Minitap accuses Google of stripping credit from its agent code

Google's Artemis mobile-automation project copied code from Minitap's open-source mobile-use project, then swapped out the original authors' names, per Minitap's September 11 post. Three named authors are missing from the file where the license requires them. For anyone shipping code under Apache 2.0, this is a live test of whether that attribution requirement holds up against a determined fork.

Minitap's post lists Android device-connection code that matches exactly and Hopper agent instructions copied word for word. It also cites test cases that send identical "Happy New Year" messages to Alice, Bob and Charlie.

Minitap says an identical bug turned up in a results-file helper in both codebases. Matching architecture can happen through convergent design, and matching test fixtures alone would only be suggestive. Nobody reproduces someone else's bug by accident, so a shared bug points to a shared origin.

A package file once listed Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo and Nicolas Dehandschoewercker as authors. GitHub's activity record shows that entry got replaced by a force push in August 2026. Apache 2.0 requires keeping copyright notices intact and flagging changes, and rewriting the author field breaks that term directly. Google hadn't responded by the time Minitap posted, which leaves Minitap's account as the only one on the record, not a settled finding.

I publish permissive code myself and have never once checked what my own NOTICE file would prove against a fork. Apache 2.0's whole enforcement mechanism is embarrassment, and a force push is a direct test of whether that holds.

Other agent projects seem to be hedging against exactly this. openhuman, a Rust agent harness with local-first memory, sits at 39,689 stars under GPL-3.0 while most of its trending-board neighbors use MIT or Apache. Rune, a new Go IDE, went GPLv3 for its core and split the extension SDK into a separate Apache-2.0 module. That split, copyleft at the core and permissive at the integration boundary, reads like a direct answer to what Minitap says happened to it.