It all started when a Microblogging service called Plurk came out and accused computer and software giant Microsoft of stealing as much as 80 percent of their code for Microsoft’s Juku service on the MSN China site.
Microsoft of course had to be seen to be doing the right thing and carries out their own investigations into the claim and temporarily suspended the Juku service whilst they did that. According to Microsoft, it wasn’t them that wrote the Juku programme, neither was it the Chinese partner, but a third party.
“Our MSN China joint venture contracted with an independent vendor to create a feature called MSN Juku that allowed MSN users to find friends via Microblogging and online games” Microsoft said in a statement.
“This MSN Juku feature was made available to MSN China users in November and is still in beta.” Here’s what happened next.
“The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied” Microsoft said in a statement. Erm a portion, I would call 80 percent a massive chunk.
“This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property” they continued.
“We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation” Microsoft said.
“We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.”
Plurk are understandably still reeling from the shock and haven’t yet come out and said what if anything they are going to do about it.
“We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms” said Plurk in a blog.
It’s not the first time that Microsoft has been in the news for allegedly ripping off other people’s work, only a month ago they were accused of using copied source code for a Windows 7 installation tool, they blamed a third party vendor then too.
Ironic isn’t it, Microsoft are such a stickler for protecting their own work but not too careful when it comes to other people’s.
To be fair though, Microsoft has stated that they are now reviewing their practices around applications code provided by third party vendors.
As for Plurk, the apparent victims in this case, they must be laughing their socks off behind closed doors.
