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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]

#521

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.

or maybe they do not know/they missed that creating a fork from an existing project actually triggers “new repo created” event in the github organization, which has an unintended effect.

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

#522
post #431

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. If Microsoft's theory is correct, under US law it is impossible to forbid this with a license, because a license is just an offer of additional permissions beyond what is available automatically under law, and Microsoft's theory is that ingesting code into Gi…

There's a part that I don't understand. If some software is mirrored on github by someone that isn't the copyright owner, it seems like github shouldn't be able to use it. Yet they said nothing about that specifically. In that case, is the only option to put code somewhere else than github under a license that forbids reuploading to github, and issue DMCAs when/if people reupload your code? It also sounds like when c…

> If some software is mirrored on github by someone that isn't the copyright owner, it seems like github shouldn't be able to use it.

If they don't need permission from the copyright owner, either via license of GitHub T&C, because it's fair use, which is their overt legal theory, then why would it matter legally whether the code was posted to GitHub at all, much less by whom? Ingesting only code form GitHub is a practical convenience that has nothing to do with their legal theory of the right to do it.

> Yet they said nothing about that specifically

Their theory of fair use means they have the right to ingest any code, irrespective of who owns it and what conditions (if any) it is licensed under or where (or even if) it is hosted online. They don't need a separate justification for your scenario if the theory they’ve cited is correct.

> In that case, is the only option to put code somewhere else than github under a license that forbids reuploading to github, and issue DMCAs when/if people reupload your code

Nope, that doesn't help at all, legally; it may help practically as long as they are just using GitHub hosted code and not consuming code from other public hosting platforms, but it has no bearing on their legal theory of why they can ingest code without additional permissions.

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

#523

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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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We've banned this account. Nobody gets to attack others like that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#524
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…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685852.

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

#525

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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!

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Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly in your HN comments. People are supposed to get the benefit of the doubt here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#526

The relevant Reddit thread also points out that MSFT has illegally relicensed Apache licensed Apple software in the same way. Apple is very litigious… https://github.com/microsoft/cups

It looks like Jeff Wilcox who seems to be in a decision making position about this has addressed this (on Christmas no less), and I think whilst this is bad and definitely violating, I don’t think there was any ill intent, and I hope we can all put the pitchforks down for a while.

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

#527

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.

Please don't pile on like this. You can make your substantive points without "how can someone be so bad at their job" hyperbole. Any mistake can be made to look terrible if you're uncharitable enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#528

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.

This is the type of online rage that we as a community need to stamp out. Be better.

I agree with you in principle but "stamp out" and "be better" are phrases that produce the opposite of what you're aiming at. We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

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

#529
post #250
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…

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[deleted]

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

#530
post #14

Quoted post unavailable.

You broke the site guidelines so badly and so repeatedly in this thread that I've banned the account. If it were just a question of a single thread, I'd put it down to going on tilt (which happens sometimes), but you've also been breaking the guidelines egregiously in other places too.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683556.

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