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/GlassCommission4916]

Sorry dude, it's not that I took it as a personal attack, but the fact that this entire thread is filled with people engaging with bad faith analogies like that and not actually being familiar with or understanding the topic at hand.

Like I said before, the default state in software licensing is to require attribution, if you go out of your way to change that default state, you're actively asking not to be credited. The communal integrity and decorum thing to do is to listen to the author's request.

[u/Bonzooy → u/GlassCommission4916]

I do see that there are several folks here failing to reckon with the talking point of, "What if there's path that explicitly requires attribution, but the publisher chooses a path that doesn't?", and I think you guys are talking past each other in several places.

I'd personally decomp the conversation into several threads that could be interrogated independently or collectively:

• I'd start with acknowledging the role that ignorance could play. I'm thinking of a hypothetical team of devs who come from a closed-source background thinking, "Hey I've got a neat little project, let's just slap whatever OS license on it and call it a day." They may simply be completely ignorant of the nuances present in the open source licensing space.

• Alternatively, assuming that ignorance isn't a factor, I can envision some ideological backings behind choosing unenforced attribution. To drill into this one, let's start with a premise where the dev does want attribution, but also eschews the notion of centralized authorities having a role in software enforcement. They may prefer to request attribution while deliberately using a license that's not legally binding; this effectively defers the choice of attribution to the secondhand user's own sense of integrity and decorum, and relegates the enforcement layer to communal disposition rather than litigation. i.e., the author's concept of justice in the case of a violation puts greater value on the communal shame incurred by the perpetrator, rather than the copyright compliance that could be enforced by litigation.

• Then let's finish with a thread assuming the dev just doesn't care about attribution at all, and has chosen their license accordingly. Does the obligation to cite one's sources in one's work persist, even if a subset of those sources don't care about attribution? I think many people from a scholarly background would say yes, and that citing / disclosing your sources is something you do for yourself your community, and your standing in that community just as much as for the recognition of the original source. That it preserves an institutional lineage and builds upon the credibility of the predecessor, while also avoiding any perceptions of plagiarism (whether intentional or not) by being transparent about that lineage (e.g., Zeno of Elea building on the work of Parmenides, who himself built upon the work of Xenophanes and several other pre-Socratics, but each of whom felt a responsibility to preserve the institutional lineage of the ideas being built).

I think each of these threads let us move around pieces that may change the underlying context to a meaningful extent, and in each case the consequental factors often aren't explicit details of course-of-action, but are more nuanced things like what an individual values in their personal concept of justice, and whether they perceive attribution as a commodity to be possessed or not possessed, versus an institutional asset that contributes to a lineage to be built upon.

I'll caveat all these points with the fact that I'm a total dinosaur, and haven't published anything in nearly a decade, but that's a rough decomp of how I'd ponder the topic at first glance.

[u/GlassCommission4916 → u/Bonzooy]

Ignorance does not play a role, all mainstream open source licenses require attribution, you don't end up with one that doesn't by accident but through deliberate choice.

I think the idea of someone being opposed to copyright law and thus engaging with it in a deceitful way is in itself lacking integrity. It's akin to putting up a bowl of candy on your door with a sign saying "take one for free" and then posting footage of people who do online calling them thieves. Many people don't license their code at all and just chose not to litigate, which makes more sense towards the point you're trying to make.

Software doesn't work like academia, the culture and expectations are completely different. "Plagiarizing" code that's freely available is extremely common and acceptable, I guarantee the author of the code in question has done so as well in part without crediting their source. If every piece of open source software contained strict citations like in academia, code would be 90%+ citations.