7 ms·
How Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it
- msie 8y agoThe developer’s twitter pic is distracting. He has a point but I have a hard time taking him seriously. That’s just me being an old man i guess.
- jabn76 8y agoHomosexuals are people, just like you and me.
- finnthehuman 8y agoMildly distracting displays of sexuality aren't limited to - nor excused by - any orientation. You can tell the parent poster to get over it without passive aggressively accusing them of homophobia.
- developerdanny 8y agoNot sure why his sexuality has any relevance?
- FortNightLord 8y agoI think that's their point.
- asdfas222dff 8y agoI'm a robot :S
- asdfas222dff 8y agothicc
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago"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.
- parvenu74 8y agoIf 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.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago> If true then it’s bad faith use of open source at MSFT and not typical of them. Only if you ignore pretty much all of Microsoft's history.
- smaddox 8y agoClearly you ruffled some feathers, but I have to agree. Microsoft playing nice with open source is a very new phenomenon.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoSounds 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.
- FortNightLord 8y agoHanselman is another shill. I was exceptionally intimate with the .NET team at one point. It is literally the case that they have devised a system where code is stolen, or poached, by the younger engineers and then "cleaned up" by "senior" devs. Senior devs then take the credit and bonus and things like that. Microsoft changed how bonuses are given out internally. It's literally a money slider that is arbitrarily set. Naturally, there is a bad "gang" (that will even gang stalk you!) within the group and yes: Its the .NET team (not the core group, but they hang in the build and tooling systems). This gang has no problem stealing from open source for their own monetary gain.
- jftzzdka 8y agoI would like to see proof of this rather than unsubstantiated claims.
- harrygeez 8y agoWhat 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".
- hliyan 8y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- djajshgsjja 8y agoWithout a doubt, stealing code like this is against policies at Microsoft.
- jen20 8y agoSo, someone should be fired for violation of these (serious) policies?
- lobotryas 8y agoIf what the author says is true then yes. Unfortunately they really bungled their case by trying to reach out through unofficial channels first.
- swerveonem 8y agoWhy does reaching out informally bungle the case?
- finnthehuman 8y agoUnder 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).
- hungerstrike 8y agoLerna was released with an MIT license as was Rush. So, nothing was stolen and if the story is true, the only infraction here would be that the Lerna copyright line was not included in the Rush license.
- bjoli 8y agoWhich is one of the very few things they are required to do. Following the clauses in the MIT license is not really rocket surgery.
- hungerstrike 8y agoThat's exactly what I said - that was the only infraction. What part of my comment are you disagreeing with?? Copyright infringement is not theft.
- eeks 8y agoSimple. Distributing MIT-licensed code without the original license disclosure is theft.
- leoh 8y agoBut both included the MIT license
- jen20 8y agoThe copyright notice is what must be included. The license states this very clearly.
- Nomentatus 8y agoThe "above copyright notice" must be included; i.e. the general MIT license itself, without credit to any author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License The original BSD license did have a credit clause which led to considerable trouble and controversy, so they don't do that any more. IANAL, and this is extremely bad manners on someone's part, but no laws were broken.
- jimrandomh 8y agoBased 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.
- hungerstrike 8y agoAre 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! Enjoy your Microsoft-hate-train all. yawn
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do sports-team-style BigCorp flamewars on HN. It's not substantive and leads to worse.
- hungerstrike 8y agoYou’re kidding right? I’m responding to the one that already going.
- dang 8y agoSure, but please don't. That's going the wrong way down a one-way street.
- hungerstrike 8y agoOh, 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?
- TheWiseOne 8y agoThere 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.
- eicnix 8y agoI 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.
- bigtunacan 8y agoI 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.
- ms013 8y agoI 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.
- gcb0 8y agoYou 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?
- ms013 8y agoIt 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.
- martinwoodward 8y agoHey – 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.
- martinwoodward 8y agoFYI - I created this issue to track any fixes needed: https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673 https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673
- JdeBP 8y ago> 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. * https://github.com/lerna/lerna/tree/9aabe1664399d5f233a89d373fc2101625bf174c https://github.com/lerna/lerna/tree/9aabe1664399d5f233a89d37... * https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/tree/c4bb2127e67522c69a19f7cd8cd90bb6fc663a35 https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/tree/c4bb2127e6...