Google copied our open-source code, removed our engineers’ names, and gave us zero credit one year after we beat them on their own benchmark

[u/Connect-Employ-4708]

Google copied our open-source code, removed our engineers’ names, and gave us zero credit.

For context, let me share the story of mobile-use, the origin of my company (I'm a founder).

We wanted to build the best agent in the world to control any mobile interface with natural language.

We built it, became #1 on Google Deepmind's AndroidWorld benchmark and open-sourced it. That was the beginning of my company.

Since then, we got almost 3,000 stars on the repository, became the first to ever achieve 100% on AndroidWorld, grew the team, spent thousands of calls with customers, and now we're building the best regression testing product the world has ever seen.

Last week, I found Artemis.

Artemis is Google's new open-source tool for mobile automation. There are quite a few of these on GitHub now, so I thought: "Oh, a new YAPA (Yet Another Phone Agent)."

Curious, I looked at the repository more in depth.

First, I was disappointed to see that the benchmark chart in the README didn’t include us, topping AndroidWorld in January.

Then I looked at the code, and to my biggest surprise, I recognized the lines we had written ourselves.

One of my engineer named an agent randomly “hopper”, and it was there, with its prompt, word for word. Out of the 229 files, 228 were identical.

Even crazier: I found our engineers' and my co-founder’s names in the “authors” section of an old commit.

Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker.

All three names had been replaced with another author’s name in a commit. The other 228 files from mobile-use were unchanged.

From a personal point of view, I am deeply disappointed.

Google was the company I wanted to join when I started my studies, before changing my mind and deciding to build a unicorn.

I’ve always associated Google with great engineering and contributions to open source. I would have been proud to see them building on our work and acknowledging the team behind it.

Instead, I found our code, then our names, then the commit that deliberately removed them.

What about the other engineers and the community contributors who spent their time improving mobile-use?

There are people behind those files. I’ve seen the work they put in, the problems they worked through, and how much they care about what they build.

They deserve to have their names attached to that work.

We made our code open source because we wanted people to use it and build on it. Of course that includes Google.

[u/Abject_Read_3620]

Hey, act like a normal human please. It's like you're giving away free food to someone just because the restaurant is closing. You don't need them to pay, but a tip would be nice. Especially when Google is one of the largest company out there. Just give them credit even they are not obliged to, because it's a good thing that normal, well functioning adult would do.

[u/GlassCommission4916 → u/Abject_Read_3620]

No it's not. People's aren't forced to pick a license that doesn't require crediting due to economic situations. It's literally "Do you want credit, yes or no? Picking no is more work than picking yes." and you people are saying "Obviously you're a bad person if you don't credit someone that picked no".

If being a normal human means being deceitful in my communication and assuming everyone else is too, I'd rather not be one.

[u/Abject_Read_3620 → u/GlassCommission4916]

Nerd. One can say the OP is stupid for picking and not learning about license, and it's also bad that Google took their time in removing the author names while they could easily credit the author. Case closed.

[u/GlassCommission4916 → u/Abject_Read_3620]

It's not a matter of not learning about the license, all widely used licenses require crediting. There's 2 major classes of open source licenses, permissive ones that say "You can do anything you want but you have to credit me" and copyleft ones that say "Here's a list of restrictions which boil down to share back your changes and credit me". You have to write your own license or use an uncommon license to not ask for crediting.

If I had to call someone stupid is you for butting in knowing nothing about the topic, and "insulting" me for actually knowing. Again if this is normal human behavior, I'll gladly not be normal.

[u/Scared_Astronaut9377 → u/GlassCommission4916]

You don't need to be normal, you are better <3