Comments on: Microsoft admits stealing 80% of Plurk website code to build Chinese Microblog

By: guest

guest — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:11:45 +0000

I’m not sure what happened behind the scenes, but I ran into a similiar situation at my company. A recent vendor of ours asked me to give them my source code to a particular function and they will modify and maintain the new code. My initial response was no! We have no business partnership with the vendor besides the fact that we bought their product and currently use it as we do with many other products. Many of the products we use are missing functions we need, so instead of customizing the products we develop our own codes and run them on different servers to achieve our business objectives. Do you think I should give the vendor my code so they can modify it and plug it into their product?

By: Alfred Thompson

Alfred Thompson — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:08:46 +0000

I’m not saying that Microsoft should be let off the hook. Rather there are more people to blame. You are not holding the Chinese partner or the outsource company at all to blame. I’m just saying that fairness would include those other entities as culpable. You see to be letting them off the hook. You don’t even mentian them at all and that doesn’t seem fair to me.

By: Wesley Fryer

Wesley Fryer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:05:14 +0000

Thanks for linking to the MS statement, Alfred. I disagree that Microsoft should be let off the hook and disassociate with this because they had outsourced the coding. This is like a government agency hiring a contractor to do dirty work so they can maintain "plausible deniability." They hired for the work to be done, they had a responsibility to insure the work was done with integrity. As I mentioned in the post, just look at the two websites side-by-side. You don't have to be a coder or uber-geek to see that this was a copycat effort. Microsoft bears the responsibility for this and should be held as accountable for this act as they would if a fulltime employee team stole this code.

By: Alfred Thompson

Alfred Thompson — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:11:01 +0000

More of the backstory is available and I’m surprised you didn’t link to the Microsoft statement. (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-15statement.mspx) The software was copied by a company Microsoft hired to do some work. While I quite agree that someone at Microsoft should have done more checking on the hired work its not quite the same as Microsoft employees doing the stealing.

By: Elaine Plybon

Elaine Plybon — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:10:38 +0000

This is unbelievable and unacceptable! Makes me wonder about all the new apps that Microsoft has been unveiling that are so similar to Google apps . . .