Plurk Overplaying Hand After Microsoft Code Copying; Meanwhile Status.net Says 'Take Our Code, Please'

from the take-the-publicity-and-go-with-it dept

Lots of people got a good ironic laugh from the news that Microsoft, which has repeatedly complained about "piracy" in China, got caught blatantly copying code from a small startup named Plurk. Microsoft blamed a vendor and shut down the service. Plurk, for its part, got a ton of free publicity, and apparently it doesn't want to give it up. It's sent out a statement to lots of media folks (and us) with absolutely nothing of substance, but which says that the company is still considering legal action, while going on and on about how its just a small company that can't even afford sales people or a marketing person to write this email. And yet, it thinks it wants to distract itself with a lawsuit against Microsoft? If it can't afford sales people, those lawyers might be a bit costly. Yes, Microsoft copied your code. Time to use that to your advantage, and whining about the legal action you might take doesn't get anyone else to actually care about your product.

Meanwhile, another provider of similar software (though open sourced), Status.net took a smarter approach. Blaise points out that Status.net put up a blog post telling Microsoft to go right ahead and take its code. After all, it's open source (and they have a Chinese translation already). That's what you're supposed to do.

Filed Under: china, code, copying
Companies: microsoft, plurk, status.net