Topic: Microsoft violating the GPL . . . again?

[Nemesis]

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Last week, Within Windows noted something suspicious in regards to Microsoft's use of the GNU's General Public License (GPL): "While poking through the UDF-related internals of the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, I had a weird feeling there was just wayyyyyyyyy too much code in there for such a simple tool. A simple search of some method names and properties, gleaned from Reflector's output, revealed the source code was obviously lifted from the CodePlex-hosted (yikes) GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster project. (The author of the code was not contacted by Microsoft.)"

Redmond remained quiet until yesterday, when the company pulled the tool in question from its servers.

Pulling the utility until they can review the code and trace its origins is the right thing to do. 

[Capt. Mike]

Reviewing the code and sources prior to posting it would have been the ethical thing to do.

Mike

[Nemesis]

Reviewing the code and sources prior to posting it would have been the ethical thing to do.

Mike

How much good will that be if  you can't trust your programmers?

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On Friday, the company said it will release the ImageMaster USB/DVD source code and binaries under GPLv2 next, following an internal investigation into the matter that found it had indeed violated the license.

It appears to be an admission of violating the GPL.

[Nemesis]

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"After looking at the code in question, we are now able to confirm this was indeed the case, although it was not intentional on our part," Microsoft's Peter Galli said in a blog posting. "While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process. We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.

The blame is laid on an unidentified 3rd party.  Don't they write any code themselves anymore?