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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]

#551

Post by brunoborges »

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…

Jeff's reply needs no addendum.

But as for some background: I am a PM for Microsoft Build of OpenJDK and from late last year to around May this year I made contributions to the gRPC_bench repo as a Microsoft employee for some experiments we have been working on, to evaluate and improve different ways of implementing gRPC exchange in Java. [1]

This fork was intended for newer experiments, one of them being about coding and running these benchmarks on GitHub Codespaces. For that, I needed the repo on an org where we, as employees, have Codespaces enabled.

The rest is HN history (back to Jeff's reply above [2]).

Merry Christmas all!

[1] https://github.com/LesnyRumcajs/grpc_bench/commits?author=br...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685628

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

#552

Post by 32ry8we7ahui3 »

throwaway82931 wrote: post #487
novok wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets also get rid of web search engines while we are at it, or transparent caching CDNs /s

Web search engines claim fair use for snippets, and MS claims fair use for Copilot. However, a web search engine result page is only an aggregate of the excerpted pages, and it refers back to them; unlike software authored using Copilot, it does not draw those snippets together into a coherent purposeful whole, strip all reference to the original author. and claim complete originality. That MS went ahead with trainin…

Why is Copilot any different from a human doing essentially the same thing? Complete originality doesn't exist. I think the people who are complaining about Copilot have likely done the same thing themselves. I can't erase the memory of all the code I have read and written that somebody else 'own' the copyright to, so my brain will subconsciously use copyrighted code when writing software.

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

#554

Post by bakul »

dang wrote: post #532
bakul wrote: 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.

This breaks several of the HN guidelines and crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that post like that, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just pointing out this (reality distortion) is a general phenomenon. Have seen the same in all big companies (& many small). As an employee you want the best for the company and you naturally imbibe the company culture and that is perfectly fine. But there is a line and this is something one has to watch out for as an employee. As an example, seeing any critical comment from outside as an attack on the company.

It is good that an employee explained how this particular event happened and that is to their credit.

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

#555

Post by cycomanic »

32ry8we7ahui3 wrote: post #552
throwaway82931 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web search engines claim fair use for snippets, and MS claims fair use for Copilot. However, a web search engine result page is only an aggregate of the excerpted pages, and it refers back to them; unlike software authored using Copilot, it does not draw those snippets together into a coherent purposeful whole, strip all reference to the original author. and claim complete originality. That MS went ahead with trainin…

Why is Copilot any different from a human doing essentially the same thing? Complete originality doesn't exist. I think the people who are complaining about Copilot have likely done the same thing themselves. I can't erase the memory of all the code I have read and written that somebody else 'own' the copyright to, so my brain will subconsciously use copyrighted code when writing software.

Because copilot is not a human and can do things that humans can't. Moreover I encourage you to learn music pieces by listening to them and then selling/giving away snippets. You will have big corporations on your heels fairly quickly even though you are a human.

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

#556

Post by michaelmrose »

mlyle wrote: post #531
wise_young_man wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple solution prior to writing to a file in this case is to check if it already exists. It shouldn’t matter what triggers this bot if it’s programmed safe and idempotent.

Nuking the existing LICENSE file and replacing with the canonical one is a good move when it's your own developers' work. They could easily have picked "a" MIT license or screwed up the copyright string, and getting this normalized from the moment the repository is published is important. But it's important that this -not- get applied to outside work from forks.

It should raise an exception that causes a person to have to deal with the matter. I should not be surprised if I were to find that this is actually in fact so and the extra step is responding to a prompt which people got used to not reading.

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

#557

Post by ViViDboarder »

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.

> Someone decided that using a piece of software to automatically alter license files.

That doesn’t seem to be the purpose of the bot. It’s supposed to add them to new repos, not alter existing. This ensures that all their projects have an explicit license rather than ambiguously public.

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

#558

Post by wtetzner »

halayli wrote: post #292
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 am finding it hard to accept that it is an honest mistake. From my personal experience, every software engineer that works in a company of this scale is obligated to take a training course on software licensing and understand the differences, and the "dos and don'ts". If Microsoft doesn't have such a program in place then that's a big problem and should expect harsh criticisms when such events take place and if the…

It was a bug in a bot, not someone deliberately changing the license.

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

#559

Post by lazyasciiart »

J0BC6xEIDNi4 wrote: post #490
tptacek wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have anything well-considered to say about an event on HN, the best thing to do is not to say anything at all. Believe it or not, your personal distrust of a giant company isn't all that interesting to the rest of HN.

I think what he has to say is well-considered, and interesting. Meanwhile, the fact that you consider yourself qualified to speak for "the rest of HN" is... deeply fascinating.

I’m sure you meant to qualify that statement to say it is deeply interesting to you, rather than imply that your assessment of the interestingness is somehow objective or represents what other people think.

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

#560

Post by michaelmrose »

dpark wrote: post #495
wise_young_man wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple solution prior to writing to a file in this case is to check if it already exists. It shouldn’t matter what triggers this bot if it’s programmed safe and idempotent.

So your simple solution is to not have the bug. Wish I’d thought of this for all the bugs I’ve ever shipped. Disclosure: Microsoft employee who sometimes writes bugs.

The world is full of important people performing vital tasks either without fail or wherein failures can be caught by other individuals and processes that serve as guard rails.

The solution isn't merely to be perfect it is to have a process that is tolerant of the level of imperfection that one would expect. For example it is perfectly reasonable that a someone could have foreseen it not clobbering a license file without prompting the user this could have brought the matter to immediate attention, its reasonable to suppose that if the first person didn't foresee it someone reviewing their choices might have thought of it, its reasonable that someone might have viewed the commit logs and noticed what was going on.

None of this is an acceptable level of failure from people that drawing a 6 figure salary for a position of expertise or leadership.

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