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- Hacker News
- 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.
by RossBencina - I'd like to know how many imposters work in big tech.by de6u99er
- 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.by bilekas
- When you say "don't be evil"; just where is your threshold Google?by pmkary
- They removed that years ago.by cortesoft
- Not around since 2015, and desperately needed since around 2018-2019 with those military contracts and silos.by dietr1ch
- Is it even possible to steal this code? How much of it is uncopyrightable LLM output?by camgunz
- https://github.com/google/artemis/commit/371aa6df56880643da5...
They're trying to cover it up now
by harshavamsi - And if they had instead chosen to remain silent on the origin of the code, how would you have characterized their actions then?by lunchbucket
- 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).
by rkagerer - 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.by jimrandomh
- I do not believe in IP.
Credit should be assigned tho.
by mam2 - Here's the force pushed pyproject.toml with the new author if anyone cares:
https://github.com/google/artemis/compare/14e02c4c27bc5b3c0d...
Seems legit+ authors = [ + { name = "somew1nd", email = "[REDACTED]@outlook.com" }, + ]by RossBencina - 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.)
by neilv - 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. :(
by justinclift - > 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?
by dataflow - This !by gr71
- 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?
- 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.
by eadwu - 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.
by jacquesm