Yet another Hacker News

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

88 points MysteryPancake 1 hour ago 17 comments

pmkary 39 minutes ago | parent

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

cortesoft 38 minutes ago | parent

They removed that years ago.

dietr1ch 32 minutes ago | parent

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 36 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

gr71 12 minutes ago | parent

This !

VoidWhisperer 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

eadwu 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

harshavamsi 28 minutes ago | parent

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

They're trying to cover it up now

rkagerer 24 minutes ago | parent

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).

lunchbucket 14 minutes ago | parent

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

m00x 4 minutes ago | parent

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

They were in clear violation of Apache 2.0

jimrandomh 14 minutes ago | parent

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 6 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

de6u99er 27 minutes ago | parent

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

bilekas 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

RossBencina 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

neilv 5 minutes ago | parent

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.