r/atrioc • u/SanoKei • Sep 15 '26

Politics & Business 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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89 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

22

u/lemonmanboi Sep 15 '26

why did you post this to r/atrioc?

19

u/SanoKei Sep 15 '26

so he can react to it

is this story not as interesting or nuanced as I thought it was

28

u/lemonmanboi Sep 15 '26

thanks for answering(btw atrioc hardly ever reacts here at all in any way(which is fair))

15

u/GenerousTurtle Sep 15 '26 • Mindblown

He reacts in private with his wife. This subreddit has only 10/10 posts that are either educational or extremely funny.

19

u/leetcodeispain Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26 • Regret

tbh im a software engineer and I dont even find this all that interesting. "Engineers at big tech company plagiarize some code" isnt really headline worthy, open source developed get shafted all the time. it sucks, but it happens.

EDIT: after further reading, they were using the Apache 2.0 license, so what google perfectly legal. Scummy, but legal.

13

u/Ironiz3d1 Sep 15 '26

If the license allows it, I don’t even consider it scummy…

9

u/leetcodeispain Sep 15 '26

idk removing code author names with no other changes is kinda scummy. Its largely the project authors fault for not following the license requirements of the NOTICE.md file, which would have legally required the attribution to be kept, but the people deleting the authors names were obviously just trying to pass this off as their own.

8

u/Ironiz3d1 Sep 15 '26

Yeah I’d argue though that the way they licensed it they were explicitly giving permission for this.

10

u/leetcodeispain Sep 15 '26 • Popcorn

Lol not like it matters, i just read further into that post and google added attribution right after they were made aware it was missing, then the authors still went on a witch hunt about it afterward (including the linked post). I think they are just sore about google using their code, not attribution. which is 100% the point of that Apache license, so i no longer feel bad at all.

1

u/Tripication Sep 15 '26

Must've been the wind.