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Comment by CyberShadow | Hacker News Reader

The account which did the change has this description:

> This is the open source management service account used for performing key GitHub operations on behalf of Microsoft employees and users.

Combined with the nonsense README change, this looks like a bot mis-use accident.

Edit: to clarify, in no way am I saying that this is a "honest mistake" which does not deserve scrutiny.

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I would't call a honest mistake some bot that is created to change code to a MS license. First of all, this kind of thing needs to be done after careful review, if they're doing it in an automated fashion there is almost the certainty that they'll take somebody else's work as their own.

Which is fine, and surely an honest mistake. Automation is great, but the way I see it is, how many other projects have been forked and automatically re-licensed, and then profited from without proper attribution? An accident still needs to be flagged, and still needs to be corrected. They also need to be learned from and avoided in the future.

Attribution is nice, but for it to be a requirement, it needs to either be specified in the license or be plain old copyright.

The license clearly states

> Permission is hereby granted [...] subject to the following conditions:

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

Changing the name in the copyright is a clear license violation.

Yes, I agree.

> An accident still needs to be flagged, and still needs to be corrected.

Yes. Additionally, the way such actions are performed is not great because the mechanism used does not provide any way to provide feedback - if the change was done by a user account, then they would have received notifications about the comments posted under the commit, but the ones received by the service account probably go nowhere.

Ok, but this is still illegal, right?

Since MIT has this line:

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

MS would be in the wrong to redistribute this code without the notice that includes '(c) 2020 LesnyRumcajs' - however, just changing the line doesn't constitute copyright infringement or fraud if MS reverses the change and/or simply appends the original MIT license above their MIT license (since MS does indeed have '5 commits ahead' of the origin repo, all of those changes are copyright MS but still MIT licensed). They could even simply have a file called 'LICENSE2' with the original notice, if they can't easily exclude this repo from the bot.

The "5 commits ahead" are literally only replacing the license and the readmes.

So the only part of the repo that is legitimately copyrighted by Microsoft is the Microsoft copyright notice? I love how meta this is.

I see. Thank you for the explanation.

Given that this change was committed to the main branch, if I download the code right now, haven't Microsoft redistributed it?

Things get philosophical rather quickly I'm afraid. If I misconfigure an FTP server, and you download some MIT code that I stripped the copyrights from, does that count as redistribution?

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No. If you hack into my company and siphon out an EXE for an internal tool that uses GPL licensed code, you are not entitled to the source code of the package because the company did not “distribute” it to you; you took it without any right to have it.

There’s a whole philosophical debate we can have where we quibble over the definitions of words as they deal with technology, but the (US) courts generally don’t care about technicalities. An analogy is stolen property. If you purchase something that is stolen property, you have (almost) no legal right to it; the courts will often order its seizure for return to the original owner. By “hacking” (according to the CFAA), you “stole” the EXE.

I would say that it isnt, because you had no intent to redistribute it.

But you cant make that argument here, as its a public repo, as such Microsoft did have the intent to redistribute.

But wouldn't this case fall under the same?

Your argument is that a misconfigured FTP server isn't intent to distribute.

What if this was a misconfigured fork that was meant to be private but was set public? Not intent to distribute either.

Those two things are far more similar to each other than to a public repo whose intent is to redistribute. So no, this case is not the same as either a misconfigured FTP server or a misconfigured repo.

Yes, it counts as distribution. Why you would even stripped copyrights form?

Yes, people make mistakes. Sometimes, mistakes turn out to be illegal.

But if you're one of the largest corporations in USA, the law tends to go easy on you for making accidental mistakes.

This is very obviously a mistake and I don’t know how can anyone assume otherwise.

Because “Microsoft Bad”. When a company gets big enough, there will always be a portion of the population you can never please, and Microsoft reached that size a long time ago.

It's got nothing to do with their size but the 40 years (thus far) of doing aggressively bad shit.

Microsoft has a long and dark history. I think you’re brushing aside the real contention.

People who were around before MS decided to open-source-wash their brand KNOW what Microsoft’s DNA is. They had a literal playbook to crush Linux.

From twenty year ago. You say it’s in their DNA, but I’ll bet that the majority of people there now were not there 20 years ago. Old habits die hard, yes, but they do die.

Microsoft has committed to open source. Maybe it’s self fulfilling reasons, but that doesn’t mean we should brush it off. If some higher up decided to go open source for PR reasons, who cares? We should be embracing it. Shunning it will just make other companies think twice about open sourcing.

Also, this was done by a bot. Microsoft is big enough to have their own in-house council, and I can’t imagine them being stupid enough to risk everything over a copyright lawsuit with evidence like this that the whole world can see.

> Microsoft has committed to open source.

They may have "committed" to open source (I think "committed" may be the wrong word there), but they never stopped hating free software.

Microsoft might have committed to open source for business reasons, to an extent ( see the recent .NET debacles), but they're still the same monopolist-abusing and anti-competitive company ( see the recent Edge debacles). They're an inherently bad and evil company, and even though they seemed to be improving, they've gone back to old tactics rather quickly.

“ Microsoft has a long and dark history.”

The KKK has a long and dark history. MS is a business that at times has had slightly sharper business practices than some of its competition.

Crushing linux is one thing.

PUBLICLY changing Copyright notice in MIT software and keeping the history online is another thing.

Because it's a very stupid mistake. I have a hard time believing someone developed a bot to deal with repo normalisation on GitHub that doesn't know how GitHub functions, what forks are, and that you can't just change the LICENSE with a file of your own. I don't necessarily think it was done on purpose to steal copyrighted content ( that'd be too stupid even for Microsoft), but it's a weird mistake to make.

No judgment from me since I suspect it is also an accident and I’ve made enough in my life that I don’t get super judgy in most cases. But what purpose is there for a bot that forks and makes changes like adding template files? Copyright aside, I don’t understand the value of this bot.

If I were to guess, it would be that the action performed here (or the basis of the code implementing this action) was intended to be done on internal Microsoft repositories that should be open-sourced.

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