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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

What happened here was obviously a mistake. The thread is full of lurid accusations, because those are fun to write and talk about, but it shouldn't take even a minute's thought to see how dumb a heist this would have been.

The thread would have been a lot more fun if we could have spent it talking about what prompted your team to build this thingy, and bounce other people's approaches to the same problem off, and maybe share some war stories about dumb things bots have done on our behalf.

Thanks, regardless, for the information you've provided here. It's interesting.

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> The thread is full of lurid accusations, because those are fun to write and talk about, but it shouldn't take even a minute's thought to see how dumb a heist this would have been.

Another good reminder that Hacker News is not above assuming the worst and gathering pitchfork mobs like any other social media.

The issue looked like a mistake from the start to anyone paying attention (committed by a bot, changes were consistent with a boilerplate LICENSE file being checked in).

If someone at Microsoft wanted to steal some code, forking it on Github and then publicly documenting the history of the code in the most visible way possible would truly be the dumbest way to do it.

Especially here, when the smoking gun is a change to an MIT licensed project. One of the torch-holding commenters remarked that developers at Microsoft ought to know enough about how licenses work to know what a big deal this was. Physician, heal thyself.

It's not just bots, it's real people: https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/8100595a3a3a6d5c7d0...

How is this commit in May related to the current thread? Your post doesn't contain enough information for me to understand your meaning.

Apparently that's a commit made by a human re-assigning copyright of a forked FOSS project [0] to MSFT, presumably without attribution [1]

[0] https://openprinting.github.io/cups

[1] MSFT moved attribution to NOTICE file, which is cleaner, but trips people who aren't paying attention: https://github.com/microsoft/cups/blob/main/NOTICE

> Another good reminder that Hacker News is not above assuming the worst and gathering pitchfork mobs like any other social media.

I would go so far as to say almost no group is, they just have different preconceptions that encourage assumptions of malice in different ways and directions.

There is no substitute for more facts about the situation, no matter how much we'd like to assume the details that aren't given.

It doesn't matter how "dumb a heist this would have been". This is Microsoft and their track record with respect to illicit and/or illegitimate behavior needs to be continually scrutinized. They put themselves in this position. They have made plenty of intentionally dishonest "mistakes" over the years.

Track records matter and Microsoft doesn't have a clean one. Scrutiny of companies of their size should be the norm. Maybe they would do more to improve "mistakes" if more people held them accountable in a continuous fashion.

"Scrutiny" doesn't mean making up nonsense issues, which is what this is. There's no amount of weasel words you're going to apply that's going to make changing an MIT license in a public git repository part of a terrifying conspiracy --- or a conspiracy of any sort.

Removing and applying an incorrect license to open source software by a multi-national software giant is a "nonsense issue"?

Hardly "weasel words" when you look at the action that took place. It wouldn't be OK for you to do it and it isn't OK for a bot that Microsoft deployed incorrectly to do either.

How much of the operation of the MIT license do you want explained to you? I’m happy to do it but don’t want to patronize you either.

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

I understand the license. Based on your response and Microsoft's attribution change I don't think you understand the argument. I won't patronize you however based on the non-response.

No, do go ahead, because I don't understand really any of the dudgeon being worked up in this thread, given the original license gave Microsoft the right to do virtually anything it wanted to with the software already. Obviously, Microsoft shouldn't take credit for other people's work; equally obviously, to me at least, that's not what they were trying to do, since all it took was a single Github link to show what had happened.

So, yes, nonsense issue. What am I missing?

> The thread would have been a lot more fun

The Microsoft STL issues are usually quite fun and entertaining, at least if you don't have to use it: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/1603

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