And it has the same fake excuse as usual "Since this was our first OSS project, we didn’t realize at first."
He sure discovered this new open source thing and it's very confusing. It's not like it's almost 40 years old at that point. I'll never understand people who lie like toddlers.
This incompetence excuse puts YC in a bad spotlight too, because it makes them look like they are funding people with exact zero software development experience.
TBH, I know plenty of people with software development experience, who I think are genuinely pretty good at converting ideas to code, but who wouldn't have any idea what Apache or GPL mean.
I do not know what is wrong with software engineers. This is theft (or whatever the lawyers says in the IP law) and now stating: Ooops we did not know, our bad, we keep it till we have found a replacement. Mistakes happen also in real life, but libraries is a common thing, like cars standing on a street. You do not accidently steal a car.
Software Engineering is more than coding. Basic license management incl. library vetting is part of it. If you decide to ignore that, you do not run a business enterprise, you run a criminal enterprise.
> Basic license management incl. library vetting is part of it.
This depends on whether you consider Compliance to be part of software engineering or a separate discipline. At least in most companies the compliance department is different from the software development/IT department, because the necessary skills are very different and barely transfer.
Because this is how the current corporate world works. It's all about appearances, someone can do whatever bad thing, will go on and say "upsie, I didn't realise that X is bad, it was an honest mistake" and then all is good, the person actually reporting it or signalling it out will be the bad one, for being critical, aggressive, not constructive or open minded.
Sorry for your story. In those days open source is REALLY HARD. Put your github link here and we will support your project by starring you and spreading your project. You definitely need to fight back.
As an interviewer, I'm seeing a huge increase in proportion of candidates cheating surreptitiously during video interviews. And it's becoming difficult to suspect any wrong-doing unless you're very watchful by looking for academic responses to questions.
Why would anyone encourage building such a tool, I can't fathom.
It's pretty simple - people need to eat (and fulfill other basic needs, of course), to eat they need jobs, to get jobs they need to pass the interview. The hiring process in a lot of industries is heavily gamed at this point, to the point that not cheating is basically an automatic fail. So, if you want to eat, you cheat.
One starts to wonder whether the LLM vendors laissez-faire approach to the legality of ingesting copyrighted / licensed material will start to infect the industry in general?
I think it will push opensource/ free software hackers to close source their code because it is being used to feed LLMs. Similar to how allot of hardcore free software proponents don't use Github. Is closed source the future?
Anyone that wants to have some rights to their code shouldn’t open it. If other people have access to your code, license absolutely doesn’t matter at all.
Some person living in china/russia could have done a similar thing and all you can do to them is complain on the internet. Big corporations could even falsely sue you because “you stole their code” maybe?
This situation truly enrages me and is likely the reason (IMO) why talented programmers (today, in 2025 versus, 2008-2013 where small founder startups thrived at places like 500 + YC).
Quite ironic how YC touts technical founders > "non-tech" ones -- when acts such as this strip ones chances of wanting to become one, or even continue showcasing their talent publicly on platforms like GH.
It's always possible to try, especially as it seems there was a technical violation here, but whether it's worth it or likely to gain enough legal traction to yield results is another story, especially in instances of "your AI generated boiler plate looks like my AI generated boilerplate, and therefore is theft"
Doesn't this happen all the time with Ultralytics yolo code? They use an AGPL license, which to my understand means that anything that links with this code also becomes AGPL.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is the license also viral if there's a network connection involved? i.e. I run the code in a container with a little network interface added ?
And yet Microsoft have release code with different licenses that make's use of Ultralytics code.
I potentially would be interested in using these wildlife detection models in a commercial (Not open source) context but simply don't trust the claim that it would be okay to do so, sounds like a big business risk to me.
What is the opinion of the community of the MIT licenses associated with PyTorch wildlife from Microsoft okay to use in a closed source commercial context? Microsoft have put an MIT license on this, but their code does imports of ultralytics libraries, which I thought were AGPL.
Note: The GPL 3 license from the official yolov9 differs in this, it must be possible to run the same code on the platform, but your usage may be closed source.
I really like the work that Microsoft did with Pytorch Wildlife but not brave enough to trust the MIT license they put on their code that uses Ultralytics code and all attempts to check if it was okay for them to change the licenses seem to indicate that they may not do this.
Love to know for sure. Maybe someone from Ultralytics can point out their view on this?
The classic playbook: copy an open-source project (or just vibe-code something similar), slap an open-source label on it, and toss in an unproven design system / framework (like Liquid Glass) to give it a shiny veneer.
Less about building something meaningful - more about manufacturing hype in hopes of catching a trend before it crashes!
I follow a bunch of YC founders on X. Lots of behavior that could be construed as 'growth hacking - or 'deceptive' depending on your bent: promoting open source libraries that don't work, rewriting tweets from smaller accounts, coordinated replies from mutuals and so on.
I guess that's the game, but they do seem a lot more cavalier about it of late. Increasingly resembles the crypto 'community' (derogatory).
The easiest way to check for integrity and ethics is if the startups YC finances routinely run afoul of YC's ethics code or the law.
If YC has no ethics code, that's your answer right there. If they do but it fails to mention basic things like lying, cheating, deceiving especially when done intentionally, bingo again. If breaking the law isn't an automatic termination of the collaboration, it takes you to the same conclusion. If YC explicitly supports the startups when knowing about these problems, or implicitly by skirting due diligence and turning a blind eye, or accepts startups having no commitment to an ethics code, then ethics or integrity are not core values, or even are completely absent.
There are more nuanced topics and methods but if it doesn't pass the smell test with the basic ones, it won't pass it with any.
GGP was clearly in the context of “how would YC evaluate this pre-funding?” rather than “how would outsiders evaluate YC?” but 15 seconds of search turned up: https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics
...some latent passive aggressiveness and YC's founder ethics code not YC's own ethics code. You need an anchor for the chain of trust. That must be the VC's (YC in this case) integrity and ethics code first.
You stopped reading after the first few words, misunderstood even those, and rushed to answer didn't you?
I addressed exactly how to evaluate ethics and integrity prefunding, and ensure it post with 2 very simple concepts that would have worked perfectly at least for this easy to catch incident:
1) Do your due diligence. In this case "15 seconds of search" would have turned up the original code and the license mismatch.
2) Have clauses to ensure breaches of law or ethics have severe consequences to the founders.
The founders indisputably breached YC's founder ethics code, in particular "Being honest in the YC application and interview process" and "Generally operating in good faith and behaving in a professional and upstanding way". Or maybe the founders were honest and YC accepted this but then we circle back YC's own ethics code.
YC had means to check for this prefunding, and has means to deal with the problem now. If there's no transparency that any of this happened, it didn't happen. So the point of "checking integrity and ethics" becomes moot.
I don’t believe I misunderstood these words of yours, and provided you a ready reference to check for yourself whether YC had a code of ethics and whether that code contained the elements you were hand-wringing about.
> If YC has no ethics code, that's your answer right there. If they do but it fails to mention basic things like lying, cheating, deceiving especially when done intentionally, bingo again.
In a general sense, open source theft is bad, obviously. I have trouble feeling bad for this specific case though, given that it is a tool for cheating in interviews and tests.
I made an OSS tool to help you cheat on your taxes, screw your business partner, or ensure your ex wife cannot see the children. Someone stole the source and is backed by a major VC firm. Is the thought different at all or exactly the same? Just raising the question.
The difference is that the tool "cheating daddy" was specifically created for the purpose of cheating. Electricity, the Internet, and Google were not created for that purpose.
Cheating daddy's tagline is "If you're gonna cheat, cheat better".
Not that I'm in any way defending Cluely/Glass. Cluely's X bio is "cheat (noun) – an advantage so good it's unfair; rewrites the balance between effort and outcome."
Disclosure: I work at Google by my thoughts are my own.
The point is being "GPL evil" is GPL. Taking the code, not obtaining the copyright, and re-licensing it is a clear violation of copyright law and immoral.
We are not little children in the playground. Two wrongs do not make a right, and rights are most important for bad people
I'd be happy for a platform that encourages and facilities cheating to disappear and not be used anymore. So, on that front, I'd agree. As a side point though, the fact that someone big is funding something like that means, it's not really an issue for, atleast some, people.
The license violation is a problem independent of this. If this becomes acceptable for any reason (including the one that your post seemed to suggest - original work is unethical), it will have detrimental effects on a lot of good players as well.
A new product with four wheels that is used to transport people from A to B is a amazing new development! Some new 4 wheeled death machine to drive through crowds of people is an detriment to society.
The original product actually sounds kinda cool, but selling it as a cheating aid is incredibly low-value, and we'd be better off without it.
Things like this are why I have become disillusioned with Open Source, and why latest projects have been closed source. The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce. If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.
Well, if you're writing open source because you want to write open source, then none of this matters. If you are worried about corporations stealing your work, that should drive you away from OSS. OSS should stay "hobbyist" for the individual developer.
If a corporation is stealing your OSS code (and violating a license) then that implies that they think your code has value, they might have paid a person to write that code but instead some hobbyist built it for free and a corporation steals it.
A few months ago, I made a pull request to LMAX Disruptor, which was merged. I was initially excited because even if my PR was simple it’s still a big project that I contributed to. But after a few minutes it occurred to me that I just did free labor for a for-profit trading company. If they merged in my code then must have thought it had some value, and I decided to dedicate my time to saving this multi million dollar company some money.
My PR there was pretty simple and only took me like 30 minutes (if that), so I am not going to cry too hard over this, but it’s just something that made me realize that if a company is going to use my work, they should pay me. I don’t think it’s wrong or weird to want to be compensated for my labor.
I am still a hobbyist. Turns out you can still be a hobbyist without sharing everything you’ve ever done on GitHub.
I submitted a PR to fix a bug in cloud-init a while ago.
It was in my interest to do so, because it means I benefit from fixed packages in the Linux distributions I use. This saves me a ton of time in not having to maintain my own packages with my fix included.
If it helps Canonical make money, then it’s no skin off my nose because I still got the benefit I wanted.
I’m not going around fixing bugs that don’t affect me, or adding features I don’t need.
> But after a few minutes it occurred to me that I just did free labor for a for-profit trading company. If they merged in my code then must have thought it had some value, and I decided to dedicate my time to saving this multi million dollar company some money.
If you're not ok with that possibility than you probably shouldn't be participating in open source.
And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that. Its up to each individual to decide how they want to spend there time. There are pros and cons to open source, and you have to weigh how you feel about them yourself.
However, its not like this is some secret trick. Its the central tenant of Open Source (esp. When using that name instead of Free software). It should be very clear that this is happening. Its the entire point.
It kind of feels a bit like someone who doesn't like oranges, eats oranges, and then are surprised that they taste like oranges. By all means if you don't like oranges don't eat them, but if you knew you didn't like them why did you eat it in the first place?
It only devalues labor if it's leveraged specifically to do so. You could make this argument about literally any volunteer activity, software related or otherwise. The real devaluation of labor comes from things like the "gig economy" where costs and compensation are abstracted such that companies can exploit the naivete of workers who, generally speaking, are not accustomed to things like amortization and accounting for external costs, thus significantly driving down their own labor, operational expenses, and risks by passing them directly to the workers. At least open source projects are up-front about what's to be expected, and tend not to engage in exploitative practices.
I have had a bunch of jobs. When I have wanted to use open source libraries, I have been told “no” because the repo has no recent updates, because that suggests that whomever built it isn’t working it anymore. Conversely, where there are lots of updates, the project is likely to be used.
Why am I telling this story? Because it suggests to me that companies will only use these libraries if there is a guarantee of ongoing free labor; presumably they could use an old appropriate library and pay people to fix any issues as they come up. Admittedly, I know that some companies do exactly that, and that’s great, but I do not think it’s the majority.
I don’t think the people doing Open Source are bad people at all, far from it, in fact. I think a lot of these people are very smart and hard workers, and I think they should be compensated for their work, even if they are just “hobby projects”. If my project is creating value for a company, then that company can afford to pay me.
I don’t like the gig economy either but I don’t think it’s relevant to my complaints.
There are different actors in play here, and each one has a different perspective. That's OK, there's enough room in the world for different perspectives.
For the company, making use of Open Source code is free labor. That's good for them. You are free to offer that labor or not.
For some developers, it's cool to write code that's used by zillions. That's reward enough.
Other developers release the code for free, but build an eco system around it. They get paid for related work etc.
New developers use it to flex their skills, and demonstrate ability (and then get upset when someone else turns it into something profitable, but that's another story).
Personally I write code, and ship as source, but it's under a commercial license (cause I like to eat.) Other companies have business models around whatever they do.
You are free to act as you wish. Which is great. We live in an economy that allows each his preferred path.
You're right. Many startups open source their products specifically to get free labor, free marketing, or whatever. As payment they release the code they write to you. Whether you think that deal is right for uou or not us up to you.
If you believe you can add value to a company then reach out to them. It's not like they're "making" you work for free.
Wouldn’t this still be accomplished with a freeware model? That way hobbyists could still get your stuff for free but a corporation would have a slightly more difficult time directly stealing it.
> If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.
I think you can notice that output looks similar, error messages are similar, etc. If the program is non-trivial its usually pretty obvious if its a copy or a reimplementation.
If it sounds plausible, presumably you could sue and read the source in discovery (ianal, not sure precisely how that works)
> The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce.
Really? If you find a piece of proprietary software does basically the same thing as yours, and the binaries contains the same strings/artwork, then it's reasonable to make a legal case of it. You can even contact FSF and they'll take it further.
If you can directly prove a violation dead to rights (or have enough cause for a discovery request) and you have money for legal defense, sure.
A lot of open source stuff is libraries and utilities though that is pretty entrenched in the code. It is hard to even find out about a violation, let alone prove anything.
Imagine I came up with a new algorithm to do Fourier Transforms 10% faster than FFTW (or whatever the current market leader is) and make a library and I release it as GPL. A company could fairly easily just import it to whatever project they’re doing, and it would be extremely difficult for me to prove anything, especially if I don’t have any obvious things like strings in there.
That’s not even taking into account that it would be relatively easy for a corporation to just pay a junior engineer to do a direct “port” of the library to another language and pretending it’s their own independent work.
> Imagine I came up with a new algorithm to do Fourier Transforms 10% faster than FFTW (or whatever the current market leader is) and make a library and I release it as GPL. A company could fairly easily just import it to whatever project they’re doing, and it would be extremely difficult for me to prove anything, especially if I don’t have any obvious things like strings in there.
If you're doing something algorithmically different and unique, presumably that would show up in the assembly.
> That’s not even taking into account that it would be relatively easy for a corporation to just pay a junior engineer to do a direct “port” of the library to another language and pretending it’s their own independent work.
Important to keep in mind that copyright is not patents. If they are just stealing the "idea" of your algorithmic improvement, that probably isn't even a GPL violation. (This isn't fully right as they would probably have to use a clean-room design to avoid copyright infringement. My point is more that such a situation is pretty muddy and might actually be allowed)
All completely true. And something you can clearly take into account when you decide what to do with your code.
You may decide its worth people using it, reading it, learning from it, exploiting it, or you may not. It's your choice.
Of course your work may be used outside of the license terms. That's pretty much impossible to enforce. That's true for most-all software, commercial or open or free. If that's your main objection to writing code then I recommend a different career. All good code is pirated. That's just how it is.
There’s a reason they ask the question about describing a time you “hacked a system to your advantage” in the YC application. They have always selected for founders who are willing to take advantage of legal and ethical gray areas. Reddit created fake users and farmed content from Digg, Airbnb scraped listings from Craigslist.
There's an argument to be made that, even if it's an open and shut violation, if enforcement is nontrivial and a vanishingly low risk, it still pattern matches as "grey area" in terms of risk.
Not at all in favor of the person stealing someone else's code and slapping a new name on it in violation of the license, just that I think I see why people might list that as matching the same intent as a question like that.
Over the last decade or two, the builder/hacker ethos has seemed to shift towards this grifter, money-over-everything attitude. I’m sure there’s a lot at play (crypto culture, VC self-selection, the attraction of ‘easy’ high salaries), but I’m sure it’ll get markedly worse with ai tooling and the any-publicity-is-good fomo marketing that’s taken over the startup scene.
My take is both OP’s tool and the blatant plagiarism of it are examples.
Yeah, most VC founders on twitter are annoying and not worth following anymore. It used to be inspiring to follow some of them many years ago, see them build a cool product and sharing learnings. Now it's all just promotion, straight up lies, and their personal brand comes across as more important than actually building something. The "learnings" shared are now more tailored to go viral than actually help others etc.
the backstory that explains it is the same silly con valley bullshit as always: low quality people doing low quality work and hyping the ever loving fuck out of it for some dumb vc bucks.
I’m sure there’s much more we don’t know about. They just didn’t get caught. Yc used to have this reputation of being one of the good guys but I guess nothing is really immune to corruption.
To paraphrase Voltaire, I mean, Tallentyre, I mean, Hall, I may not agree with what you publish under the GPL but I defend to the death your right to assert the GPL...
So when someone is actively losing their rights you feel the need to go out of your way to say you're unsympathetic. What did you /intend/ to convey with this? You support them, but at this dark moment, you felt the need to kick their shins also?
I initially downvoted you, but on second thought I’m actually a bit sympathetic to your argument. We see a similar pattern happening elsewhere. E.g. US citizens being round up by paramilitary forces and shuttled without due process to places which can almost be described as concentration camps. All for the stated crime of maybe entering the country improperly. The argument goes that they do not deserve anything else because they are ”illegals”.
Doing one bad thing does not necessarily justify other bad things done to you.
That said, I don’t like this cheating-enabling software either and think the world would be a better place without it.
Here you are OP, a little closer to idiocracy by your own actions and by HN zealots here, and all you SV tech bro wannabes who participate in this day by day ever more fake economy.
Propel and fund into the world the product with sole purpose to pretend, to cheat, to fraud everyone, then to make "open source" version on this, and then to complain that someone stole it from you, to fund and sell even more sophisticated product with sole purpose to pretend, to cheat, to fraud everyone.
This maliciously deliberate hustling behavior, fake it till you make it, feel good, superiority complex, reality distorted, this version of society, a bubble, a community, open source, call it, or wrap it too sell whatever you want it, this all post-post-modern obscenery will be ruin of you all.
There's actual good reason for that. the X Formally Known As Twitter company has a content weighting system that punishes external links, regardless where the link is pointed to. So apparently Mr. Soham did the smartest thing to give that post the best chance to spread.
BTW, the X Formally Known As Twitter company is not the only one who conduced the world to this, all big names do link restriction. Look what we've become, such nice world :)
Yeah, once someone posted a link I could read, I saw that. Bummer, looks like they ripped it off and sounds like they're currently doing the usual backpedal. Sorry your project got the wrong kind of attention in this way, I also (eventually) read into your tone while reading through your repo, and I understand much of it is tongue-in-cheek. It softened my position a bit. Hope you enjoy better luck in your future endeavors.
lol, I'll bet you $10 that the name is exactly why they got themselves into this mess. Had the name been something like "meeting-agent" or some corporate friendly name like that, they probably wouldn't have tried to hide it so much.
This being on page 2 with 247 upvotes in the three hour time period this post has been up is surprising to me. I wouldn't be surprised if @dang is suppressing it (but I'd also be happy to hear that it's not being suppressed).
It's pretty spineless for the Pickle team to come out and pretend they mistakenly re-licensed GPL code. Hilarious.
> in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache
How can you write a sentence like that in good faith?
The first rule of HN moderation is that we moderate (i.e., intervene) less if a story reflects negatively on a YC company or YC itself.
This principle goes right back to pg days, and was the first thing he taught dang [1].
That said, it doesn't mean we avoid moderation at all and it doesn't mean the guidelines all go out the window.
Different factors influence the story's rank and visibility on the front page: upvotes, flags, the flamewar detector, and settings to turn these penalties on/off. I'm actively watching the thread to keep it on the front page, as per the rule.
That said, the guidelines ask us to avoid fulmination and assume good faith. Whilst it's fair enough to criticize and question a company when they do something like this, we can also be adult enough to look the evidence before us and recognize that this was most likely a dumb mistake that they've moved quickly to correct.
Setting the license text is an explicit act and it seems fairly unlikely for anyone who creates software to think they can relicence GPL code or to think they didn't need to Google it first. Doing something that you meant to do isn't a mistake it's a choice.
It seems more likely that they didn't think anyone would notice.
> It seems more likely that they didn't think anyone would notice.
Maybe, but if that's what they thought (and I have no idea, I haven't spoken to them or anyone else about it), it's very foolish, because this kind of thing will always get noticed eventually, especially if the project becomes successful.
The evidence clearly shows it was not a 'dumb mistake'
They claim they wrote the whole thing in 4 days. They did not attribute the original author in ANY way.
They clearly showed they intended to steal the authors work and sell it as if they wrote it. YC has just become such a dumpster fire if that kind behaviour is even remotely accepted or called a 'dumb mistake'
They committed the (presumably ripped off) repo yesterday, changed the license from GPL to Apache, and now have changed it back (presumably in response to this thread).
> let's not freak out - you can't "steal" open-source code, they used an incompatible license. that was accidentally too free.
What a poetic formulation? In reality, they deleted history and they put a license that allows the "freedom" to let them monetize the code. I wonder how's the original author more free with this license? How is anyone more free? Sounds like the license was "accidentally" "too free" in a way that only made themselves more free.
> people monetizing something you open-source isn't stealing.
It's, in fact, the precise definition when the open-source project uses the GPLv3 license.
If it was 'just' a licensing slip up sure, but there's still a lot of integrity issues here despite that. The presentation of "we created an open source library to do X in just days" comes across as a lie right?
I feel like ycombinator leads may want to look more deeply into this one. If they are presenting it as something they've achieved that's an integrity issue right?
This is the crux of it all to me. Anyone in the industry knows mistakes happen all the time but the braggadocios nature rubs me the wrong way and spits in the face to those of YC who do indeed have integrity.
It's baffling why someone would do this tbh. It's not like the base project is some spectacular piece of engineering that would be very costly to replicate.
I'm guessing they just looked at it as a jumping point. It probably went something like:
- We know how to polish an electron app
- here is a barebone electron app with an interesting idea
- Can we build a polished UI around this, and give a demo?
The baffling part is, had they just disclosed that, no one would have given a shit. Plenty of demos begin like that: "here is a cool idea we found, here is that idea on crack". is a very common demo pattern. But of course you can't give a shout out to 'cheating-daddy' at YC demo.
It's like a fine student at a fine college, in a class they are doing fine in, then they decide to copy their friend's cover letter because "eh", then they get caught and now what? wtf would you do this?
Like the frog in the parable,[1] people with integrity often struggle when they attempt to understand the motivations of people who cheat. “Why would they cheat in this particular situation?”, they ask themselves. “It makes no sense!” Well they are cheaters. Cheaters cheat.
1) I once was in a position where I had root on the linux boxes at a large corporation because I had been a sysadmin there and even when I changed roles, I was never removed from sudoers. Years later there was an accusation that someone had stolen source code and taken it with them to a new job. On its face this made absolutely no sense whatsoever - the system they were accused of stealing was a complete pos in the middle of a complex ecosystem so even if you had it, you couldn’t use it without all the other pieces and in any case, it was old and outdated and just total garbage. Anyway this accusation was somewhat hush—hush so the cto came to me and asked me to just look into whether or not it could be true. Sure enough, there in his bash history I could see him checking out the code and pushing it to an external repo. It made absolutely no sense, but he had indeed stolen the source code to a system that was a total piece of junk. He ended up with a criminal conviction, he lost his shiny new job, his wife left him etc. It was very said and baffling.
2)Second example, fast forward some years and I was working for a saas provider. We had won an initial proof of concept and were negotiating a 5-year, multi-million dollar contract. At the same time, our client asked us to just do a free two-week spike on something unrelated. We had to sign a (different) zero dollar contract to cover licenses, liability etc for the free spike. The same purchasing lawyer was working on both contracts. The usual contracting process is you send the contract over to the other side with some markup and comments, they make some markup and comments, you propose language, they amend it, they propose language, you amend it, eventually everyone agrees and you make a clean copy and both sides sign. While we were doing this for the big contract, we got to the point of signing the zero dollar contract. At the last moment with everything agreed, the other side said they would make the clean copy. They sent it over to us and when we did our final check before signing we found the guy on the other side had meticulously gone through and made a version which accepted all their changes and backed out all of our changes. This required a lot of extra work and could not have been an accident (think cherrypicking commits and fixing all the merge conflicts using only MS Word revision history), and it was on the zero dollar contract so there was no conceivable upside except he could say he “won” somehow by tricking us. All this while we were negotiating the multi-million dollar multiyear contract. It made absolutely no sense whatsoever to do what he did. There is no way to understand why he decided to do it, but he did it.
So yeah, don’t even try to understand why some people do the unethical things they do. Scorpions gotta sting. It’s just what they do.
The license they used was less free than the GPL license. Laundering GPL code into projects with licenses that aren't as free is classic copyright infringement.
yes, but sublicensing to even permissive ("free-er") license (GPLv3+ to Apache2.0) is a violation of license.
GPL is supposed to viral, if you are using project adopted that, you are taking the risk with it.
If you are just changing the license and took the code, that's wrong and need to get an attention. If anyone could go just yoink and relicense the GPL code to other permissive license was "legal", the https://gpl-violations.org wouldn't exist in the first place (i.e. you can just take the linux kernel code and rename it something like "mynux", redistribute in bsd-3 clause and "don't distribute the derivative part").
It looks like they've squashed everything into a single commit, since there's only a commit on their repo right now that was pushed 28 minutes ago (as of this comment).
That's probably the right thing to do Git-wise, because licences might not be retroactive.
From what I understand, it would be a breach of contract at minimum (based on what I remember from past discussions of this sort of activity involving different participants).
If someone else has a better idea of what “forking GPL 3 source code and using a different licence” would be, then please let me and others know.
If you don't follow the license, then you don't have a license to use, distribute or modify the code. So then you get into copyright violation territory, up to $150,000 per infringement in the US if it's intentional.
Sadly in my experience various courts have taken a stance that violating GPL does not cause monetary damages, because the software in question is free.
I somewhat doubt they can since in the US the BusyBox lawsuits pretty much all ended with the infringers settling and paying out, and those that didn’t settle, busybox won[1]. I would think that, and the original artistic license lawsuits (which were decided on by the US court of appeals) established that infringing open source softwaree licenses is a copyright infringement.
You can read the text of the GPLv3 license itself; it has a specific provision for this case.
> "Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice."
Realistically this will probably just have a reputational cost for Daniel Park/Pickle. Whether he intended to or not, some amount of people will associate “pretends to make things that he did not make” with him because of this entirely unforced error.
Hi everyone, this is Daniel from the Pickle team. Glass is a new open source project from us that we plan to build on and improve. We built several original features for it like live summaries, real-time STT Transcript and one-click "Ask" from summary that we're very excited about. However in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache. This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end. We made a quick fix and are working right now to do a proper fix that addresses the issues fully and cleanly. We are sorry to the original author of the project, Soham (CheatingDaddy), and thank him for pointing this out. We are also sorry to the open source community for messing up here. Thanks everyone for caring about this.
Hiding the entire history of this incident[1] behind a force push[2] to make it seem as if credit was given and proper license was chosen from the start really displays a lack of integrity, and tells me it’s definitely malicious (which should be quite clear from zero mention of the original project to begin with, but this act reinforces that) rather an inadvertent screwup.
I don’t think the rebase is malicious. Would they even be allowed to continue distributing the older commits (where they claim an Apache license) or would that be to perpetuate the license violation?
I'm too jaded to pointlessly debate all the misunderstandings about copyright and licenses. Bottom line is, this case is clearly not going to court, so there's no entity allowing or not allowing them to do anything, the only thing that matters is does this act of hiding enrages the original author even more? My answer to that is yes. Plus that old commit is still there, accessible after a couple of rather obscure clicks, so it's not even taken down if you want to debate technicalities.
I think the assumption that the license.txt in a given revision is accurate an applicable is erroneous. One is expected to follow the license.txt in the main repo regardless of revision.
Calling it sloppy work is too charitable. It's one thing for others to give you a benefit of the doubt, it's absolutely crazy that you yourself are doing it. It's clear if the other guy did not speak up, you would not have "corrected" the incorrect attribution. Your entire repo uses the work from someone else, and you did not even credit the person who built it until he called you out for the deception.
If you had any semblance of respect for the work of others and what is right you would sincerely apologize and shut the project down instead of rolling with it.
Hard to say that your work isn't derived from a GPL project if you quite openly are reimplementing a GPL project you used at the core of your own project.
I love comments like this ^. It provides a solution to the table, rather than conversing the problem over dinner.
IMO This sounds pretty fair to me. Publicly apologize somewhere, and link OP to it. I like that. Or come on, at least Venmo "the kid" $1000 -- "a kid" who saved you time, and is putting food on your table.
"A kid" whose idea you took and profited on. Wow, just realizing upon writing this -- what if Pickle CEO has kids, and one your kid reads this?
> This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end. We made a quick fix and are working right now to do a proper fix that addresses the issues fully and cleanly.
There is no fix. Your work is derived and should be/will be licensed as GPL. You do not want to accidentally succeed and then find you have nothing. You are being a smart-ass here.
Cut the grandoise talk. You stole someone's work and now you just shrug it off as "incorrectly attributed as Apache". That's not a mistake, that's a deliberate action plan. The force push others have mentioned is the proof. Atleast be honest in your apology.
I hope YC takes serious action and eliminates you guys from their cohort if you're still in one. This reflects very poorly on them otherwise.