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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]

#351

Post by johnisgood »

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…

> 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...

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

#352

Post by j4hdufd8 »

jeffwilcox wrote: post #321

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

I'm really sorry you had to deal with this during the festive period.

I certainly understand how scandalous this looks to crowds like Hacker News.

But this seems a little bit blown out of proportion, as if Microsoft just forked the kernel or something and put their name on the license.

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

#353

Post by PragmaticPulp »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #333
jeffwilcox wrote: post #321

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

A lot of commenters are sharpening their pitchforks, but this comment, in my opinion, makes it very likely that it was an honest mistake. Amazing what taking personal responsibility and earnestly apologizing can do to restore trust and credibility!

> makes it very likely that it was an honest mistake.

I don’t have any doubt that it was an honest mistake. They also took accountability for the mistake, shared their steps to prevent it from happening again, and they’re in contact with the original repo author directly.

At this point, anyone digging for excuses to further demonize Microsoft isn’t interested in honest discussion about this issue. This is a textbook mistake followed by rapid resolution (on Christmas Day, no less), with great communication on top.

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

#355

Post by btdmaster »

ognarb wrote: post #342
throwaway277432 wrote: post #247

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.

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

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.

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

#356

Post by [deleted] »

jolux wrote: post #316
michaelmrose wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by xigoi »

ghoward wrote: post #165
_0ffh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what kind of language you would need to add to your license in order to explicitly forbid the ingestion of your code by Copilot and/or like projects.

IANAL, but I have written licenses for that purpose. [1] (I'm trying to get them reviewed by a lawyer, but can't afford to; maybe I'll do a GoFundMe.) What I did is say that if you feed copyrighted software to an algorithm that itself outputs software, then the license applies to the output. This covers the output of compilers and such, but it would also cover Copilot in my opinion. We'll see what a lawyer says. Howe…

The “Yzena Copyleft License” states that it's a copyleft license, but it also states that it's not a viral license. According to Wikipedia, a viral license and a copyleft license are the same thing.

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

#358

Post by tptacek »

jeffwilcox wrote: post #321

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

What happened here was obviously a mistake. The thread is full of lurid accusations, because those are fun to write and talk about, but it shouldn't take even a minute's thought to see how dumb a heist this would have been.

The thread would have been a lot more fun if we could have spent it talking about what prompted your team to build this thingy, and bounce other people's approaches to the same problem off, and maybe share some war stories about dumb things bots have done on our behalf.

Thanks, regardless, for the information you've provided here. It's interesting.

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

#359

Post by xafnuaetrf8764 »

sarahnovotny wrote: post #350
jeffwilcox wrote: post #321

I lead the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office team. I'm sorry this happened. We have merged a pull request that restored the correct LICENSE file and copyright, and are in touch with the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs who emailed us this morning. We'll look to revert the entire commit that our bot made, too, since it updated the README with a boilerplate getting started guide. The bug was caused by a bot that was d…

This is my favorite part of the culture change which is happening at Microsoft. We are still working on it. And, it will take time. Jeff's team, my team, the java team whose forked repo this unintentionally highlighted are working with dozens of other teams every week. Satya says we're all in on open source. Hold Jeff and Me and all the leaders of Microsoft to that vision. Keep us accountable. And, know this takes ti…

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

#360

Post by victorvscn »

_zzaw wrote: post #348
gautamcgoel wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of commenters are sharpening their pitchforks, but this comment, in my opinion, makes it very likely that it was an honest mistake. Amazing what taking personal responsibility and earnestly apologizing can do to restore trust and credibility!

Yeah, I think this is an example of addressing a mistake that other companies should take note of. I don’t trust Microsoft-sized corporations as a matter of principle, and I don’t typically give them the benefit of the doubt, but when one of their own engineers explains in human-readable terms what specifically happened—on a holiday, no less—I’m impressed enough to believe him. Some PR flack showing up with vague boi…

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