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

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

#311
post #256
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jurisprudence is a specialty beyond the skill level of an average lawyer. It's like saying to be able to eat you need to have a complete understanding of how to raise a chicken.

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

#312
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

#313
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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).

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

#315

The larger issue is that anyone using GitHub is donating their work for re-use without attribution through Copilot. In return, you receive hosting from GitHub. The writing is on the wall. You MUST host your own code on a stand-alone website. Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com It runs on a Linode shared CPU cloud instance that costs $5 per month: h…

> Here is an example. This Go program (a compiler) generates and serves its own website: https://NN-512.com Not a very good one - clicking the link produces a download dialog on Firefox (I'm guessing because the website neglects to indicate a Content-Type). Ironically this is an argument against trying to do everything yourself - you might waste time chasing the long tail of thousands of little details that had been…

>clicking the link produces a download dialog on Firefox

Works fine for me (v90/Linux).

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

#317
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…

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.

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

#318
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#319
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

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