[mcny]

You guys are talking about copyright but I think a bigger takeaway is there is a process breakdown at Microsoft. Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?

I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick?

(I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)

[efitz]

I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.

Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.

I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.

I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.

I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.

And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.

[bastawhiz]

I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.

It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.

[Sophira]

> I didn’t see the original post...

If you or anyone else who sees this wants to see the original post, it's still available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....

[crazygringo]

> Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?

Why do you assume that reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code, and that if docs aren't being reviewed it's somehow less likely that code is being reviewed?

There's a formal process for reviewing code because bugs can break things in massive ways. While there may not be the same degree of rigor for reviewing documentation because it's not going to stop the software from working.

But one doesn't necessarily say anything about the other.

[novaleaf]

I don't know if you are just playing devil's advocate, but there's plenty of examples of code quality issues coming out of msft these days too.

[smadge]

At another BigCo I am familiar with any external communications must go through a special review to make sure no secrets are being leaked, or exposes the company to legal or PR issues (for example the OP).

[jacquesm]

If they have the documentation... With Microsoft probably the answer to that is yes, but more often than not documentation is simply absent. And in cases like this not being too aware of where the lines are is probably a great way to advance your career.

[miki123211]

This isn't really documentation though, I suspect devblogs get even less scrutiny than that.

[shadowgovt]

Reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code because it's a lower bar than reviewing code.

I have never even heard of a software company that acts otherwise (except IBM, and much of the world of Silicon Valley software engineering is reactionary to IBM's glacial pace).

I'm not saying docs == code for importance is a bad way to be, just that if you can name firms that treat them that way other than IBM (or aerospace), I'd be interested to learn more.

[NoPicklez]

Whilst I understand it shows a break down somewhere, it a bit of a stretch to extend that idea across their entire codebase.

Organizations are large, so much so that different levels of rigor across different parts of the organization. Furthermore, more rigorous controls would be applied to code than for documentation (you would assume).

[keithnz]

I always got the impression that the devblogs were mostly driven by the MS dev creating the blog post

[lazyasciiart]

Yea, I have a post up there from a couple decades ago (maybe? I haven't looked, I don't know if they keep stuff up forever) and I guarantee you my code went through more review than that post did.

[anonymars]

Agreed. And I think the quality of their talent pool overall these days is the common factor

[themafia]

"Steal stuff and get away with it." Is not an 'innovation' even though it may feel like one. The side you should pick is honesty.

[direwolf20]

On the contrary, getting away with breaking the law is most of the innovation in the past decade. Look at Uber and AirBNB, and cryptocurrency, and every AI company.

[anonymars]

Yeah, I recently stumbled on some other devblogs post very similar in quality to the one that was linked here, which was basically wholesale plagiarism of a stackoverflow answer. I found it while searching for an error message.

I wasn't mad, just disappointed.