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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it's probably a mistake, did you try to contact them? https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://twitter.com/OpenAtMicrosoft

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Contacting Microsoft is always a mistake. They don’t want to hear from anyone and their process reflects this.

1) What's your source for that assertion

2) Assuming it's even true, what should this person do instead?

3) What do you think the outcome would be if this person did contact Microsoft? Since it's a mistake, I assume something bad?

> Assuming it's even true, what should this person do instead?

Since this is copyright infringement, the copyright holder could file a DMCA takedown notice.

A 'mistake' they are actually doing since a long time now. Here is the cups equivalent with a license change from apache to mit for the CUPS system.

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/ad69bcc78bdea3fea3f...

Why the scare quotes around mistake? Are you implying that it's intentional? Or negligence? It seems like nobody noticed the CUPS license change until now, so it's irrelevant, right?

How is it not intentional? To me it seems very clear that someone designed this bot to specifically alter the LICENSE file so that it matches some sort of predefind Microsoft file.

Edit: To give a bit more nuance, I would guess that the actual bot changing the LICENSE files is not a mistake, but working as intended. What could, however, be a mistake is thinking that licenses can be legally overwritten. It wouldn't be a "rogue engineer" kind of mistake. Certainly several people at Microsoft have signed off on this.

Because a bot like this could never used on internal libraries that are about to be open sourced?

I'm sure it could be used, however that would probably be a similar problem. Microsoft has internal libraries with all sorts of licenses. Replacing the actual licenses with a template wouldn't be the correct move there either.

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/8100595a3a3a6d5c7d0...

That's not a bot.

Because it was done intentionally by an employed individual in this case rather than a bot. You cannot in good conscious as an individual make this "mistake" without knowing or acting maliciously unless you are incompetent to begin with. Seems like a growing trend at MS. And I'll remind you that Apple actually uses CUPS for their print backend and funds it directly, they retain the original license and support the project, meanwhile MS takes it, doesn't contribute and acts like it's their own, sick.

https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/8100595a3a3a6d5c7d0...

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