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

Post by thisoneistheone » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #433

bmitc wrote: post #391

What's surprising to me about all the negative reactions Microsoft receives, especially on here, is that from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc). I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open, but they do no wrong in most people's eyes, where even a simple mistake by…

Please, Google contributes far more to open source than both. Between Chromium (which seemingly most other browsers are based on now as well as things like VSCode) to Android, GSoC, Golang, Dart/Flutter, the Linux kernel and a bunch of other random stuff, Google has probably done as much or more for the open source ecosystem than pretty much anyone. Pretty much MS' only useful contributions to open source are from MS…

Post by wiredone » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #303

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.

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.

Post by billti » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #407

bmitc wrote: post #391

What's surprising to me about all the negative reactions Microsoft receives, especially on here, is that from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc). I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open, but they do no wrong in most people's eyes, where even a simple mistake by…

> ...from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) I'm curious to know how you're measuring openness. I agree Apple is the least open of the group, but Facebook and Google owe their existence to FLOSS, and were always in harmony with it from their origins.

Post by thisoneistheone » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

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…

Post by hackertux » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #191

drnonsense42 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, get that promotion! Developers, developers, developers!

I think your comments does not add anything meaningful to discussion. Yes, Microsoft screwed up. Yes, a Microsoft employee is trying to make excuses for them. This does not mean we couldn't have a civilized discussion, though.