[osolo]

The attitude in these threads always boggles my mind. When YOU, your teammates or someone else you know makes a mistake, then it’s just a mistake. But when someone at Microsoft makes a mistake it’s because Microsoft is evil and by extension so is the person who offended.

“It’s a big company”, you say. They should have a process! And I’m sad to say, they do/will have a process exactly because of this attitude. Then, everyone wonders why it takes forever to fix that bug they’re furious about or why features are slow to come.

Full disclosure: I work for MS, though have nothing to do with this. It’s a huge company. I know hundreds of people and most of them are upstanding and try to do the right thing.

[throwaway277432]

This is their process. Very hard to argue these are all mistakes:

ippsample (Apache -> MIT) https://github.com/microsoft/ippsample/commit/938bff17c72868...

huggingface-transformers (Apache -> MIT): https://github.com/microsoft/huggingface-transformers/commit...

health-cards-tests (MIT changed) https://github.com/microsoft/health-cards-tests/commit/5649b...

CUPS (Apache -> MIT) https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/ad69bcc78bdea3fea3f...

Credit to this reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/roa9xz/comment/...

[verst]

This is a bot that is supposed to configure the right license when employees start a new repo in the Microsoft GitHub org.

It seems the automation is also triggered when Repos are forked into the Microsoft GitHub org which isn't correct behavior.

This isn't a deliberate action. If it were plenty of employees (myself included) would be outraged. I assume it's a bug in the bot - an edge case that was not considered. It is very rare to fork something into the Microsoft GitHub org after all.

I'll pass it along to some people I know.

[throwaway277432]

Thank you. So these are in fact all mistakes.

I looked at some of the other forked repos (95 out of 4.5K repos) and all the human commits from MS I saw seem to care about getting the licenses right. So it really is just a broken bot.

I hope the bot can be fixed soon and I'm going to put my figurative pitchfork down now.

[verst]

I reached out to Jeff Wilcox who runs the Open Source Programs Office now earlier (see Tweet https://twitter.com/berndverst/status/1474789173882089472?s=...).

He since commented on this post with a lot more detail.

[throwaway277432]

He wrote a great response. Not many people I know would stand in front of a online mob and say "It's code that I wrote". And then fix it on Christmas!

While I'm glad this got resolved so quickly, I'm slightly ashamed of myself and the HN community for how we handled this. In hindsight the outrage was wildly out of proportion for a simple bug.

I'll make a mental note to do better in 2022.

[tptacek]

Thanks for saying this.

[verst]

I'll consider it an unusual bug report.

Hopefully the bot can be fixed soon and the affected licenses changed back.

Realistically I'm not sure folks are working over the holidays, so give it a bit of time :)

[ognarb]

Look at https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/8100595a3a3a6d5c7d0... . This was done by an human.

[mst]

As noted elsewhere in this thread this one looks like human misunderstanding and has already been raised internally for fixage.

Shame it slipped through the cracks, but at scale eventually something's going to no matter how hard you try.

[btdmaster]

Are they deliberately getting their modifications under an pseudo-incompatible* license? This is the only reasonable explanation I can think of.

* IANAL. Although Apache 2.0 and MIT are compatible, using a different license makes it awkward for changes to be merged upstream.

[ognarb]

The biggest change between Apache 2.0 and MIT are related to patents. INAL but the Apache 2.0 is a lot more safe in this aspect.

[lazysheepherd]

Things break all the time, so errors will happen.

If you look at life as good & evil, you won't solve any conflicts. You should rather focus on "incentives". Correcting bugs and errors take time and other resources, therefore require incentive to prioritize. If their bots were to stamp Microsoft projects with open source licenses, there would be huge incentive for them to tackle this problem within this sprint, and make sure it never happens again.

This bug profits them, or does not harm them at worst case. Therefore, by drawing attention and applying pressure, we should create the incentive for them to allocate resources to fix it, and make sure it does not repeat.

[michaelmrose]

How can someone be so bad at their job that they realize that a bot that writes to the license file needs to avoid overwriting an existing file? A certain degree of malfeasance cannot possibly be explained as incompetence.

[dang]

Please don't pile on like this. You can make your substantive points without "how can someone be so bad at their job" hyperbole. Any mistake can be made to look terrible if you're uncharitable enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jolux]

> A certain degree of malfeasance cannot possibly be explained as incompetence.

This is a missing conditional check, a mistake that is extremely easy to make and one I’m sure you’ve made at least once if you’ve been a professional programmer for any significant length of time.

[csunbird]

or maybe they do not know/they missed that creating a fork from an existing project actually triggers “new repo created” event in the github organization, which has an unintended effect.

[wiredone]

This is the type of online rage that we as a community need to stamp out.

Be better.

[dang]

I agree with you in principle but "stamp out" and "be better" are phrases that produce the opposite of what you're aiming at. We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

[micimize]

These forks may be done for security purposes for projects that use source-based build systems so that the depending project doesn't have 3rd party repo dependencies.

As someone whose developed similar GH integrations, getting things right with their API is fairly tricky. What would actually be desirable is public-to-private forks so that the fork-dependency pattern is more enterprise friendly and this kind of confusion is mitigated.

[tbrock]

Why would anyone write that so it changes the license to the right one instead of just flagging it as incorrect for review?

[chris_wot]

Have you considered that the reason for the outrage is because people don't actually trust Microsoft to do the right thing? I can see this is a mistake, but surely the litany of awful business practices by Microsoft in the past precedes it?

[verst]

I didn't say anything about the outrage of others. I said a deliberate license change would be unacceptable to employees.

I'm no official representative of Microsoft...

[chris_wot]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you were. But no offense, so what if it isn't acceptable to employees? The decisions by Microsoft are made by the management of the company. As an example of another company with severe credibility problems, I'm sure there are plenty of employees at Facebook who don't like working there now, but they are still there. And still implementing the policies and directions of management.

[Tyriar]

MS dev here. Thanks for calling this out. I contacted the GH@MS admins to look into this and to consider adding some safeguards to the tooling so this doesn't happen in the future.

[michaelmrose]

How is it remotely possible to not understand you cannot automatically overwrite a license file with your own. If you yourself were creating such automation wouldn't that be one of the first and most obvious things you would think of?

[mlyle]

If you think of the use case of forks, sure.

If you think of employees creating new repos in the org--- smash the correct LICENSE in there ASAP.

The problem is that forking a different repo into the org triggers the logic of a "new repository".

[wise_young_man]

A simple solution prior to writing to a file in this case is to check if it already exists. It shouldn’t matter what triggers this bot if it’s programmed safe and idempotent.

[mlyle]

Nuking the existing LICENSE file and replacing with the canonical one is a good move when it's your own developers' work. They could easily have picked "a" MIT license or screwed up the copyright string, and getting this normalized from the moment the repository is published is important.

But it's important that this -not- get applied to outside work from forks.

[dpark]

So your simple solution is to not have the bug. Wish I’d thought of this for all the bugs I’ve ever shipped.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee who sometimes writes bugs.

[dpark]

Do you never write code with bugs or do your employers just judge you much less harshly than you judge others?

> If you yourself were creating such automation wouldn't that be one of the first and most obvious things you would think of?

Probably not, because it sounds like this was not intended to ever run on forked repos at all.

[ordiel]

And so ther revert the ones done in the past I hope...

[phendrenad2]

Wrong. The more links, the easier it is to argue that it's a mistake. Automation is hard, you know? Especially if no one noticed these and called them out on it until now.

[fivea]

> Wrong. The more links, the easier it is to argue that it's a mistake. Automation is hard, you know?

Is it wrong though? I mean, if Microsoft's reiterated pattern of license switches is automated, wouldn't this also mean that the error would be easily detected based on public feedback alone? And given this was not the first or second or third separate and independent occurrence of this pattern, if this was a honest mistake then wouldn't this already be addressed in any of the multiple past shout-out?

[nomel]

> wouldn't this also mean that the error would be easily detected based on public feedback alone

Please see the entire public feedback you’re a part of right now.

[fivea]

Thanks for the call out. Here's a helpful link to the announcement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685628

[throwaway277432]

(deleted)

[Tyriar]

MS acquired that extension, Don works at MS now.

[throwaway277432]

You're right. Saw the reviewer on that PR but you were too quick and I couldn't delete my comment anymore.

[windexh8er]

Microsoft, a collective group of people trying to do the right thing, has made many choices over their time. Many of those choices have been in direct violation of things like, but not limited to, the spirit of the Internet, anti-competiton, spying on their customers, and many other negative things. Should we have let those things slide because Microsoft employs others that weren't involved? No. You can say this may have been a mistake but that is a slippery slope. Microsoft deserves negative press on "mistakes" because this acts as a balance to keep the power they wield in check. Beyond that you have a significant bias against biting the hand that feeds.

[fxtentacle]

In my opinion, this gets a strong reaction because:

1. They made similar mistakes in the past.

2. They didn't fix it for half a year.

3. They can expect strong financial benefits from making these mistakes.

4. They've recently burned a lot of goodwill by deliberately infringing licenses on a large scale when they trained Copilot.

5. They could have easily prevented this kind of mistakes.

My summary would be that Microsoft deserves to be punished for making this mistake. If nothing bad happens now, then we'll have the same discussion again in half a year from now.

[tptacek]

What financial benefits do they stand to gain by changing the name on an MIT license?

[fxtentacle]

In some cases, they changed other licenses to MIT. That would then allow them to train their AI models on this source code, or redistribute a closed-source monetized GPL rip-off.

Team A) makes a mistake and changes the license. Team B) uses the fork under its new license and forgets to check the original branch's license.

Two honest mistakes leading to a de-GPL-ed library.

[tptacek]

Here, they're changed the name on an MIT license. What financial benefit do they stand to accrue from doing so? That's the question I'm asking.

[fxtentacle]

I was talking not only about this specific instance of it happening, but Microsoft had similar mistakes throughout the past 6 months. Here's the one from CUPS, a Linux printing library:

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/ad69bcc78bdea3fea3f...

It used to be Apache License, then it became "MIT License (c) Microsoft Corporation". Thanks to the attention that this thread got, it has now been fixed:

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/3859d70160010c61fd7...

But that source code was online with the wrong license for more than 6 months. Imagine if you had hosted Windows source code with a misattributed MIT license for 6 months... They would also bring out the pitchforks ;) Or even worse: well-paid lawyers.

[tptacek]

I asked what Microsoft had to gain from altering an MIT license. You're answering a different question. But, fine, I'll bite: tell me how Microsoft stood to make a nickel by modifying an Apache license.

[chris_wot]

Um, it changes the ownership? If they wanted to relicense it, then they could say "well, hey, it's our license!".

[tptacek]

The MIT license puts essentially no restrictions on them that they would need to relicense out from under. They can't un-MIT it. So I'm still not clear on how you propose for them to make money by doing this. Do you have an answer to my question?

[m3047]

They're asserting ownership. By asserting ownership they're converting good will and assuming the mantle of authority, which will sway plenty of weak-minded people: hey it's Microsoft.

[tptacek]

I see how that gets them a C-grade Mastodon lyric, but not how it gets them a nickel. Did I ask this question in a particularly weird way? The responses it's getting are a little confusing.

[fault1]

also, never forget CP/M: https://www.wired.com/2012/08/ms-dos-examined-for-thef/

[laumars]

This isn’t just one person making a silly mistake. This is a catalogue of failings. Where’s the peer review? Are you suggesting that anything published in the main branch on Microsoft’s GH org gets commit without any branch protection? And as pointed out by others, this isn’t even an isolated case.

A healthy org doesn’t blame individuals, it blames failures in process. Thus Microsoft should own this mistake. Stating it’s the fault of an individual sounds more like your team operates a blame culture. Which, frankly, is a major red flag for a failing organisation.

[res0nat0r]

It's an automated bot, and it's an edge case that wasn't considered and is going to get fixed soon.

[laumars]

I’m satisfied that the situation has been, or at least will be, resolved.m however there is still the unanswered question of who audits the changes the bot makes.

There is a definitely lesson to be learnt here that bots aren’t infallible themselves and thus need reviewing too. Automation undoubtedly enhances our developer experience but we do need to ensure that automation doesn’t make unchecked changes. This is something a great many engineers can learn from too.

[timeon]

Is forking on Github edge case?

[res0nat0r]

Apparently forking a 3rd party repo INTO the Microsoft github org is, yes.

[aynyc]

There are genuine mistakes, and there are some due to incompetency. Both can be somewhat execused.

However, if you look at the changelog, I don't know how you are gonna say with a straight face that it's a "mistake".

[bakul]

How is running a bot to change copyright notices a /mistake/?

> Full disclosure: I work for MS

It is difficult to see the reality distortion field you are in from the inside.

[dang]

This breaks several of the HN guidelines and crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that post like that, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[bakul]

Just pointing out this (reality distortion) is a general phenomenon. Have seen the same in all big companies (& many small). As an employee you want the best for the company and you naturally imbibe the company culture and that is perfectly fine. But there is a line and this is something one has to watch out for as an employee. As an example, seeing any critical comment from outside as an attack on the company.

It is good that an employee explained how this particular event happened and that is to their credit.

[hatware]

I respectfully, and vehemently disagree. Informing someone that they may be drinking too much of their company's Kool-Aid, without knowing what is in it, is a moral obligation.

Despicable that you present this as a bannable offense.

[dang]

Sorry, but garden-variety internet comments and cheap personal attacks don't rise to the noble level of moral obligation. The comment plainly broke the site rules. That's not allowed here. If people have noble duties to fulfill, they can do that without breaking the rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[bakul]

I too don't think there is any "moral obligation" involved but I did feel it was perfectly fine to point out what I did. I quoted their "I work for MS" to provide the context for my comment, nothing more.

[dang]

Sorry, but that's definitely not accurate. You quoted it as part of a personal attack: implying that someone was lying about making a mistake, imputing sinister motivations to them instead, and adding a name-calling putdown into the mix (accusing them of being inside a "reality distortion field", as if you know more about their world than they do). All that is clearly against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I'm sure you didn't intend it that way, but we have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Intent doesn't communicate itself, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

[colejohnson66]

You are insinuating astroturfing with no evidence other than "I work at Microsoft" and your personal, albeit somewhat justified, belief of "MS bad". It's not a constructive comment.

[hatware]

> garden-variety internet comments and cheap personal attacks

That is how you took the comment.

I took the comment to be a refreshing dose of reality.

Perspective matters a lot.

[dang]

Ok, but anyone could say that about any comment, so from a moderation perspective that is either an empty point or means that we shouldn't moderate anything at all.

For practical purposes, someone has to make judgment calls about these things. The way we do that is that we have a set of guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and moderators who make calls about which accounts are breaking them. We try to be as even-handed as possible when we do that, but certainly no one is going to agree with every call we make. Nevertheless, someone has to do the job, and that includes banning accounts when people break the rules and aren't interested in modifying their behavior.

[bakul]

> I took the comment to be a refreshing dose of reality.

This is how I meant it but I could have phrased it or presented it differently as this point got lost at least with the moderators and may be many more. Will try to be more careful in the future.

I appreciate your speaking up. And I also appreciate the moderators in trying to keep the discussion standards high. They have a tough job trying to decipher the intent of every commenter.

[yawnxyz]

I used to work for MS and... it's still easy to see it from the inside lol

[newjersey]

I don't work at Microsoft but I can confirm. There are so many "suggestions" for Microsoft Teams. I don't know if there exists another company whose employees are more critical of Microsoft Teams than Microsoft.

My personal conspiracy theory is Teams would have died long ago if not for strong support from the top.

[tyrrvk]

Teams is garbage, every time I use it I loathe computing in general.

[fault1]

teams seems important strategically for microsoft however, if it truly wants to remain as the standard 'operating system' for enterprises.

but yeah, friends of mine who work at github say the worst thing about the acquisition was Teams

[hirsin]

Which is odd because Github doesn't use Teams, they're Slack based. As in, if I set up a meeting with my Github counterparts they're late because they had to install Teams.

[jounker]

How is this inconsistent with “Teams is awful, and we avoid it as much as possible”?

[dado3212]

when $new_repo in $msft_github: echo $standard_license > LICENSE.md

Could just be normal practices, and doesn’t check if a license already exists because it’s usually handling non-forked OSS repos. What’s the phrase? “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence”.

[junon]

The difference is, most engineers I know respect and understand licenses. If you work at Microsoft - a software company - you should too.

[nomel]

Respecting a license is completely orthogonal to the unintended behavior of an automation used on something it wasn’t really meant for (fork rather than a new repo)

[productceo]

+1

This is the peril of the imaginary "corporation" identity. People expect a company to be one coherent and consistent entity, but although a company can be managed well, establish culture and processes, and progress towards cohesion, it can never become as coherent as one person. And a person is not that coherent in the first place.

I am sure I subconsciously make the same mistake when I think about other companies. But I am making conscious effort to get better, take a more forgiving view on the humankind and give people as well as corporations chance to try again and be a better version of themselves, build the mental capability to remember that corporations are comprised of real people, and people make mistakes, and reasonable people who make up the majority of the population are constantly seeking (just struggling) to be better versions of themselves.

[psyc]

Ok. I worked at MS from 2005-2015. As I recall, there was this huge formal legal process and due diligence around including a single line of open source code. Is that not still the case? Am I remembering it wrong?

[robbedpeter]

Github changed everything. All sorts of automation and open source involvement happened, with new bots and systems.

[psyc]

Y'know, it actually slipped my mind that Microsoft transformed into a much more open-source friendly company. That makes some sense now.

[dpweb]

You have to take "companies doing good" always with a grain of salt. They're profit seeking companies, who act aggressively in their own interests.

It doesn't have to be a debate on "good vs evil" I've always hated those terms applied in these contexts, it's childish and for the naive. Fix the problem and move on.

[gausswho]

'Profit-seeking companies' begs a common pejorative that actively reduces the variety in the pool of companies. It may not be descriptive of the companies for which this is not an overarching motivation. Many of them really want to make a happy customer by crafting as good a thing possible for the price they charge, and be well by their employees.

That said, I can relate the the cynicism especially for the giants. But painting them all as 'profit-seeking corporations' may deaden a satisfaction that comes from being a customer for a company you believe is good.

[michaelmrose]

A company is merely a useful legal and organizational fiction. It's all people all the way down and those people don't act in a different moral context when they act on behalf of a company.

[blihp]

Microsoft is a rather special case of a company that has virtually no goodwill in the open source world. These are the dividends that result from statements and actions over decades. So when something like this occurs, the default reaction is often 'of course... it is Microsoft after all'.

[michaelmrose]

Few people are likely to know <insert employee here> but many people are very familiar with decades of bad behavior undertaken by Microsoft not as isolated misdeeds but as a matter of policy. Lacking personal context misdeeds or mistakes are extremely apt to be interpreted in context of literal decades of bad behavior by Microsoft.

I mean come on the seismic change in leadership at Microsoft is just former lower echelon leaders during the time frame that MS was doing wrong now moving up and taking the helm.

We are after all talking about the company that tried to destroy the competition by funneling money into a fraudulent lawsuit/pr campaign that was a front for a pump and dump. The only thing separating MS leadership and felony charges is meeting notes between them and SCO and the fact that important people don't go prison in the US if can at all be avoided. Lest we forget the current CEO was at this time an executive VP as well.

Maybe it boggles your mind merely because you yourself are an ethical person who comports themselves properly professionally and would want people to see your efforts good and bad in context of who you are. This is entirely reasonable but people don't know you personally whereas your company makes headlines for bad behavior.

[__MatrixMan__]

If you had a history of behaving as badly as Microsoft, I'd be as harsh on you as I am on Microsoft.

[jrmg]

But when someone at Microsoft makes a mistake…

For many it’s not just Microsoft. Many assume negative intent from others most of the time. It much be such a frustrating, draining way to live.

[halayli]

I am finding it hard to accept that it is an honest mistake.

From my personal experience, every software engineer that works in a company of this scale is obligated to take a training course on software licensing and understand the differences, and the "dos and don'ts".

If Microsoft doesn't have such a program in place then that's a big problem and should expect harsh criticisms when such events take place and if they do then it probably needs to be revised because it doesn't seem adequate.

On the other hand, outside the context of MS, if a software engineer doesn't feel they are doing something dirty as they are replacing the license or the thought of I might get in trouble with legal doing that doesn't cross their mind, then they probably shouldn't be allowed to be at the front line taking actions that represents the company's name.

[wtetzner]

It was a bug in a bot, not someone deliberately changing the license.

[3np]

Along similar lines as my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684127

...Given that several engineers employed at Microsoft have been part of armchairing this along everyone else now, why is not one of y'all (not necessarily you but come on, this is getting absurd, holidays aside) still just busy discussing around it rather than spending the <5 minutes required per repo to start actually fixing the fallout of it?

[micromacrofoot]

if I did this to microsoft do you think I’d be granted the same leeway? could I tell them they need to cut me some slack because i’m one person and “there’s a process”?

[akkartik]

It's a bug, but it's also an example of what I think of as differential accountability:

* Bugs in the bot inevitably assign ownership to the writer rather than from the writer.

* Bugs in the billing system invariably overcharge customers

* Bugs in the image recognition system invariably select white people.

Well-meaning people still follow their incentives. Corners have to get cut somewhere.

I totally agree this isn't specific to MS. We have seen the enemy, and it is us.

[micimize]

This isn't true – the only billing system bug I've seen undercharged. Also if it was an overcharge, they would have made customer whole, whereas they wrote off the undercharge.

Microsoft doesn't really gain anything here – there's a clear "forked from" qualifier in the repo, they aren't republishing these packages, etc. The only people who noticed noticed in a negative light.

[akkartik]

To reiterate, I'm not saying there's malicious intent in any single bug. Yes, billing errors don't lead to more revenue for the firm. I'm describing rather a systemic bias in incentives for the people doing the work (programmers) and supervising the work (managers).

[m3047]

I believe "moral hazard" is the term of art for what you describe.

[akkartik]

Approximately. Moral hazard typically refers to sins of commission. Deliberately taking on more risk because you're insured. Here I'm thinking more of sins of omission. You just forgot to do something. You didn't have enough attention to devote to the task, so you rationally apportioned the attention budget to the areas most likely to be checked by others.

[SquishyPanda23]

I'm just curious, is Microsoft actually in violation of the MIT license here?

All future changes to this repo are copyright Microsoft, so Microsoft's copyright should be in the statement.

Arguably there should be an additional statement indicating that LesnyRumcajs holds copyright to bits of code that Microsoft hasn't changed.

But

(1) exactly which bits have LesnyRumcajs's copyright would have to be verified by examining source control history. Since LesnyRumcajs's copyright statement is visible on any commit where LesnyRumcajs holds copyright, this setup makes actually makes it easy to verify which portions LesnyRumcajs has copyright claims on.

(2) Including LesnyRumcajs's copyright statement in repo history seems to be all that the MIT license requires. The license doesn't forbid there being another more easily accessible copyright notice that doesn't list all copyright holders. It only requires that LesnyRumcajs's statement be included in all copies of the software, which it currently is.

[esrauch]

What you're saying doesn't make any sense. If what you're saying was true you could take any MIT repro, fork it and replace the license with a fully proprietary copyright claim or any other license. You absolutely can't take code and just change the license to anything more permissive without the original copyright holders permission.

It's definitely the case that at a given snapshot of the repository which has copyrighted code owned by someone else the copyright notice has to be there at that same revision.

[SquishyPanda23]

The license wasn't changed. But yes, generally you can make changes to MIT code that aren't released under the MIT license.

> It's definitely the case that at a given snapshot of the repository which has copyrighted code owned by someone else the copyright notice has to be there at that same revision.

This isn't in the license. Where is this laid out?

[esrauch]

MIT license is very permissive but the original author retains copyright and one of the very few restrictions is that you must maintain the original authors copyright notice. So you can use MIT code in a GPL project but you can't remove the original copyright notice and MIT license text.

I don't quite follow your thinking about removing the notice but having it somewhere in history; a given snapshot/ revision will be a distribution where someone can show up and download just the master branch newest state and not the full git history. In which case you surely have distributed a copy of the copyrighted MIT licensed code without complying with the terms of the license, right?

[indymike]

Microsoft has lawyers and more layers of management than grandma's lasagna.

[faangiq]

MS and other bigcos have a history of being evil. It’s the correct assumption.

[johnisgood]

> I know hundreds of people and most of them are upstanding and try to do the right thing.

How can you work for Microsoft AND do the "right" thing? I guess it depends on your role, but still...

[skywhopper]

Folks who work at mega corporations with outrageous amounts of power have a correspondingly large responsibility to the communities they interact with. Their mistakes have a much larger impact. Honest mistakes by hugely powerful entities are not mere trivia. They have an effect on the rest of the world commensurate with their power. Thus they should be held to a much higher standard than everyone else.

[bananamerica]

It is reasonable to have different expectations from large corporations with enormous resources than you would have for an independent developer.

[hatware]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[lostsoul8282]

I highly agree with this.

Everytime I've taken the route that there is some evil, no good as come out of it but when you give a group of people the benifit of the doubt, I would argue the majority of the time it's just a mistake.

[victorvscn]

I feel like the only people with an attitude against Microsoft these days are teenagers trying to look edgy and critical thinking or pretending they are insiders.

I don't work for Microsoft.

[curious_cat_163]

There is not an attitude for the whole thread. Understandably you feel defensive but there is no need to.

If you care about this issue, try to get it fixed within your company and move on.

[PascLeRasc]

You can't ascribe one attitude to a thread of hundreds of commenters and then shame us for ascribing an attitude to a company.

[PascLeRasc]

A third way: individual people can make an honest mistake and Microsoft is still evil.

[johncena33]

You should see how HN would react if Google has done anything remotely close to it. If it was Google your comment would be downvoted to oblivion instead of being the top comment. Not to mention you'd be disparaged for protecting your employer.

[beervirus]

Y’all are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt any more than obviously-evil companies like Facebook are.

[dang]

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop (most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29501677).

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [e-mail] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We particularly don't want the online callout/shaming culture here. nhttps://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

[voakbasda]

For those of us that remember the “old” Microsoft, they are still obviously evil. Nothing they have done will change that view. Incidents like this prove that this zebra cannot change its stripes.

Never. Trust. Microsoft.

[Dylan16807]

> Never. Trust. Microsoft.

Good advice.

> Incidents like this prove that this zebra cannot change its stripes.

Nope! This was a simple mistake that would have gained them nothing.

[beervirus]

I mean yeah. But for a few years there, they were at least not as obviously horrible as they used to be, or as some other companies were.

[drnonsense42]

Yeah, get that promotion! Developers, developers, developers!

[hdjjhhvvhga]

I think your comments does not add anything meaningful to discussion. Yes, Microsoft screwed up. Yes, a Microsoft employee is trying to make excuses for them. This does not mean we couldn't have a civilized discussion, though.

[hackertux]

All discussions are civilized until you start throwing stones at each other.

[dang]

Posting like this will get you banned here, so please don't. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html