[gozzoo]

It doesn't sound exactly like taking responsibility to me. It's more an acknowledgment of the fact and damage control. Taking responsibility would suggest admitting fault and taking action to make things right. His statement doesn't have any of these. 'I am looking into it' is too vague and doesn't mean much.

Probably Amazon's legal department doesn't let him say much more, but then his statement sounds unconvincing and doesn't serve the purpose of taking responsibility and assuring the comunity of their good intentions.

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Fault for what? Using code in accordance with the license selected by its developer?

[gozzoo]

By admitting fault I mean if you have done something wrong to speak up. Legally there is no fault as far as I can judge, but there is a moral fault. Not giving credit, not trying to involve the developer in their effort and not offering any kind of reward for his effort is definitely a fault in my dictionary.

These kinds of actions damage the community much more than some people realize. Open source developers lose trust in the idea of sharing their work when seeing how huge companies with limitless resources take advantage of their effort. This happens little by little but in the end we become cynical and when we see good intended initiatives from these companies we don't trust them and simply refuse to participate.

I tought Microsoft has abandoned its evil demeanor and has become a good open source citizen until this happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

I think what they did is much worse than this, because they intentionally misled the developer by giving an impression that they were going to hire him and when he came for an interview they tricked him to share his ideas about the future of his product. What's similar is the reaction of both companies - half-heartedly acknowledging something that has already become public knowledge and giving some vague promise for fixing things.