As well I met them and it wasn't a pleasant experience. It was a decade ago around the same time Sonos met with them and they did similar to Sonos. Though Sonos recently won their case against them https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22871121/sonos-google-pate....
I think it's more like the Yahoo of yesterday? They made a few key products and then... nothing... for decades, while sponsoring deals everywhere to try to maintain their monopoly.
They basically only created a better search engine which that possibly could have been stolen too. I mean Facebook was stolen as well and the public doesn't care. I'm sure the public doesn't care that 100s to 1000s of innovators have been ripped off by Google as they just see them as not the winners. Yet a lot of the winners are the no talent thieves and those who throw all their morals to win at all cost.
I've talked about my experience (click thru my 1st link above ...my comment is the top of that thread as I met with that same R&D team, Google ATAP the MIT student did and Im betting so did Sonos who actually worked with Google) to warn those if and when Google comes knocking demand money deposited in your bank before taking a meeting! Blow their stardust back in their face and demand money!
Reminds me of something they mentioned on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code series: Google asking small startups for a sales offer, copying the startup instead, and using the offer as a shield against future lawsuits (look, they only thought it was worth X)
This is a fiction. I'm not sure if it is pushed by corporate apologists, or by people trying to convince others the system is completely broken and must be destroyed (and replaced with system X).
In general, corporations are given a large leeway as to what is 'in the best interest of the coporation'. Fidiciuary duty basically means CEO's just can't run the company into the ground and spend all the cash on cocaine parties.
Sure, that's why they should steal other people's work without any credit or consideration to their morals. Because it's a "fiduciary responsibility", this is totally fine.
It seems like this guy has nothing to do with this project? I mean, he could have told other Googler's about this idea, but maybe it's just a coincidence?
Based on a sibling comment I thought he might have merely collected information about Mr Oz's project, in a DevRel role, and someone else gotten hold of it. But IANAL and IANAJ, I just thought that since he's been mentioned he'd like to speak for himself. Esp. considering what some of the sibling comments are saying.
Please see my statement above. I started this project long before I met Oz. And when I met Oz, I had a very specific technical requirement that I hoped his library could fix, and then we could lift up his library as a solution instead of building our own. Unfortunately it could not, and at that point the discussion ended.
I found that deeplearning.ai and GoogleX in edX had some MOOCs where the person who is facing the allegation was an instructor.
After some minutes, I found the person to be average, and not really up to my expectations as an instructor in AI. The rigor of those MOOCs were quite low, too.
Digging up, I found that he was an "AI Advocate" at Google, which is just devrel. He is not a full-fledged developer or a scientist or research engineer.
Of course, I didn't finish or purchase those MOOCs.
I have a lot of respect for Oz's ability to ship and skills / imagination.
Only thing I can think of is for people to think thoroughly the license they set. BSD in this case, 4 years ago. And to not take any contributions unless they sign a CLA so the license can be changed in the future.
As for my own point of view, I screen apps/libraries that are not MIT/BSD/Apache2 and I may want to link statically to or sell services for and try to sponsor on Github projects I rely heavily on.
I don't know what is the remedy here since it seems Google broke no laws, did it?
Can you sue someone for "stealing your idea"? Unfortunately this is the world we live in. Only thing I can think of is that people vote into power parties who are willing to check the power of big corporations:
The remedy is Google gives the guy a job or some damn payment. "They don't have to" - well no shit, we don't have to be nice to each other, yet most of us are. Why can't Google be nice to people?
Because Google is a corporation, not a person. Even if Google decides to be "nice" in this case, this will be for purely selfish reasons (they decide good PR they get from paying this guy is worth more than whatever they pay). Expecting corporations to behave like people is a sure way to get disappointed.
Yeah good luck with that. The founding principal and mission of a corporation is to make money at all costs. Being "Good" will always come second to making money, the individuals who make it up are powerless to stop it.
They're made out of people subservient to the owners, whether that's a rich dude or a bunch of shareholders largely shielded from the day to day operations and who just want their stocks to go up a little more. Google is THE poster child of a company whose employees rebelled, even unionized, but who still don't really have much power.
It's a huge advertising company trying to make more money, not a scrappy search tech startup in a garage...
Corporations can't be nice. They exist to multiply capital of the investors. Among those investors there is a big one - 401ks, index funds and other assets of small people managed by big firms. As an individual investor, do you want your 401k to grow? If you do, you're among the many who force Google to promote efficient nihilists who bring money. If you don't, why haven't you invested your savings in a nonprofit fund helping the homeless?
Just because something is legal, doesn't mean that it isn't utterly immoral.
The Google guy should be ashamed of himself, apologize, and try to remedy the injustice he perpetrated - get Oz a job, and/or credit him in their work.
Should be but is not, that's the problem.
He's probably happy about a pay-raise.
The problem is that Google has the monopoly.
No use trying to boycott a monopoly.
The only remedy is anti-monopoly and related
legislation. And for that we need to elect
(into power) politicians that are willing
to enact such legislation.
If anything I'm ashamed of the sheer volume of personal time, money, and effort I put into helping build and enable community, only for accusations like this to lead people to believe all kind of false things about me to the extent that they'll write me horrifying emails, and speculate on Ycombinator about my motives!
I really do not see what google did wrong here. There should be no flag-planting in the open source community. The fact that one person develops an idea does not mean that nobody else has a right to develop their own version. In this case the authors has even deleted all his repositories due to mental stress. It makes even more sense for Google to develop their own version so that they can be in the control of their project.
Open source is unsustainable if we act like this. A 100k grant costs a fraction of the latest leetcode wanker member of the blind church of tc. Add to it a couple of seniors to mentor the dude a couple afternoons a Week and you’re steering the project without too many problems at lower cost.
“Give back to the community” used to be something I admired in the American culture as an European, but I guess most exchanged it for a L6 promo
Just because it is not illegal does not mean you want your employees acting this way. Google should at a minimum have in place a program to help these folks start a small company for the purposes of acquiring, with the implied benefit for the employee that it shows their leadership capabilities. Ripping off a disabled veteran should reflect badly on Google and therefore disciplinary actions can be taken.
The fact that it isn't a thing at Google speaks volumes.
Ya, F google. But that's what corporations do. I wouldn't expect otherwise. But that's also why the PR department could get on this and make it right, and profitable (which is always the only motivation).
The Honda "random acts of helpfulness" goes a bit too far to be tasteful to me, because their acts are so random.
But if an individual could use help, and the situation is related to a companies service or product, the business should help, even just for PR, especially if they are selling to consumers, whom are all individuals.
1) why would Google steal this instead of bringing Oz onto the team, which assumes he wanted to work for Google)
2) what can we as a community do to support Oz .
Oz, if you're reading this, you're obviously a very capable person, how do you think we can support you. Not just in relation to MidiBlocks, but beyond. That is just one project, I'm sure you've got more in you, if you want to pursue other things.
With a big company like Google you can't just randomly hire someone without putting them through the rigorous interview process that can be months long (been there, done that), accomplishments or not (see the Homebrew dude).
FYI, it is incredibly common to subject acquihired employees to the same interviews, and extend offers only to those that pass. This is especially true at FAANG.
So if John Carmack, Guido, Rich Hickey, Donald Knuth wanted a job, they would first have to leet code like everyone else?
The reason the failure to invert a binary tree story was notable was because the dude invented Homebrew. He was supposed to enter though the back door, but someone screwed up and made him go through the regular mechanism.
To be clear, I am not passing judgment on Oz - I think his accomplishments are impressive, all the more so given his day-to-day challenges. And I'm not at all a fan of the Leetcode interviewing culture either. My point was that Oz is not Carmack, Knuth, etc, so wouldn't fall into the exception bucket that Google cares about (unlike you or me). There are usually well-meaning reasons behind these processes, regardless how well they turn out.
For this piece of tech, he is Carmack. He is Knuth. He deserves respect for the work he’s done in this problem space, it actually is gaming changing the way it works.
I think his point is that not everything is well thought out or planned. A lot of the time people are just winging it and hoping for the best. Just because some giant corporation does something doesn't mean they planned, thought about or even intended to do a thing and arguing that they must've had teams behind every decision is silly. Sometimes, shit happens.
It's not "Google", it's people on project teams looking to elevate their careers. There's greed, credit, ego, and notoriety at stake, and sharing it with others is not a priority for many.
"Google" is only going to care if it affects Legal or PR. If you want Google to care, this is going to need a lot more exposure. It will also be really bad for the people at Google responsible for this situation if this gets too much attention.
I'm often skeptical of claims like the one I read here...not this time. This is is pretty egregious, and thanks to Professor Levin for providing lots of supporting material, making the offense even more obvious.
This is so close to being the amazing story we all want to hear about.
A veteran, suffering from PTSD, falls on hard times and ends up homeless. Despite his hard situation, he strives to help those who are even worse off. He learns how to program and uses these skills to build something to improve the lives of those are severely disadvantaged. He spends years working on this project and ends up building something really cool and useful.
So useful in fact that his dedication pays off and one of the biggest software companies in the world is inspired and brings him on to scale up this technology to help improve the lives of millions.
Except of course that doesn't end up happening. Instead, we're left reminded that life can be cruel.
We can be more specific here. "Some people can be cruel".
(Of course, I'm talking about the one who took all the notes from Oz then instead of giving him the credits ghosted him completely and later co-authored the blog post announcing the "inspired" project. https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-project-gameface)
Android existed since before the iPhone was even announced. Google did buy the company making it to compete with iOS though. (or maybe sybian/windows phone. depending on who you want to believe)
are you trying to defend apple, or are you trying to shame google? just curious because I understand the latter, but the former wouldn't make sense since apple is not any better in their behaviour
There's really no need to bet. It was a blackberry clone and then pivoted the moment the iPhone was announced. The early Android SDK still had affordances for navigating around the UI using joystick style buttons to select UI elements and physical keyboard use. Apple moved the state of the art to touchscreens with little to no physical controls and Google followed.
A bunch of android still works like that for navagating around the UI. (from my limited experience dealing with cheap android devices via keyboard/remote control) Probably not as well supported in third party apps using non-native UI bits.
It’s always people. People press buttons. Culture might be a reason to WHY people do stuff. But still, people DO stuff. Shifting the blame away to entities that can’t act, or change, actually stops the people from changing their behaviours and attitudes..and as such keeps the culture alive!
People will do what the organization has done itself, allows and promotes through incentivizing each employee with bonuses for new technology they turn whether it's their own work or not.
Yet if society allowed heinous acts, it still makes sense to blame those who commit them. Just because the punishments are removed, or even the acts encouraged, does that give individuals the right to defer the moral obligation to act correctly. Even when governments FORCE you to do heinous acts, we still hold individuals accountable for having done them (Nuremberg trials).
Hmmm society vs. a money making organization to me are two different things.... politicians those who make the laws arent going around doing school shootings and other murderous acts. They do steal, lie, cheat and other bad things and they are brought to justice. So with that in mind Google itself is the politician in this example and or a group of them doing terrible things yet no one cares/nothing is done about their nefarious behavior ... probably because Google has bought the politicians ;-)
sounds like this dude got caught in someone’s promo packet assembly. i wouldn’t worry too much if i were him. this’ll be deprecated in three years or so once it served its purpose to signal how good of an engineer the person who made it as part of their promo package is
would highly recommend Oz look for some mental health resources. nowadays there's plenty of self-study online, no insurance or expensive therapist needed. wishing him best of luck.
More interesting is not having the "This is not an official Google project so not supported" disclaimer so many repos in their org has.
Shady origins, shoddy maintenance, but the incident will be forgotten as is usually the case. The reality is Google still has huge mindshare and respect among engineers and will likely be immune to damage in these situations.
I would like to respect Oz decision to close the issue and his desire to see gameface succeed. For those that are uninformed please read the issue.
Imoroney what can we do as a community? This project is still in need of a measure of Google support to be handed off to the community. The project needs fostering to develop community lead maintainers.
This project could be useful as a library, not just as a front end. Accessibility must scale to its users needs. For instance, integrating with speech recognition, eye tracking, and other peripherals allows people to have the most interaction with their environment.
I for one would love to work on hooking into gameface with C#, python for integration alongside grammar based speech recognition.
I won't claim any expertise in the licensing side of things -- but there's a fully working product there that people can take a run with. If you want to build a business on it and thus grow this, AFAIK, the Apache 2.0 license permits that.
That was always my goal with this -- my team is not in the business of product development. Still, there was (and is) an opportunity to build the basis for an app that the community could either maintain or an entrepreneur could use.
Either way, if it spreads the tech far and wide to help more people like Lance, we all win.
118 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadAs for Oz, what an incredible story.
As well I met them and it wasn't a pleasant experience. It was a decade ago around the same time Sonos met with them and they did similar to Sonos. Though Sonos recently won their case against them https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22871121/sonos-google-pate....
Ouch. That one hurt. Google is looking worse every day. Is it going to be "the Yahoo of tomorrow?"
I've talked about my experience (click thru my 1st link above ...my comment is the top of that thread as I met with that same R&D team, Google ATAP the MIT student did and Im betting so did Sonos who actually worked with Google) to warn those if and when Google comes knocking demand money deposited in your bank before taking a meeting! Blow their stardust back in their face and demand money!
How did anything Google did harm this guy in any way?
An analysis of this claim:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
In general, corporations are given a large leeway as to what is 'in the best interest of the coporation'. Fidiciuary duty basically means CEO's just can't run the company into the ground and spend all the cash on cocaine parties.
Maybe the B Corps and co-ops stand a chance...
[] https://github.com/lmoroney
ed. not GOOG user, employee, but GH user, you know...
I found that deeplearning.ai and GoogleX in edX had some MOOCs where the person who is facing the allegation was an instructor.
After some minutes, I found the person to be average, and not really up to my expectations as an instructor in AI. The rigor of those MOOCs were quite low, too.
Digging up, I found that he was an "AI Advocate" at Google, which is just devrel. He is not a full-fledged developer or a scientist or research engineer.
Of course, I didn't finish or purchase those MOOCs.
Only thing I can think of is for people to think thoroughly the license they set. BSD in this case, 4 years ago. And to not take any contributions unless they sign a CLA so the license can be changed in the future.
As for my own point of view, I screen apps/libraries that are not MIT/BSD/Apache2 and I may want to link statically to or sell services for and try to sponsor on Github projects I rely heavily on.
[1] https://github.com/ozramos/handsfree/blob/master/LICENSE
Can you sue someone for "stealing your idea"? Unfortunately this is the world we live in. Only thing I can think of is that people vote into power parties who are willing to check the power of big corporations:
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2023/09/biden-doj...
It doesn't matter if it's made of people or ants.
It's a huge advertising company trying to make more money, not a scrappy search tech startup in a garage...
Public shaming can work pretty well too, sometimes.
The Google guy should be ashamed of himself, apologize, and try to remedy the injustice he perpetrated - get Oz a job, and/or credit him in their work.
Should be but is not, that's the problem. He's probably happy about a pay-raise.
The problem is that Google has the monopoly. No use trying to boycott a monopoly.
The only remedy is anti-monopoly and related legislation. And for that we need to elect (into power) politicians that are willing to enact such legislation.
If anything I'm ashamed of the sheer volume of personal time, money, and effort I put into helping build and enable community, only for accusations like this to lead people to believe all kind of false things about me to the extent that they'll write me horrifying emails, and speculate on Ycombinator about my motives!
“Give back to the community” used to be something I admired in the American culture as an European, but I guess most exchanged it for a L6 promo
It wasn’t just a random repository they came across.
Anyway this is why I GPL everything. At least it ensures that the changes to it remain free.
Just because it is not illegal does not mean you want your employees acting this way. Google should at a minimum have in place a program to help these folks start a small company for the purposes of acquiring, with the implied benefit for the employee that it shows their leadership capabilities. Ripping off a disabled veteran should reflect badly on Google and therefore disciplinary actions can be taken.
The fact that it isn't a thing at Google speaks volumes.
Google's Legal department can definitely resolve this problem.
The Honda "random acts of helpfulness" goes a bit too far to be tasteful to me, because their acts are so random.
But if an individual could use help, and the situation is related to a companies service or product, the business should help, even just for PR, especially if they are selling to consumers, whom are all individuals.
1) why would Google steal this instead of bringing Oz onto the team, which assumes he wanted to work for Google)
2) what can we as a community do to support Oz .
Oz, if you're reading this, you're obviously a very capable person, how do you think we can support you. Not just in relation to MidiBlocks, but beyond. That is just one project, I'm sure you've got more in you, if you want to pursue other things.
The reason the failure to invert a binary tree story was notable was because the dude invented Homebrew. He was supposed to enter though the back door, but someone screwed up and made him go through the regular mechanism.
Why disrespect what’s been achieved here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
I think it's funny that you listed people who develop game engines, programming languages, and write algorithm and data structures textbooks.
Literally the people who could do the LeetCode algorithms and data structures problems in their sleep because it's actually relevant for their job.
In a previous life on a job site, the term was called measuring dicks but I digress.
"Google" is only going to care if it affects Legal or PR. If you want Google to care, this is going to need a lot more exposure. It will also be really bad for the people at Google responsible for this situation if this gets too much attention.
We supported Oz in the ways that we could.
This is so close to being the amazing story we all want to hear about.
A veteran, suffering from PTSD, falls on hard times and ends up homeless. Despite his hard situation, he strives to help those who are even worse off. He learns how to program and uses these skills to build something to improve the lives of those are severely disadvantaged. He spends years working on this project and ends up building something really cool and useful.
So useful in fact that his dedication pays off and one of the biggest software companies in the world is inspired and brings him on to scale up this technology to help improve the lives of millions.
Except of course that doesn't end up happening. Instead, we're left reminded that life can be cruel.
We can be more specific here. "Some people can be cruel".
(Of course, I'm talking about the one who took all the notes from Oz then instead of giving him the credits ghosted him completely and later co-authored the blog post announcing the "inspired" project. https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-project-gameface)
- Copied iOS and created Android
- Worked with Sonos then stole from Sonos; Sonos 10 years later wins a victory in court https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23739273/google-sonos-sma...
- To inviting a MIT student out for an interview who demoed her tech & they patented it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
To many other examples ... it's not the employees it's the company!
Android existed since before the iPhone was even announced. Google did buy the company making it to compete with iOS though. (or maybe sybian/windows phone. depending on who you want to believe)
How much you want to bet :)
https://github.com/google/project-gameface/pull/31#issuecomm...
More interesting is not having the "This is not an official Google project so not supported" disclaimer so many repos in their org has.
Shady origins, shoddy maintenance, but the incident will be forgotten as is usually the case. The reality is Google still has huge mindshare and respect among engineers and will likely be immune to damage in these situations.
We wanted GameFace to be something that we kickstarted and then donated to the community to run with. That's still the case.
Imoroney what can we do as a community? This project is still in need of a measure of Google support to be handed off to the community. The project needs fostering to develop community lead maintainers.
This project could be useful as a library, not just as a front end. Accessibility must scale to its users needs. For instance, integrating with speech recognition, eye tracking, and other peripherals allows people to have the most interaction with their environment.
I for one would love to work on hooking into gameface with C#, python for integration alongside grammar based speech recognition.
That was always my goal with this -- my team is not in the business of product development. Still, there was (and is) an opportunity to build the basis for an app that the community could either maintain or an entrepreneur could use.
Either way, if it spreads the tech far and wide to help more people like Lance, we all win.