Hacker News

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

94 points by MysteryPancake 2 hours ago | 21 comments

dataflow 2 hours ago

> 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?

VoidWhisperer 37 minutes ago

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?

eadwu 36 minutes ago

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.

gr71 41 minutes ago

This !

harshavamsi 57 minutes ago

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

They're trying to cover it up now

jimrandomh 42 minutes ago

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.

m00x 35 minutes ago

> 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.

topato 6 minutes ago

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.

rkagerer 52 minutes ago

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).

SillyUsername 20 minutes ago

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.

lunchbucket 43 minutes ago

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

m00x 33 minutes ago

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

They were in clear violation of Apache 2.0

RossBencina 26 minutes ago

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

neilv 34 minutes ago

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.)

pmkary 2 hours ago

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

dietr1ch 2 hours 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

dataflow 8 minutes ago

> Not around since 2015

> "but retained it in the last sentence"

cortesoft 2 hours ago

They removed that years ago.

bilekas 45 minutes ago

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.

de6u99er 56 minutes ago

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

RossBencina 38 minutes ago

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.