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Comment by harshavamsi | Hacker News Reader

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

They're trying to cover it up now

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.

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".

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