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Comment by personamb | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about what it's like to hire an independent contractor (i.e. how much oversight and control is typically practiced), but is it really possible that Microsoft wouldn't have noticed how blatant the ripoff was before pushing the site live?

To me, the "independent contractor" excuse is pretty lame, and seems pretty common (the fusiongarage guy's ripped-off article uses the same excuse, just off the top of my head). If you hired them to do a job under your name, then it's your responsibility to make sure that job meets your standards before publishing it under your brand.

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This happened to Microsoft recently with their Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool: http://wudt.codeplex.com/ . They (apparently via a 3rd party development house) used GPL code from the ImageMaster project without releasing any of their sources. MS did the right thing in the end and released the code, but like you say, it shouldn’t happen in the first place. You should hold contractors to the same level of code quality that you’d expect from your employees.

"You should hold contractors to the same level of code quality that you’d expect from your employees."

Copyright violation is orthogonal to code quality. The protections against this kind of behavior are usually legal, not procedural.

> but is it really possible that Microsoft wouldn't have noticed how blatant the ripoff was before pushing the site live?

It's pretty likely actually. Doubtful a random person in ops knew what code was being pushed out (assuming that MS pushed it out).

So, they don't do proper competitive analysis. I doubt it.

For IP reasons, developers are prohibited from directly using competitive products.

All market comparisons and analysis are done by third parties (at least a separate marketing organization and often paid external consultants) to avoid any chance of taint.

We can all see how well this prohibition worked...

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