Microsoft Acknowledges Theft of Code From Plurk 215
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by
kdawson
from the least-they-could-do dept.
from the least-they-could-do dept.
adeelarshad82 writes with news that Microsoft has acknowledged and taken responsibility for the theft of code belonging to Plurk.com, although the company also said it was the work of a Chinese vendor. Yesterday we discussed Plurk's blog post accusing Microsoft of copying their UI and code for Microsoft's Chinese microblogging site, Juku. Microsoft has now taken the site down and indefinitely suspended Juku's beta.
Re:Blaming somebody else is not taking responsibil (Score:5, Informative)
"When I was a child there were penalties for breaking rules. Come to think of it, there still are, unless you're a giant corporation it seems."
They've admitted that the code was copied and took down the site. What rule didn't they follow?
Re:a world without copyright (Score:5, Informative)
I think it's a good thing actually. Because it's revealing the problems of subcontracting. What Microsoft is seeing already has happened elsewhere. Just the victim is either too small, or the companies involved are smaller, so that news of stuff like this is lucky to make the news. Only big companies get the attention of the press.
Code gets "reused" all the time, accidentally or maliciously. Just the parties are often too small or settle quickly to be more than a ripple. In fact, I'd guess Microsoft and other companies are looking at the three major code "reuse" issues in recent history - Microsoft and the USB/DVD Downloader Tool, this thing, and the BusyBox thing, to carefully audit their subcontracted code.
Re:I assume heads will roll. (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA, the decision to copy the code was not made by MS itself, but by an independent Chinese contractor that was hired to do the job. I assume that said contractor will now be heavily fined for breaking the contract terms (TFA: "This was in clear violation of the vendor's contract with the MSN China joint venture").
Furthermore, "Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors".
Re:Chinese government will execute the vendor (Score:3, Informative)
PRC, for the most part, has rule of law, and crimes for which you can be executed are explicitly enumerated. While they do use capital punishment for some things that no-one else does (e.g. large-scale fraud which incurs a lot of aggregated damage on the victims), I'm fairly certain that copyright infringement isn't on that list.
Re:Chinese government will execute the vendor (Score:4, Informative)
Re:a world without copyright (Score:4, Informative)
if everything is open source, we don't have to worry about people "stealing" things - it becomes easy for everyone to see if everyone else is using or taking their code, and particularly inspired developers will add to the code.
Spoken like someone who doesn't develop software for a living.
My company (among other things) develops software. The sale of that software pays for our homes, electricity, computers, and the ability to continue developing programs that people need.
Now if someone wants to pay my car payment, house payment, electricity bill, buy a few new computers, etc...then sure--I'll develop and release software for free.
But as long as I need to feed my family, I need to continue earning money. If I can't do that by developing software, I'll go pump gas and you can live without it.
If Microsoft couldn't make money from their software, and Bill had decided to pump gas instead, where would you be today?
Would linux be where it is today?
How about the iPhone?
Re:a world without copyright (Score:3, Informative)
Um, you're talking about two different things. It's one thing to copy a concept, like directories on a file system, but it's quite another to rip off code.
Re:I assume heads will roll. (Score:3, Informative)
While I don't know how this extends to contractors, internally Microsoft has extremely strict regulations about use of open-source (even if not GPL or other copyleft) code. If it were somebody internal to the company, they'd probably be looking for a new job right now.
For a contractor, breach of contract conditions at the very least, and its unlikely they'll get any more MS contracts in the future. This sucks for them - there are a lot of small companies that make much if not all of their income doing contract jobs specifically for MS - but from Microsoft's perspective, those guys are now an object lesson to all the other small software shops out there, of which there's really no lack.