Google stole open source code without crediting the authors (Artemis/Minitap) | Hacker News Reader

Google stole open source code without crediting the authors (Artemis/Minitap)

minitap.ai

180 pointsMysteryPancake34 comments

> The author history was harder to understand. An earlier package file listed Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, and Nicolas Dehandschoewercker. The version that replaced it removed all three names and substituted another author. The only change to the files was the author list. GitHub’s activity record shows that the replacement happened through a force push in August, before our investigation this September.

Wow, this looks pretty damning. I can't imagine Google seeing this as worth the risks. Is an innocent explanation possible here?

This !

If there is an innocent explanation, I'd love to hear it, because it kind of reads like the force push was done to move the commit with the attribution change out of the public eye so it wasnt clear what they had done.

Maybe it is possible the google engineer didn't understand how open source licenses work, or didn't care since maybe it was supposed to be an internal project first that eventually ended up open sourced?

Given the replacement author and email seem like a random person rather than an employee, I wonder if whomever did this thought they had found the "real" author and that somehow the others were incorrect? It's confusing, I don't know.

For over a decade at least, Google has been a hostile entity hoarding trillion dollar's worth of wealth at the expense of everyone else's freedom and well-being. We don't need to embolden them any further by hunting for excuses.

Not Google or related to any of the projects.

This is normal (specific to pyproject.toml overwriting authors). I am not sure about pyproject.toml conventions but I would have done the same. This is the equivalent of telling you who the maintainers of the project are.

Usually what you see in the code is the retention of Copyright statements on source code and LICENSE with some reference on README.

The point is that the plagiarism is evident and they took steps to hide it, not that the authors should have been left as is.

The lack of any attribution at all is the ultimate issue like you point out, but the force push demonstrates intent over honest mistake in my opinion.

You can just add a line to clarify. You can't just wipe out other people's names.

I think that in case of large multinationals you don't need to search for innocent explanations, as a rule they are perfectly aware of what they're doing and that you are in no position to make them pay for it.

Might makes right, and these companies have more power than a whole raft of nation states. They act with complete assurance that absolutely nothing will come of it.

This kind of thing is almost always a result of the performance culture. There are a lot of promo oriented people in big tech who just want money and have no ethics (or engineering competency usually), sadly. These people have no issue at all plagiarising or stealing credit to get themselves more money and success. And it works.

Looks like the GitHub repo added some minimal attribution a few days ago: https://github.com/google/artemis/commit/371aa6df56880643da5...

They've also closed the reporting issue, and pro-actively locked it without any kind of explanation or apology: https://github.com/google/artemis/issues/40#issuecomment-568...

That they didn't even bother to apologise or explain their actions seems pretty shitty. :(

Regardless of whether or not Google is liable, what would be interesting to me is how this happened, the role(s) at Google that were involved, when each knew of the problem, and what each did.

(I'm interested in what this says about current culture.)

Here's the force pushed pyproject.toml with the new author if anyone cares:

https://github.com/google/artemis/compare/14e02c4c27bc5b3c0d...

    + authors = [
    +     { name = "somew1nd", email = "[REDACTED]@outlook.com" },
    + ]

Seems legit

The MO is so recognizable so I digged around.

This maintainer <https://github.com/somew1nd> is shady as hell.

It looks like the profile is a recent Chinese graduate, who have been working on a "challenge cup" <https://www.tiaozhanbei.net> robot project not very long ago.

Personally, I know that lot to appropriate stuff for themselves without blinking an eye. Believe me when I say I know.

Also, the OP seem to have been heavily downvoted, which I believe have been fudged.

Reporting this twit to his manager may be the right way to go.

Look here

https://github.com/OpenMind/OM1/pull/2517

Is it even possible to steal this code? How much of it is uncopyrightable LLM output?

I do not believe in IP.

Credit should be assigned tho.

https://github.com/google/artemis/commit/371aa6df56880643da5...

They're trying to cover it up now

Is that a coverup - eg. are they retroactively rewriting old comments - or are they simply jumping on this and trying to correct the problem?

(Although I would say it isn't a very good-faith effort to address the issue if they don't put back the author attributions they removed).

They've so far ignored the ticket https://github.com/google/artemis/issues/40 to potentially avoid the Streisand Effect (drawing attention to it), yet started work fixing it.

That reads like a coverup as open discourse would have admitted a mea culpa and apology.

I predict they will close the issue without discussion, citing this PR as the fix, potentially associating the fix with a less guilty looking duplicate ticket.

I'd like to be wrong but this is what other commercial projects do when they are called out on a shady practice.

Yeah, they closed and locked that issue about an hour ago. :(

And if they had instead chosen to remain silent on the origin of the code, how would you have characterized their actions then?

They only did it because minitap called them out? It's in the post.

They were in clear violation of Apache 2.0

Obviously, and they deserve no credit for the bare minimum. But if you imagine them doing the opposite and not taking any steps to rectify the error, that would clearly be closer to a "coverup".

That's not "trying to cover it up", that's a link to them adding credits that were missing, which is the main corrective action to get into compliance with the source project's license.

> We opened Google’s Artemis repository and recognised code we had written for mobile-use. Then we found our names in its history—and the change that removed them.

Did you read the post? They originally removed all traces of minitap and its contributors, and only added it back when they were called out.

Hahaha adding credit… after that credit had already existed, then been removed and the history of its removal spirited away?

Yeah, they’re totally being forthright. /s

For the amount of money Google’s engineers are paid, I expect you guys to be able to tell your manager when you’ve used OSS code, since you already have a proven worth to the software engineering ecosystem as a whole… that’s why you’re a googler. If you’re too afraid to make sure attribution is properly documented, perhaps due to your only engineering knowledge centering around basic understanding of VCSs, then perhaps you’re not yet ready for the high-stakes lifestyle of a Fortune 50 Engineer.

When you say "don't be evil"; just where is your threshold Google?

They removed that years ago.

Not around since 2015, and desperately needed since around 2018-2019 with those military contracts and silos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

> Not around since 2015

> "but retained it in the last sentence"

Well I am shocked, who would have thought, an advertising company who prides themselves on not being evil, used code that wasn't credited. I mean, if that's the case, we better start a revolution.

I'd like to know how many imposters work in big tech.

Flagging because the title here on HN is editorializing. The actual page title is "I expected better from Google"

I was going to comment on the title's perpetuation of big IPs stealing/theft meme but it turns out that TFA did not use those words.

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