Microsoft "modified" the copyright statement of the original author of the MIT project cited dispute: There was a problem with the automated script | The correct LICENSE file/copyright information has now been restored

Recently, when Microsoft forked an MIT open source project, it retained the MIT license agreement of the original project, but modified the original author's copyright statement to Microsoft itself, which caused a lot of controversy.

It is reported that this project was developed by the developer Leśny Rumcajs based on the MIT license agreement-grpc_bench. After forking the project, Microsoft changed the original "2020 LesnyRumcajs" copyright statement to "Microsoft Corporation.", which was questioned by developers in the industry.

Regarding this incident, Jeff Wilcox, the head of the Microsoft Open Source Project Office, explained in an article on December 16 that this is all "the fault of automated scripts"-the error was caused by a template file submitted in a new repository (Bot ) Caused by robots.

Jeff Wilcox replied in his post: "I'm sorry for this." "We have merged the request to restore the correct LICENSE file and copyright information, and contacted the upstream author Leśny Rumcajs, who sent us an e-mail this morning. Mail. We will also consider restoring all the promises made by our bot (bot updated the readme file with a sample getting started guide)."

Jeff Wilcox stated that the problem was caused by a robot designed to submit template files in the new repository. And he wrote this code to prevent other problems that Microsoft encountered when publishing projects in the past-it should not be run on forks.

Jeff Wilcox pointed out the problem with this incident and was as open as possible:

• The templates applied on the new repository are located at:
  https://github.com/microsoft/repo-templates
• The error seems to appear on this line of the new repository workflow:
  https://github.com/microsoft/opensource-management-portal/bl...
• Existing systems even try to use this log information to guide engineers:
  (161ce8e5bd29cc https: : 161ce8e5bd29d0 161ce8e5bd29d2 Repository${subMessage}, the template file will not be submitted. Please Check licenses and other documents to understand existing obligations. })”
......

Jeff Wilcox also added that they have a lot of processes for forks and must implement controls to ensure that people understand the guidelines.

In the future, Jeff Wilcox and the team will focus on reviewing all forks repositories and restore similar changes to other projects.

As early as a few years ago, Jeff Wilcox's team had begun to "lock in" forks to enforce its process. Jeff Wilcox and the team hope that developers will transfer projects to their respective GitHub accounts to encourage them to participate in upstream projects.

Although Microsoft has set out to solve the problem, it still triggered a lot of ridicule from netizens:

About the MIT agreement:

The MIT agreement is a common open source project license agreement. The licensee has the right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell software and copies of the software, but it must include a copyright statement and a license statement.