Hacker News Reader

Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Not just forked. Microsoft stole the code without attribution, violating the license terms. Truly shameful behavior. Best case, it was a single engineer who was tasked with duplicating the functionality, but chose the lazier, fraudulent route and was even too lazy to clean things up entirely. Still, MS should own up, correct the record, and make this right.

View on HN

    “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

― Bill Gates

Copied, not stole. It's unfortunate that the two are so often conflated.

Leaving off the attribution makes it stolen. They stole credit for the code, in violation of its license.

No it doesn't. It makes it copied without authorization. Stolen means the original owner does not have access which is not the case[0]. This idea that copying is theft was propaganda invented by the MPA[1], and we ought to stop parroting it, even when it's Microsoft doing the unauthorized copying.

[0] https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car

Plagiarism is theft because it does take something away from the original author (attribution). Plagiarism and piracy are different concepts. Making a copy and forking the code is not what they did wrong, that part was authorized. Deleting the author's name and pretending it was their original work is the issue.

The idea that piracy is theft was not invented by the MPAA. I arrived at that conclusion myself, and indeed most people I've interacted with find it to be pretty reasonable. It's only ever been a minority of giga-nerds who try to claim that "stealing" cannot cover situations involving a non-scarce resource.

Does it not need to be in each file for it to properly propagate to another source?

Stole.

When you download a movie from torrents, you don't submit it for an Oscar nomination claiming you've made it. You just copy a file to your computer intending to kill a few hours of your time while playing it back.

Microsoft®™, however, not only copied the code, but claimed it's theirs.

Copied.

Claiming the code as authored by themselves did not leave the original author without their code. This would not be true had they stolen it.

The term "research theft" is widely accepted in academia:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/8356...

The original researchers still have their ideas and work, it was "just" copied. Still, we call it stealing and theft.

In this case, code was taken and the credit was stolen.

Do you own the word?

  2 (transitive, of ideas, words, music, a look, credit, etc.) To appropriate without giving credit or acknowledgement.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/steal#Verb

Reply on news.ycombinator.com