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There's a lot of blame being assigned to Microsoft, the entire corporation. But I doubt this was a heavily contemplated decision by a room full of executives,
by alphazard 1y ago
There's a lot of blame being assigned to Microsoft, the entire corporation. But I doubt this was a heavily contemplated decision by a room full of executives, or voted on by the shareholders.
More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment. They can steal users from the original project and justify using Microsoft's resources to maintain it, which puts more resources under their control, and gives them something to talk about during performance reviews.
The open source community should have a way to enforce professional consequences on individuals in situations like this. They are motivated by professional gains after all. That's the only way this will stop happening. Professional consequences does not mean doxxing or other personal attacks, it means losing career opportunities, losing contributor privileges, and becoming known as untrustworthy. These consequences have to be greater than the expected gain from passing a project off as your own at work.
I wonder if a new kind of license could be created which includes projects in some kind of portfolio and violating the license means losing access to the entire portfolio. Similar to how the tech companies added patents to a shared portfolio and patent treachery meant losing access to the portfolio.
- jeanlucas 1y agoYeah, but Microsoft's response to this will actually be a company official position. It's a space to keep watching.
- nickelpro 1y agoA flash in the pan about a random fork they have on Github with <100 stars, and no significant public usage, which fails to correctly follow the reproduction requirement of the MIT license will not generate a C-suite response. It won't get outside the local management of the team responsible for the fork. Maybe a few dozen people at MS will ever know about this, and most of those from seeing it on HN; who have zero connection to the responsible team. It baffles me that HN has no idea how large organizations work. The boss's boss's boss has no idea what random worker bees are doing.
- soraminazuki 1y agoSo what's your point? That megacorps shouldn't be accountable for the actions of their employees? That people saying otherwise are clueless and should shut up?
- nickelpro 1y agoI don't have a point beyond thinking that this is "Microsoft", the corporate entity, making a strategic decision is wrong. This is Aditya, the random software engineer with 5 years of experience making a decision. How you reckon with that, what you take away from it, is up to you. If you want to hold MS corporate responsible for every decision Aditya and Piotr and Zhong make, you can feel free to, but it won't help you understand how these decisions are made because it's wrong.
- jeanlucas 1y agoThe way you underestimate how companies deal with potential PR problems tells me all I need to know about your corporate experience.
- nickelpro 1y agoThis is not a PR problem, no one cares about this. It's barely a thing on HN, and not something any traditional media cares about.
- billllll 1y agoJust because the shareholders didn't vote on it, or an exec didn't explicitly say "hey steal this" does not absolve the company. Leadership doesn't get to throw up their hands and say "not my fault" when something bad happens. It is ultimately the responsibility of the company and its people to create a system where things like this are discouraged or prohibited. Not doing so is tacit approval, especially in this case where they have a significant history of doing the same thing.
- alphazard 1y agoIt's fine that you think corporations are supposed to work that way, and I don't necessarily disagree. But they don't in practice. They don't feel the consequences of bad actions because of legal economies of scale. They also don't backpropagate consequences from the company's bottom line to the individuals responsible. If you were to rectify this so that it works exactly as you envision, you would have made incredible advances in the Principal-Agent problem as it pertains to corporate compensation. Most corporate actions that 3rd parties consider "bad" are the result of someone inside the corporation having an asymmetric payoff from directing the corporation to do the bad thing. They get the upside from a success, but not the downside from failure. If you want to stop a certain bad behavior, your best bet is to change individual incentives.
- da_chicken 1y agoI think the point being made is that the executives are either responsible for the company, or they're not actually running the company at all. Like this isn't some tragedy of the commons situation. This isn't some situation where the company is a cooperative confederation of equal partners. Either shit rolls uphill, or you don't have leadership at all. You don't get to pass the buck on criticism because you made a decision out of self interest, either. "It's not technically illegal," is the most blasé, low-effort rule for behavior. It's why only twelve-year-olds and lawyers use it as a defense for poor behaviors and poor ethics. Being a POS earns you a reputation for being a POS, and that includes people publicly pointing you out as a POS in public forums.
- darepublic 1y agoThey created the atmosphere that encourages or even necessitates shenanigans like these. Absolutely blame the corporation
- Fraterkes 1y agoExactly. If you don't hold managers responsible for the results of the incentives they set, you give the most powerful people in a company the most moral leeway. It should be the other way around.
- awesome_dude 1y agoIt's my personal experience that toxic behaviour is tolerated (and even encouraged) by toxic leadership. Whilst there are always bad apples in a big company, a good company stamps out bad behaviour as soon as it becomes aware of it.
- guappa 1y agoAt my job the management sees not violating copyright as a nuisance. Then when a customer wants to know if we're violating copyright of something or not they suddenly go insane.
- mogwire 1y agoLicenses don’t matter and are rarely challenged in court. This is the nature of OSS. Out right theft in hopes you will never know until it’s too late. Very rarely do large corporations contribute their fair share back to any project. Does this make me money and/or solve a problem quickly? Fork it and it’s mine. Until we stop giving money to large corporations that profit off the free work of others, then it will never stop. And it won’t because we like low cost solutions that work.
- kassner 1y agoI think it’s a bit charitable to assume that something published under an official Microsoft public channel wouldn’t have some sort of legal review, at least for the initial publication.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cryptonector 1y ago> More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment. No, it was a whole team at MSFT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755745