't have it both ways. It's like people complaining that the GPL is "viral". That's the whole point of it. Companies that don't want to re-contribute their source changes are dissuaded from using it at all.
If you put an attribution clause in the license, the companies that don't touch your code is the company you never wanted to use your code at all. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I need the exposure so I use a totally permissive license" and then say "Oh but I actually want attribution in a way that if people knew about this requirement, wouldn't use it to begin with"
The author needs to decide what's more important then, getting a pat on the back, or contributing to OSS. It's pretty crappy using a permissive license so companies are willing to use the software, then trying to make them look bad for not following unwritten rules.
I assume he personally thanked all of the technologies that he's used as well?