Maybe the engineers did not go through a 12 months process with their legal department and did it wrong.
And with the bad publicity coming back to Microsoft, maybe those engineers will now understand that they should just avoid re-using open source projects when possible. And the next HN post will be about "BigTech reinvents the wheel in order to have control".
We're all nitpicking here: they mentioned the original project in the README. Peerd is quite different from Spegel, it's not just a copy with a small patch.
Sure, they should do it right. But really, a polite, small PR fixing that would probably be a good first step.
You don't need a 12 month process with a legal department to not take code without giving credit. This is not untrodden ground.
> they mentioned the original project in the README
They thank them for their "generous insights". That's not the same thing. If I take chapters unmodified from Harry Potter and thank Rowling for her "generous insight", that's still not okay.
> Peerd is quite different from Spegel, it's not just a copy with a small patch.
Nobody said it was. It does, however, copy functions and other entire blocks of code with comments directly from Spegel without giving attribution. That is wrong. That is plagiarism.
> You don't need a 12 month process with a legal department to not take code without giving credit. This is not untrodden ground.
Well, I have been in big companies where it takes a lot of time for the legal department to check those things. Not because it's fundamentally hard, but because the queue of things they have to do is pretty big.
> They thank them for their "generous insights". That's not the same thing.
Sure, it's wrong. But it's not "purposely stealing without giving any credit at all" either. It feels like an engineer did that, tried to give credit and did it wrong. And now we go on and on saying how this engineer is evil.
It's not that an engineer is evil, it's that this mistake should not be happening in a company like Microsoft. It's professionally incompetent at the very best. No trained and professional programmer should be accidentally plagiarizing code.
And with the bad publicity coming back to Microsoft, maybe those engineers will now understand that they should just avoid re-using open source projects when possible. And the next HN post will be about "BigTech reinvents the wheel in order to have control".
We're all nitpicking here: they mentioned the original project in the README. Peerd is quite different from Spegel, it's not just a copy with a small patch.
Sure, they should do it right. But really, a polite, small PR fixing that would probably be a good first step.