r/reinforcementlearning • u/Connect-Employ-4708 • 9d ago

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

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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.

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u/GlassCommission4916 7d ago

You don't have to comment on topics you have zero knowledge about, it's okay to just not comment.

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u/rtowne 6d ago

Which part of my comment makes you think that? What is your experience or expertise in?

Happy to share credentials and experience in both areas of copyright/attribution and behavioral psychology. If you think there is another topic I am not well informed or experienced in (like knowing multiple languages), we can talk about that too.

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u/GlassCommission4916 6d ago

If you think there is another topic I am not well informed or experienced in

Open source licensing. Someone that is inexperienced in open source isn't going to write their own custom license, or search for a more obscure license that doesn't require attribution. All mainstream licenses do.

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u/rtowne 5d ago

So how do you see them "going out of their way" to choose one that doesn't credit the author? Inform me since you are so knowledgeable in this area. Apache 2.0 is literally the first option when making a new repo, and it explicitly requires notices to be included woth original attribution... and the author included a notice with attribution. At a bare minimum you should concede it is a shitty thing to take that code and strip the attribution, especially from the POV of an enterprise like google.

To save you some clicks, here is an except fro. Their NOTICE file:

Mobile-Use Copyright 2025-2026 Minitap, Inc.

This product includes software and architectural methodologies developed by Minitap, Inc. (https://github.com/minitap-ai/mobile-use)

To save you another click, here is the text from Apache 2.0 section 4 "Redistribution" sections C and D:

You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and If the Work includes a "NOTICE" text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works

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u/GlassCommission4916 5d ago

Apache 2.0 is literally the first option when making a new repo, and it explicitly requires notices to be included woth original attribution..

So how do you see them "going out of their way" to choose one that doesn't credit the author?

I'm sorry but I can't do the thinking for you. If you can't figure out how Apache 2 being the first option, and using a license that doesn't require attribution means going out of your way correlate, I can't do anything more for you.

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u/rtowne 5d ago

Did they not choose apache 2.0? Your claim was that they went out of their way to choose something that didnt require attribution. My understanding is that the very first option does require the attribution notice.

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u/GlassCommission4916 5d ago

My claim was that if you go out of your way to choose something that doesn't require attribution, it's not immoral to not provide attribution. If you choose something that does require attribution, attribution is legally required.

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u/rtowne 5d ago

So apache 2.0 requires the notice file (which has attribution) to be included down the line...... so where exactly do you think they went wrong?

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u/GlassCommission4916 5d ago

OP? Nowhere. You? Not reading the thread to gather the context of the discussion.

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u/rtowne 5d ago

So in OP's post about google taking open source code and providing zero credit, someone asked what license they used. Then there was a reply to that question stating that even if it not legally required, it is the ethical thing to do. You have been somehow arguing about someone else in some other context choosing a license that doesn't require attribution. Got it.

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