

Microsoft Investigating Questions over MSN China joint venture’s Juku feature - jcsalterego
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14statement.mspx

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personamb
I don't know much about what it's like to hire an independent contractor (i.e.
how much oversight and control is typically practiced), but is it really
possible that Microsoft wouldn't have noticed how blatant the ripoff was
before pushing the site live?

To me, the "independent contractor" excuse is pretty lame, and seems pretty
common (the fusiongarage guy's ripped-off article uses the same excuse, just
off the top of my head). If you hired them to do a job under your name, then
it's your responsibility to make sure that job meets your standards before
publishing it under your brand.

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robin_reala
This happened to Microsoft recently with their Windows 7 USB/DVD Download
tool: <http://wudt.codeplex.com/> . They (apparently via a 3rd party
development house) used GPL code from the ImageMaster project without
releasing any of their sources. MS did the right thing in the end and released
the code, but like you say, it shouldn’t happen in the first place. You should
hold contractors to the same level of code quality that you’d expect from your
employees.

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aaronblohowiak
"You should hold contractors to the same level of code quality that you’d
expect from your employees."

Copyright violation is orthogonal to code quality. The protections against
this kind of behavior are usually legal, not procedural.

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jcsalterego
Courtesy of jf: <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=996118>

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gorm
This seems more like an issue with IP mentality in China than with Microsoft.

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ig1
They waited until morning in China ? - at software companies I've worked at
they would have woken people up for something as major as this. This isn't the
sort of thing where you want to be caught behind the news cycle.

~~~
awa
Well the damage was already done.

Why wake some developer to check if the code actually looks similar to the
competitor. who then would get back to you, then you contact some other people
to decide what to do and then you contact the Infrastructure guy to take the
site offline.

The outcome: the site would have been taken out a few hours earlier.

I don't think this situation warranted such measures, the PR nightmare had
already begun. This way they were able to analyze the situation, contact the
guilty vendor and do a preliminary investigation before deciding to take the
site offline instead of doint it as a kneejerk reaction.

~~~
ig1
Those few hours can be critical when you're trying to stay ahead of the news
cycle, because you have to race with news deadlines (at newspapers, PR wires,
tv stations, etc.)

The difference of a few minutes can be the difference between a minor story of
"Microsoft withdraws website over legal issue" and a major story "Scandal:
Microsoft rips off competitor; ignores allegations".

Geeks embbeded in a 24-hour web-newscycle often forget that most of the worlds
news cycle still revolves around newsroom deadlines.

