How Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it(threadreaderapp.com) |
How Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it(threadreaderapp.com) |
Out of curiosity, who _would_ the right person to contact at Microsoft be? In my experience public channels exist to isolate the rest of an organization from having to deal with the outside (including complaints about bad behavior).
I wish the author actually substantiated his claims a bit better.
Also, when some random blogger contacts Microsoft and asks Microsoft to do something about something, then Microsoft better stop what they're doing and listen!
Enjoy your Microsoft-hate-train all. yawn
The only instances of lerna being mentioned are people who use or work on rush mentioning differences between the two projects.
Assuming the lerna author is accurate, why just the angry blog post? If I had contacted MS and raised the issue via email, and nothing happened, I would have started raising issues on the project GitHub and making pull requests to rectify the situation. Not only could that actually work to resolve the issue, but the discussion would be public.
a pull request would be the same as an email or blog post at this point. it is just a way to communicate. why is a PR better then what they are doing now?
Only if you ignore pretty much all of Microsoft's history.
Here are the respective codebases as of Christmas Day 2015, 21 days into the lifetime of one and 11 days into the lifetime of the other. They do not appear to match that description.
* https://github.com/lerna/lerna/tree/9aabe1664399d5f233a89d37...
* https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/tree/c4bb2127e6...
Obviously the license was broken by removing the copyright notice of the original author, but it also doesn't sound like the author really did anything to try and handle the issue properly so now they are posting a rant.
Here is the extent of what the author did, "So I reached out to people I knew at Microsoft. This was probably a year ago now. They were shocked and apologized. But since then nothing has happened."
We don't know who those people are, what they're roles are, but I suspect they are not involved with the Rush project nor is it their job to handle potential copyright violations for all of Microsoft.
The author could have posted an issue to the repo expressing their concern. If this was ignored then they could issue a DMCA takedown notice through GitHub. If this was not successful then the author could contact Microsoft legal or file a lawsuit.
So, nothing was stolen and if the story is true, the only infraction here would be that the Lerna copyright line was not included in the Rush license.
My comment isn't about trust, it's about what the actual infraction was. Microsoft is made up of 35,000 people. There's no way I trust all of them. Of what company do you actually have trust in every employee?
What part of my comment are you disagreeing with??
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Have we not learned our lessons yet, by boiling, basically, the entirety of the internet down to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? (And maybe Amazon.) The trend in the US capitalistic system towards monopoly is inescapable, and harmful in so many ways.
The grandparent poster is correct -- copyright infringement is not theft and the two ought not be conflated. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft explains why: "Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vo...). The supporters of repressive copyright are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.".
The GNU Project also recommends pointing people who misuse the word "theft" in this way to https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/04/harper-lee-kil... -- "which shows what can properly be described as 'copyright theft.'".
Please don't join people in getting this wrong. Even some of the most hostile abusers of that conflation have recanted (the MPAA was denied use of that conflation per https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-banned-from-using-piracy-and-t... and the MPAA's Chris Dodd admitted that conflation was wrong according to https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-piracy-is-not-theft-after-all-...).
The copyright holder in this case has options including suing, but calling what happened as "theft" is not an option and is unlikely to get anywhere with a judge.
“Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft. For instance, the United States Supreme Court held in Dowling v. United States (1985) that bootleg phonorecords did not constitute stolen property. ” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#"Theft"
The original BSD license did have a credit clause which led to considerable trouble and controversy, so they don't do that any more. IANAL, and this is extremely bad manners on someone's part, but no laws were broken.
That's the copyright notice. The license text is "this permission notice". So no, you can not leave the original author name off.
The BSD license differs in that it requires the resulting software to display the credits, not just the source code to contain it. (Which is why e.g. phones or cars have somewhere deep in the menus a point where they show license information, to fulfill the BSD requirement)