Dec 27, 2021 11:20:00

Microsoft inadvertently rewrites the MIT license project to Microsoft's name and apologizes

by

Thomas Hawk

Microsoft has rewritten and forked the MIT licensed project published on Github under the Microsoft name. Microsoft's open source software program representatives have acknowledged and apologized for this incident.

LICENSE updated to template · microsoft / grpc_bench @ 04c7143 · GitHub
https://github.com/microsoft/grpc_bench/commit/04c7143a39a0bb243369e31f3b3b797449468fdb

Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed] | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683471

Microsoft fork changing the license?: opensource
https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/roa9xz/microsoft_fork_changing_the_license/

The project in question is a gRPC benchmark program called 'grpc_bench' published by Lesny Rumcajs.

GitHub --LesnyRumcajs / grpc_bench: Various gRPC benchmarks
https://github.com/LesnyRumcajs/grpc_bench

Although grpc_bench was granted the MIT license that 'free and unlimited use is permitted as long as the copyright notice and this license notice are stated', Microsoft rewrote the license owner to Microsoft and forked it.

GitHub-microsoft / grpc_bench: Various gRPC benchmarks
https://github.com/microsoft/grpc_bench

If you look at the changes in the license file committed by microsoft opensource, you can see that the copyright notation has been changed from '2020 Lesny Rumcajs' to 'Microsoft Corporation.'

Github users commented on this phenomenon, saying, 'Microsoft has finally done it.'

According to a post on Hacker News by Jeff Wilcox , director of Microsoft's open source programming team, this phenomenon is due to a bot designed to automatically commit template files to a new repository.

This bot was created to prevent problems that could occur when the project was released, but creating a fork was an unexpected behavior. Wilcox promised to re-examine for other similar phenomena and apologized, 'I'm sorry for this.'