Instead of collaborating or supporting me, Google stole my idea
github.com
github.com
This is so close to being the amazing story we all want to hear about.
A veteran, suffering from PTSD, falls on hard times and ends up homeless. Despite his hard situation, he strives to help those who are even worse off. He learns how to program and uses these skills to build something to improve the lives of those are severely disadvantaged. He spends years working on this project and ends up building something really cool and useful.
So useful in fact that his dedication pays off and one of the biggest software companies in the world is inspired and brings him on to scale up this technology to help improve the lives of millions.
Except of course that doesn't end up happening. Instead, we're left reminded that life can be cruel.
We can be more specific here. "Some people can be cruel".
(Of course, I'm talking about the one who took all the notes from Oz then instead of giving him the credits ghosted him completely and later co-authored the blog post announcing the "inspired" project. https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-project-gameface)
- Copied iOS and created Android
- Worked with Sonos then stole from Sonos; Sonos 10 years later wins a victory in court https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23739273/google-sonos-sma...
- To inviting a MIT student out for an interview who demoed her tech & they patented it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
To many other examples ... it's not the employees it's the company!
Android existed since before the iPhone was even announced. Google did buy the company making it to compete with iOS though. (or maybe sybian/windows phone. depending on who you want to believe)
How much you want to bet :)
Only thing I can think of is for people to think thoroughly the license they set. BSD in this case, 4 years ago. And to not take any contributions unless they sign a CLA so the license can be changed in the future.
As for my own point of view, I screen apps/libraries that are not MIT/BSD/Apache2 and I may want to link statically to or sell services for and try to sponsor on Github projects I rely heavily on.
[1] https://github.com/ozramos/handsfree/blob/master/LICENSE
I found that deeplearning.ai and GoogleX in edX had some MOOCs where the person who is facing the allegation was an instructor.
After some minutes, I found the person to be average, and not really up to my expectations as an instructor in AI. The rigor of those MOOCs were quite low, too.
Digging up, I found that he was an "AI Advocate" at Google, which is just devrel. He is not a full-fledged developer or a scientist or research engineer.
Of course, I didn't finish or purchase those MOOCs.
As for Oz, what an incredible story.
As well I met them and it wasn't a pleasant experience. It was a decade ago around the same time Sonos met with them and they did similar to Sonos. Though Sonos recently won their case against them https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22871121/sonos-google-pate....
Ouch. That one hurt. Google is looking worse every day. Is it going to be "the Yahoo of tomorrow?"
I've talked about my experience (click thru my 1st link above ...my comment is the top of that thread as I met with that same R&D team, Google ATAP the MIT student did and Im betting so did Sonos who actually worked with Google) to warn those if and when Google comes knocking demand money deposited in your bank before taking a meeting! Blow their stardust back in their face and demand money!
1) why would Google steal this instead of bringing Oz onto the team, which assumes he wanted to work for Google)
2) what can we as a community do to support Oz .
Oz, if you're reading this, you're obviously a very capable person, how do you think we can support you. Not just in relation to MidiBlocks, but beyond. That is just one project, I'm sure you've got more in you, if you want to pursue other things.
The reason the failure to invert a binary tree story was notable was because the dude invented Homebrew. He was supposed to enter though the back door, but someone screwed up and made him go through the regular mechanism.
I think it's funny that you listed people who develop game engines, programming languages, and write algorithm and data structures textbooks.
Literally the people who could do the LeetCode algorithms and data structures problems in their sleep because it's actually relevant for their job.
Why disrespect what’s been achieved here?
In a previous life on a job site, the term was called measuring dicks but I digress.
"Google" is only going to care if it affects Legal or PR. If you want Google to care, this is going to need a lot more exposure. It will also be really bad for the people at Google responsible for this situation if this gets too much attention.
We supported Oz in the ways that we could.
Google's Legal department can definitely resolve this problem.
"I’m out on vacation right now, and will respond when I get back. But these allegations are completely untrue, and massively distressing to me, and to others."
https://twitter.com/lmoroney/status/1702695501542597080
How convenient he's on vacation right now. Why didn't he respond sooner if it's all untrue?
(Also why am I not surprised to see this guy paid for a blue check...)
It is the truth that it was, and continues to be, massively distressing to me to be falsely accused like this.
It is the truth that I paid (out of my own pocket) for a blue check, because in the new Twitter that gets me 10x engagement, and I've always used my platform to enable and lift up others. That's what makes these accusations, and the follow-on abuse and attacks over email and otherwise so distressing.
I'm standing by those truths.
Can you sue someone for "stealing your idea"? Unfortunately this is the world we live in. Only thing I can think of is that people vote into power parties who are willing to check the power of big corporations:
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2023/09/biden-doj...
The Google guy should be ashamed of himself, apologize, and try to remedy the injustice he perpetrated - get Oz a job, and/or credit him in their work.
Should be but is not, that's the problem. He's probably happy about a pay-raise.
The problem is that Google has the monopoly. No use trying to boycott a monopoly.
The only remedy is anti-monopoly and related legislation. And for that we need to elect (into power) politicians that are willing to enact such legislation.
If anything I'm ashamed of the sheer volume of personal time, money, and effort I put into helping build and enable community, only for accusations like this to lead people to believe all kind of false things about me to the extent that they'll write me horrifying emails, and speculate on Ycombinator about my motives!
It's a huge advertising company trying to make more money, not a scrappy search tech startup in a garage...
It doesn't matter if it's made of people or ants.
Public shaming can work pretty well too, sometimes.
Just because it is not illegal does not mean you want your employees acting this way. Google should at a minimum have in place a program to help these folks start a small company for the purposes of acquiring, with the implied benefit for the employee that it shows their leadership capabilities. Ripping off a disabled veteran should reflect badly on Google and therefore disciplinary actions can be taken.
The fact that it isn't a thing at Google speaks volumes.
It wasn’t just a random repository they came across.
Anyway this is why I GPL everything. At least it ensures that the changes to it remain free.
“Give back to the community” used to be something I admired in the American culture as an European, but I guess most exchanged it for a L6 promo
When Oz approached me, I was already working on what would become Project Gameface, and had a specific technical problem that I was trying to solve. Oz showed me his impressive demo, and we chatted briefly about the problem I was having. Unfortunately Handsfree.js could not solve it, and thus I didn't use Handsfree.js in any capacity.
As I mentioned to Oz when we spoke, I wish him the best with his open source work. Finding new ways to make computing more accessible is an important space that I hope many projects are successful in.
[] https://github.com/lmoroney
ed. not GOOG user, employee, but GH user, you know...
Maybe the B Corps and co-ops stand a chance...
https://github.com/google/project-gameface/pull/31#issuecomm...
More interesting is not having the "This is not an official Google project so not supported" disclaimer so many repos in their org has.
Shady origins, shoddy maintenance, but the incident will be forgotten as is usually the case. The reality is Google still has huge mindshare and respect among engineers and will likely be immune to damage in these situations.
We wanted GameFace to be something that we kickstarted and then donated to the community to run with. That's still the case.
Imoroney what can we do as a community? This project is still in need of a measure of Google support to be handed off to the community. The project needs fostering to develop community lead maintainers.
This project could be useful as a library, not just as a front end. Accessibility must scale to its users needs. For instance, integrating with speech recognition, eye tracking, and other peripherals allows people to have the most interaction with their environment.
I for one would love to work on hooking into gameface with C#, python for integration alongside grammar based speech recognition.
That was always my goal with this -- my team is not in the business of product development. Still, there was (and is) an opportunity to build the basis for an app that the community could either maintain or an entrepreneur could use.
Either way, if it spreads the tech far and wide to help more people like Lance, we all win.
Google has abandoned a ton of projects, and this repo kind of looks abandoned. It’s likely google loses interest in it like they have a deserved reputation.
Google has no obligation to pay anyone other than their employees and vendors.
If Oz doesn’t like what google is doing, he can continue on his own repo right?
How did anything Google did harm this guy in any way?
The Honda "random acts of helpfulness" goes a bit too far to be tasteful to me, because their acts are so random.
But if an individual could use help, and the situation is related to a companies service or product, the business should help, even just for PR, especially if they are selling to consumers, whom are all individuals.