How Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it

Hey – I’m Martin Woodward from Microsoft. I have talked to Jamie and are investigating his concerns and will come back to this thread with any findings. An initial review hasn’t indicated we’d previously heard about this issue. We’ve also reached out to the original copyright owner to ensure we’re taking all the needed steps. If anyone has concerns or spots an issue where a project is missing correct and full attribution then please log it as an issue with the project or contact opensource@microsoft.com and we’ll be sure to take action right away. We have over 1,800 repos in the Microsoft org and thousands of Microsoft engineers contributing to open source. We try really hard to get it right, and we take this very seriously.

What happened was truly awful, but I don't think it's fair to blame MSFT when probably what happened was a few employees trying to take all credit for code they didn't write. From the thread it seems that he did not reach out to MSFT via any official channels and only informed "people he knew at MSFT".

There isn&#x27;t a single link to a commit, file or repo that shows the similarities between the two code bases, let alone alleged plagiarism. It is conceivable that they truly are two different projects that happen to be developed around the same time. It&#x27;s not the first time that has happened.<p>I wish the author actually substantiated his claims a bit better.

Based on this description, it sounds like an employee committing plagiarism in order to defraud their boss. Retroactive editing of the commit history is particularly suggestive; it implies someone tried to cover their tracks.

I just dug around in the rush GitHub, and was surprised to find no pull requests by the author of Lerna trying to rectify the missing copyright (&quot;Hey guys, you forgot to keep my copyright in there since this is a fork of Lerna, so here&#x27;s a pull request&quot;), or any issues raised (&quot;The copyright of my MIT-licensed project is missing. What&#x27;s up with that?&quot;).<p>The only instances of lerna being mentioned are people who use or work on rush mentioning differences between the two projects.<p>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.

If true then it’s bad faith use of open source at MSFT and not typical of them. Have you tried contacting Scott Hanselman - @shanselman on Twitter - or anyone else via twitter instead of “normal” channels? One of the great things about the Devs at MSFT is that they are very responsive on twitter. If someone was being a douche with your code then the right people haven’t gotten the message yet.

&gt; <i>Files and directories were named the same things, it had many of the same core functions with code that I distinctly remembered writing.</i><p>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.<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lerna&#x2F;lerna&#x2F;tree&#x2F;9aabe1664399d5f233a89d373fc2101625bf174c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lerna&#x2F;lerna&#x2F;tree&#x2F;9aabe1664399d5f233a89d37...</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;web-build-tools&#x2F;tree&#x2F;c4bb2127e67522c69a19f7cd8cd90bb6fc663a35" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;web-build-tools&#x2F;tree&#x2F;c4bb2127e6...</a>

I will start by saying I&#x27;m not giving Microsoft or the &quot;Rush author&quot; a pass on this.<p>Obviously the license was broken by removing the copyright notice of the original author, but it also doesn&#x27;t sound like the author really did anything to try and handle the issue properly so now they are posting a rant.<p>Here is the extent of what the author did, &quot;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.&quot;<p>We don&#x27;t know who those people are, what they&#x27;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.<p>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.

Lerna was released with an MIT license as was Rush.<p>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.

&quot;The consolidation of our infrastructure is dangerous.&quot;<p>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 developer’s twitter pic is distracting. He has a point but I have a hard time taking him seriously. That’s just me being an old man i guess.