Hey – I’m Martin Woodward from Microsoft. I have talked to Jamie and are investigating his concerns and will come back to this thread with any findings. An initial review hasn’t indicated we’d previously heard about this issue. We’ve also reached out to the original copyright owner to ensure we’re taking all the needed steps. If anyone has concerns or spots an issue where a project is missing correct and full attribution then please log it as an issue with the project or contact opensource@microsoft.com and we’ll be sure to take action right away. We have over 1,800 repos in the Microsoft org and thousands of Microsoft engineers contributing to open source. We try really hard to get it right, and we take this very seriously.
What happened was truly awful, but I don't think it's fair to blame MSFT when probably what happened was a few employees trying to take all credit for code they didn't write. From the thread it seems that he did not reach out to MSFT via any official channels and only informed "people he knew at MSFT".
Unfortunately, the thing about corporate personhood is that corporations are responsible for the actions of their employees. Unless of course, they can show that the employee was acting against explicit instructions or policies.
Under the principle-agent relationship (the concept, not the legal definition), I do think it's fair to blame Microsoft if they don't remedy this soon.
Out of curiosity, who _would_ the right person to contact at Microsoft be? In my experience public channels exist to isolate the rest of an organization from having to deal with the outside (including complaints about bad behavior).
opensource@microsoft.com or make an issue in GH or tweet any one of a dozen people like Miguel or me or Martin who care deeply about this stuff. It’ll all get routed eventually to the Office of Open Source.
There isn't a single link to a commit, file or repo that shows the similarities between the two code bases, let alone alleged plagiarism. It is conceivable that they truly are two different projects that happen to be developed around the same time. It's not the first time that has happened.
I wish the author actually substantiated his claims a bit better.
I also seems like the projects have different architectures. The author claimed they were copying his code and modifying it for their "weird event system they added". It is not clear to what degree they changed any of his code or if they only used his project is an inspiration.
Based on this description, it sounds like an employee committing plagiarism in order to defraud their boss. Retroactive editing of the commit history is particularly suggestive; it implies someone tried to cover their tracks.
Are you sure that it wasn't Microsoft, the corporate person? They are a company of 35,000 people and I'm quite sure that they always act in unison.
Also, when some random blogger contacts Microsoft and asks Microsoft to do something about something, then Microsoft better stop what they're doing and listen!
Oh, OK so you’re not going to say anything to people who are fucking putting all the anti-Microsoft bullshit out there and just say something to me because I disagreed?
I just dug around in the rush GitHub, and was surprised to find no pull requests by the author of Lerna trying to rectify the missing copyright ("Hey guys, you forgot to keep my copyright in there since this is a fork of Lerna, so here's a pull request"), or any issues raised ("The copyright of my MIT-licensed project is missing. What's up with that?").
The only instances of lerna being mentioned are people who use or work on rush mentioning differences between the two projects.
Assuming the lerna author is accurate, why just the angry blog post? If I had contacted MS and raised the issue via email, and nothing happened, I would have started raising issues on the project GitHub and making pull requests to rectify the situation. Not only could that actually work to resolve the issue, but the discussion would be public.
You are assuming someone who is scrambling to change function names and hide git logs will be going back to the code they stole to re-check for an update license?
a pull request would be the same as an email or blog post at this point. it is just a way to communicate. why is a PR better then what they are doing now?
It would be publicly visible on github, such that the community can see the dispute and the response (or lack thereof) from the other project. While it won’t necessarily fix the problem, it is more visible.
If true then it’s bad faith use of open source at MSFT and not typical of them. Have you tried contacting Scott Hanselman - @shanselman on Twitter - or anyone else via twitter instead of “normal” channels? One of the great things about the Devs at MSFT is that they are very responsive on twitter. If someone was being a douche with your code then the right people haven’t gotten the message yet.
Sounds to me like a fork that isn't being heavily worked on and the repo should of just been private. It's probably not ready to be fully worked on and probably had goals for a different direction than the original project. What's sadder is that nobody at Microsoft didn't just try to contact the original project to try and collaborate. There's too many layers to the onion that is Microsoft that its hard to tell. Best way to find out is to have contacted the maintainera of the forked project I would say.
> Files and directories were named the same things, it had many of the same core functions with code that I distinctly remembered writing.
Here are the respective codebases as of Christmas Day 2015, 21 days into the lifetime of one and 11 days into the lifetime of the other. They do not appear to match that description.
I will start by saying I'm not giving Microsoft or the "Rush author" a pass on this.
Obviously the license was broken by removing the copyright notice of the original author, but it also doesn't sound like the author really did anything to try and handle the issue properly so now they are posting a rant.
Here is the extent of what the author did, "So I reached out to people I knew at Microsoft. This was probably a year ago now. They were shocked and apologized. But since then nothing has happened."
We don't know who those people are, what they're roles are, but I suspect they are not involved with the Rush project nor is it their job to handle potential copyright violations for all of Microsoft.
The author could have posted an issue to the repo expressing their concern. If this was ignored then they could issue a DMCA takedown notice through GitHub. If this was not successful then the author could contact Microsoft legal or file a lawsuit.
Do you disagree about what the actual infraction was here if the story is true?
My comment isn't about trust, it's about what the actual infraction was. Microsoft is made up of 35,000 people. There's no way I trust all of them. Of what company do you actually have trust in every employee?
The X11 license (MIT has used multiple licenses so there is no single "MIT license") does say "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." but not doing so is not theft.
The grandparent poster is correct -- copyright infringement is not theft and the two ought not be conflated. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft explains why: "Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vo...). The supporters of repressive copyright are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.".
The copyright holder in this case has options including suing, but calling what happened as "theft" is not an option and is unlikely to get anywhere with a judge.
“Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft. For instance, the United States Supreme Court held in Dowling v. United States (1985) that bootleg phonorecords did not constitute stolen property. ” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#"Theft"
"The consolidation of our infrastructure is dangerous."
Have we not learned our lessons yet, by boiling, basically, the entirety of the internet down to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? (And maybe Amazon.) The trend in the US capitalistic system towards monopoly is inescapable, and harmful in so many ways.