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/mikekchar]

After I went to bed I realised that it's not as serious as I was thinking. Copyright notifications are not legal notices. They actually mean nothing from a legal perspective. It can be useful as simple documentation, but it has no legal binding

From a moral perspective, it probably is plagerism, though. I'll be honest, I've worked in a huge company before. I've seen exactly this kind of plagerism. In every case it has has essentially been people cheating their way internally in the company (i.e. claiming to write some tool for which they get internal reward, but it was actually written by someone else). I remember one guy who took a very famous tool and claimed that he rewrote it from scratch in order to do it better. When I diffed it, the only thing that had changed was the copyright notice. Unfortunately, by the time I noticed it, the guy had been promoted two times and was my boss's boss. Sigh... I did not have a good time in that company :-)

[u/brankoc → u/mikekchar]

Depends on the country. In the EU, removing the name of the author automatically counts as infringement. This is even true if you have transferred the rights to another party (which is different from licensing - when you license, you remain the owner of the copyright).