MS caught with their hand in the Plurk cookie jar

Remember the big stink about Microsoft stealing open source code, then taking almost a month to post an open source version of the offending product? Miccrosoft fessed up, saying that the offending party was, in fact, a contractor, and that nobody inside Microsoft realized that the contractor used open source code.

This one stinks, too, in a slightly different way.

Chinese microblogging service Plurk woke up one morning to discover that a big chunk of its code and design had been, uh, borrowed by Microsoft China. The Plurk blog puts it succinctly:

Microsoft China officially launched its own microblogging service, MSN Juku, some time in November, 2009. The service’s design and UI is, by-and-large, an EXACT copy of Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigation system… Some 80% of the client and product codebase appears to be stolen directly from Plurk… Plurk was never approached nor collaborated in any capacity with MS on this service.

Mark Hachman at PCMag reports that MS has fessed up about this one, too:

“On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture,” a Microsoft spokesman said in an email. “We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

“The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied,” the Microsoft spokesman added. “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.”

Golly.

The fact is that, after all these years, and all of the bad publicity, Microsoft’s corporate culture still accepts this kind of rotten behavior.