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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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?

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.

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.

This !

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