Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 626 posts

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#251

Post by tptacek »

chris_wot wrote: post #244
tptacek wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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?

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#252

Post by verst »

throwaway277432 wrote: post #247
verst wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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 :)

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#253

Post by dado3212 »

bakul wrote: post #183
osolo wrote: post #178

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, e…

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.

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”.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#256

Post by bogwog »

soheil wrote: post #176
gortok wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. You can change the license if the license allows you to. It’s copyright you can’t change unless the author assigns the copyright to you.

This comment highlights the ignorance of a lot of people in this thread jumping to conclusion and view MS instantly as an aggressor and themselves as victims of the obvious and horrible crime of copyright infringement. A) Do you know it was not an honest mistake? B) Why a complete understanding of esoteric legal copyright laws created by non-programmers all of a sudden so important to a mainly programmer HN audience?

Are you joking? Programming is all about intellectual property. A complete understanding of copyright laws is important for anyone in the tech industry.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#257

Post by naves »

Yeah, everyone has a second chance but Microsoft has had n-th chances.

Make no mistake, gravity will always pull MS towards their default behavior. Just wait for VS Code becoming a subscription-based product.

Yes, there will always be a community maintained project. But it will not be MS Certified…

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#258

Post by robbedpeter »

psyc wrote: post #249
osolo wrote: post #178

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, e…

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?

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

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#259

Post by nickelpro »

Tepix wrote: post #154

I don't think that just because some "bot" did this Microsoft is to be excused. Someone decided that using a piece of software to automatically alter license files. This is a genuinely stupid idea. And they already fucked up in the same way with the CUPS project. Will they learn without someone taking them to court over this? I don't think so.

The bot's job was to get MS-originated repos onto the correct standard license for MS open source code. That forked repos got their license changed is an unintentional bug, not something anyone "decided" to do.

Re: Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

#260

Post by readbeard »

There is a rampant practice where companies and organizations flippantly and often fraudulently stamp copyright notices on everything they touch—including public domain materials such as the U.S. Constitution, works of William Shakespeare, prints of the Mona Lisa, copies of the 9/11 Commission Report, and compositions of J.S. Bach. [0]

It seems Microsoft has now automated this practice.

[0] http://www.copyfraud.com

Edit: It's easy to jump the gun and start accusing Microsoft of something nefarious here. To be clear, I'm personally giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this was an honest mistake, and that the folks at Microsoft who had something to do with setting this up were well-meaning.

My point is that we're living in a culture that, as a standard practice, sprinkles "(c) [year] [company]" on things like salt, that such claims are frequently invalid or misleading, and that this broader issue may be partly to blame for incidents like the one we are discussing today.

Post reply on HN