Microsoft Acknowledges Theft of Code From Plurk 215
Posted
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.
Dealing with the Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
I've said it several times before, and I'll say it again: dealing with Chinese vendors sucks. You never know if the code is original or not.
At this point, when I run into Chinese code when working with whatever client, I assume it's been copied from somewhere. Often I recognise it as such (Busybox, various http servers, etc.) When confronted, they either deny it, or simply wonder what the problem is - it's "freeware", after all, particularly after stripping off that pesky GPL at the top of each file.
It's not theft... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's just "extreme outsourcing."
Can't beat the price, eh?
kdawson on Google News (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:a world without copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
This case gives us a great window into what a world without copyright protection would look like: everyone ripping off everyone else's code. There got to be a compromise that works for both the GPL and the RIAA, so end users (us) win.
The compromise is to require completely open source code from all software vendors. People will go to the place that has the best results for them, and 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.
It would be like books now - there's copyright on them thar books and if you copy it and sell it under a different book title, it's plainly obvious.
Closed source is a way for a company to hide their dubious practices. It's when shit is closed source like what microsoft normally does that it takes a lot of effort to tell if they're standing on the backs of the hardworking goliath that is open source developers.
Re:a world without copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
The analogy fails in several ways.
First: Your house usually contains private stuff. Going to someone's house is more like breaking into his computer.
Second: If you take something away, it's not there any more.
And the argument that some people do something for a living doesn't tell you anything about if that should be legal. In the times of slavery, some people were trading slaves for a living. Professional killers kill for a living. By your logic, slavery and killing should be legal.
Re:Dealing with the Chinese (Score:4, Interesting)