There's a lot of blame being assigned to Microsoft, the entire corporation. But I doubt this was a heavily contemplated decision by a room full of executives, or voted on by the shareholders.
More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment. They can steal users from the original project and justify using Microsoft's resources to maintain it, which puts more resources under their control, and gives them something to talk about during performance reviews.
The open source community should have a way to enforce professional consequences on individuals in situations like this. They are motivated by professional gains after all. That's the only way this will stop happening. Professional consequences does not mean doxxing or other personal attacks, it means losing career opportunities, losing contributor privileges, and becoming known as untrustworthy. These consequences have to be greater than the expected gain from passing a project off as your own at work.
I wonder if a new kind of license could be created which includes projects in some kind of portfolio and violating the license means losing access to the entire portfolio. Similar to how the tech companies added patents to a shared portfolio and patent treachery meant losing access to the portfolio.
Just because the shareholders didn't vote on it, or an exec didn't explicitly say "hey steal this" does not absolve the company. Leadership doesn't get to throw up their hands and say "not my fault" when something bad happens.
It is ultimately the responsibility of the company and its people to create a system where things like this are discouraged or prohibited. Not doing so is tacit approval, especially in this case where they have a significant history of doing the same thing.
It's fine that you think corporations are supposed to work that way, and I don't necessarily disagree. But they don't in practice. They don't feel the consequences of bad actions because of legal economies of scale. They also don't backpropagate consequences from the company's bottom line to the individuals responsible. If you were to rectify this so that it works exactly as you envision, you would have made incredible advances in the Principal-Agent problem as it pertains to corporate compensation.
Most corporate actions that 3rd parties consider "bad" are the result of someone inside the corporation having an asymmetric payoff from directing the corporation to do the bad thing. They get the upside from a success, but not the downside from failure.
If you want to stop a certain bad behavior, your best bet is to change individual incentives.
I think the point being made is that the executives are either responsible for the company, or they're not actually running the company at all.
Like this isn't some tragedy of the commons situation. This isn't some situation where the company is a cooperative confederation of equal partners. Either shit rolls uphill, or you don't have leadership at all. You don't get to pass the buck on criticism because you made a decision out of self interest, either.
"It's not technically illegal," is the most blasé, low-effort rule for behavior. It's why only twelve-year-olds and lawyers use it as a defense for poor behaviors and poor ethics.
Being a POS earns you a reputation for being a POS, and that includes people publicly pointing you out as a POS in public forums.
> or they're not actually running the company at all
Executives are not micro-managing day-to-day implementation decisions of every team, no. They set broad strategic goals, the management layers below them decide how to best operationalize those goals, and the layers below those middle managers make specific implementation decisions to execute those operations.
If you want to think of this as "not actually running the company at all", you're free to. The point is that's how the world works.
Microsoft has north of 100k SWEs working for them, the idea that corporate management could be personally responsible for the decisions of every single one is absurd.
It’s not “CEO must know everything a junior does”, but more of “If a junior messes up doing something for the company, the CEO is finally answerable” - be it to the board, the govt or the public etc.
Rephrasing it - there’s a reason it’s Zuckerberg and Pichai and Tim Cook who go to congress, and not the folks implementing it on the ground level.
This post isn't popular, it has already fallen off the HN frontpage never to be seen again in any context. It did not and will never break into any sort of traditional media.
Not a single Microsoft C-suite exec, or anyone within spitting distance of the C-suite, will ever hear about this. Do not mistake your personal media bubble for the general media ecosystem.
In reality executives are responsible when the company is doing well. When mistakes happen it is either handled by insurance or by firing an employee who was only partially involved.
My observation ( for other such (similiar) war events) is that investigations by the instigators country will lead to very less serious punishments for the instigators and "down playing" of the harm from such events
If you’ve funded Abu Ghraib (by paying the US government) then you’re criminally culpable. And don’t try the Nuremberg Defense on me: “I was just following orders to pay every April 15”
Indeed. Hence "just following orders". Ultimately, I don't believe in this kind of strong culpability but it's clear the people who claim they do don't either and just bring it up when convenient.
Yes, have a moral philosophy which does not lead to total contamination across the interaction graph. It’s okay to pay taxes into the US Government even if some representatives of it act poorly.
But you said "Indirectly is sufficient. You're paying for it to happen.", when I was talking about taxes. What if I have a moral philosophy but my taxes still go to whatever is we are being against? I am indirectly paying for it, but it is coercion, IMO. The "vote for someone else" does not play here, another head of the same dragon.
I was taking that position to illustrate that moral contagion inevitably leads to a declaration of everyone being immoral. Therefore, moral contagion is not a useful differentiator between people.
A flash in the pan about a random fork they have on Github with <100 stars, and no significant public usage, which fails to correctly follow the reproduction requirement of the MIT license will not generate a C-suite response. It won't get outside the local management of the team responsible for the fork. Maybe a few dozen people at MS will ever know about this, and most of those from seeing it on HN; who have zero connection to the responsible team.
It baffles me that HN has no idea how large organizations work. The boss's boss's boss has no idea what random worker bees are doing.
So what's your point? That megacorps shouldn't be accountable for the actions of their employees? That people saying otherwise are clueless and should shut up?
I don't have a point beyond thinking that this is "Microsoft", the corporate entity, making a strategic decision is wrong. This is Aditya, the random software engineer with 5 years of experience making a decision.
How you reckon with that, what you take away from it, is up to you. If you want to hold MS corporate responsible for every decision Aditya and Piotr and Zhong make, you can feel free to, but it won't help you understand how these decisions are made because it's wrong.
> More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment.
At my job the management sees not violating copyright as a nuisance. Then when a customer wants to know if we're violating copyright of something or not they suddenly go insane.
I think it’s a bit charitable to assume that something published under an official Microsoft public channel wouldn’t have some sort of legal review, at least for the initial publication.
Exactly. If you don't hold managers responsible for the results of the incentives they set, you give the most powerful people in a company the most moral leeway. It should be the other way around.
More likely, this is a way for someone to get ahead in their career at Microsoft by passing off a successful open source project as their own accomplishment. They can steal users from the original project and justify using Microsoft's resources to maintain it, which puts more resources under their control, and gives them something to talk about during performance reviews.
The open source community should have a way to enforce professional consequences on individuals in situations like this. They are motivated by professional gains after all. That's the only way this will stop happening. Professional consequences does not mean doxxing or other personal attacks, it means losing career opportunities, losing contributor privileges, and becoming known as untrustworthy. These consequences have to be greater than the expected gain from passing a project off as your own at work.
I wonder if a new kind of license could be created which includes projects in some kind of portfolio and violating the license means losing access to the entire portfolio. Similar to how the tech companies added patents to a shared portfolio and patent treachery meant losing access to the portfolio.