This post has already been removed from the front page and my comment was flagged and I guarantee you have shadowbanned me already. Let's be real, you do this all the time Mr. Goebells. Your boys PG and Thiel are traitors who supported J6 and are actively trying to elect Donald Trump and JD Vance.
I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years.
In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed.
I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while building the initial PoCs).
Some have failed, some have succeeded wildly, some have hit their limits of growth, some have a great product that solves an obvious problem yet get zero traction.
Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there are 3 companies in the same domain doing the same thing; then it simply comes down to insider connections, sales, marketing, and pricing.
In the end, the team that wins isn't always the one with the best product; there is a fair bit of luck and timing, marketing is super important, and having the right leadership team in place makes all the difference. The non-product aspects of a successful business are supremely underappreciated, especially by the technical folks. Bad products can become good products eventually; bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
So it makes sense for YC or any VC to bet broadly because the reasons why a team succeeds and another fails is so intangible with so much luck and timing involved as well that making broad bets -- even if two YC-batch companies are very similar in terms of domain and product -- is just sound business.
Edit: to be clear, these are not my principles (no need to attack me personally); these are simply my observations about teams that have succeeded and teams that have floundered. I left 1 company because because in principle, I disagreed with their loose operational style in a regulated space.
The problem here is not that they stole the idea, it's that they literally just took an open-source codebase and filed off the serial numbers to claim it as their own proprietary work, and they did so in the most comically inept way possible.
From the OP:
PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.
> PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it
This is comical but not the core fuck-up: PearAI failed to attribute, thereby violating Community’s license.
It might be salvageable if they can convince customers they aren’t dragging everyone who uses them into a legal morass. But that will likely take more funding, and “help me pay lawyers” isn’t a great pitch.
Good artist copy, great artists steal. PearAI tried and failed to copy. Y Combinator's value-adding play is in striking a licensing and indemnification deal between PearAI and Community. (If Community is smart, they'll demand an arm and a leg. They're owed it.)
It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
Anyone who uses open source software licensed under Apache 2.0 must include the following in their copy of the code, whether they have modified it or not:
1. The original copyright notice
2. A copy of the license itself
3. If applicable, a statement of any significant changes made to the original code
4. A copy of the NOTICE file with attribution notes (if the original library has one)
[...]
However, you do not need to release the modified code under Apache 2.0. Simply including any modification notifications is enough to comply with the license terms.
The problem is that they took someone else's code, claimed they built it themselves, and then claimed that as evidence for the velocity and capability of their team.
If they had said it's based on X. Or that they're going in a different direction. Or even that they're going in the same direction but will best that other team. Who cares? YC should bet on multiple companies in the same space. It's only logical.
What bothers people is the lie.
Also. They did break the terms of the license. They replaced the Apache license with their own enterprise license. They said they have the rights to relicense the code. Apache requires that they disclose the origin of the code and what modifications they made. And they lied to YC about that, they don't have any of these rights.
It's not sound business to lie to investors. It's not sound business to violate licenses.
Wild take, copying matters. If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market. This very idea that ideas don't matter is hogwash, you can say that idea alone is not enough, but it matters. This is why big companies sometimes get sued by the govt, they copy smaller companies ideas, add it into their already established product for free and stifle growth for the world.
> bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes:
"We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so their instinct was to ask ChatGPT to generate one that they "thought was open" and they didn't even blink when it generated one with "Enterprise" in the title.
These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.
It's very possible that they have the wrong vibes and will fail; this is why any VC is smart to bet on multiple teams, even if many are building very similar products. A good portion of those teams will go nowhere and fall apart by themselves. Even the best VC-partner can't always tell how a teams vibes are from the inside until it's too late.
Maybe the point isnt to invest in the team with the best ideas, but to invest in the most ruthless/least ethical because thats what the investors believe will win the day?
> a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude
You've described most "successful" startups.
FTX, Binance, Uber, etc.
The company I was in that raised a $100m C was in a real mess behind the scenes operating in a highly regulated space (one of the reasons I left; I disagreed with certain practices in principle).
Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible? I say that wholeheartedly considering the time it takes to take something from an idea to a PoC to an MVP. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are plenty of quick slap together projects out there, similar to the one been commented here, they are more like a marketing wrapper of bundles from others people’s work, which is something to be frowned upon… specially if you are technically motivated.
Well, IMHO, when considering a project, knowing that you are solving for a customer demand problem is very different than from a VC minded problem. I personally would never advise or be part of such an “Arrangement.” These are my clear principles, and my success will come or fail, but my integrity will never be questioned.
> Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible?
I joined each at different stages. Some I left after short stints because the vibes were just wrong. Some failed and I could immediately tell that the vibes were off after the first bit of turbulence. I'm still at one of the startups because the vibes are good and we've got a good product and team.
I'd say it matters. Life becomes so much harder if you have to justify why your seed/pre-seed startup has a unique advantage, but you're just ripping off the competition. Maybe you have unique hustle. That's a fairly incredible claim - especially in a crowded space like AI.
I think it's at least a warning klaxon. We're entering this market by copying a competitor (not just in UI/UX, but literally byte-for-byte). How are we going to beat them? How do we ensure the same does not happen to us?
AI-powered coding is such a ridiculously crowded arena. I would be pretty apprehensive. Even if I was dead-set on doing an AI startup, I would still look for a different market.
All good points. Problem is, they didn’t attribute after the copy. And that’s literally all they had to do. Now they stand in violation of that license which I admit I don’t know what that means, but it probably isn’t good. I mean, how do you fuck up piggy-backing off open source? I’ve had many companies piggy back off my own project and it’s whatever, because they attribute to the original codebase. But it’s all whatever. Most these discussions are gonna end up in the trash over the next 5 years anyway as rationalistic machines spread more and more.
>Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter
LOL. Why is the West complaining about China 'copying' their ideas and products? It seems hypocritical. Why are Western companies crying foul about China?
> Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter.
There is this tendency among a subset of the tech community to look down on copying. I think this is probably coming from more junior people who recently came out of university where plagiarism is punished, or people in academia such as in PhD programs which are trained to highly value originality.
People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year. They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb. If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.
> In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year.
I think people think otherwise because they used to be more selective, and haven't noticed just how much their volume has grown over the years. Early on it was a few dozen startups per year, then a hundred or so, and eventually the current state of greenlighting almost two startups every day on average (we're 275 days into the year and YC has racked up 509 companies in this years batches so far). They're less of a startup accelerator and more of a startup shotgun at this point.
It’s game theory. AWS would do the same thing by pitting teams against each other internally. Often times, we would have multiple products doing the same exact thing but slightly differentiated. Of course AWS claims to not deprecate services but they would resource the successful service team and PIP everyone out of the unsuccessful team and bring it back to a skeleton crew. If you wonder why the AWS Product offerings are so F'd and inconsistent it's because of them using management techniques like this.
This is true for every VC no? And the whole idea behind VCs? They aren't exactly only aiming to fund the startups they think 100% will be successful, as then they wouldn't fund anyone, so instead they spread out the risk to catch any surprise winners.
Does anyone really look at the line-up of funded startups from a VC and think they're all winners?
Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them. In the first case they will obviously do a ton of due diligence, go over business plans, get board seats, look at code and more. YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it.
The earlier you invest, the larger the risk and looser the diligence.
For sure- it's just that YC didn't used to operate like that. They have morphed from an interesting higher-touch incubator whose involvement was a strong positive signal into a scattershot VC, but not everyone realizes that so being "YC backed" still carries more prestige than is warranted.
Most VCs try to avoid having the portcos actively compete with each other (ie they won't back 2 separate ride hailing apps) b/c they'll end up competing for the same pool of customers
Correct what exactly? Did they release this as their final product as the first milestone?
From what I gleaned the company has barely started and the founder recently(?) quit his job. They raised money on an idea and forked another project, changed the branding, and used it as the base to build a prototype
That doesn't mean this is the end product that YC invested in.
Lots of companies created MVPs this way before using funding and their new runway of time to do it properly.
If they do release it as the end product with little effort that’s basically fraud
> Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour
Lol if you’re not aware, they came up with the gold standard in simple seed investment contracts used by nearly every pre-series-a startup in existence. Adding clauses like “don’t fork open source code” is just pointless and cumbersome legal bs that does nothing but get in the way.
What does this do to society when people with no product, no use, and no hope of profit are consistently rewarded with free money? It practically incentivizes bullshit.
Well this just goes to the core of your view on the role of luck in life. Are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year and 5 of them are run by geniuses who single handedly disrupt loads of markets. Or are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year full of roughly equally good people 5 of which get extremely lucky and make boatloads of money.
Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.
The worst part is that instead of backing out and let's say kicking them out of the batch, YC doubled down praising the (pretty poor imho) justification that may also have been written by ChatGPT, like the license :)
I don’t thinks its the worst, but it did feel in bad taste. YC have put money and trust in them, so why would they kick them down? Would you? They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves (Note: I am not a YC founder or affiliated with YC in any way)
They haven't built anything and didn't even bother to properly rename everything in the original repository.
It's clear they are not deserving of YC backing, nor are they trustworthy, as they seem to have misrepresented their involvement in building the software. They're not in crypto anymore :)
> They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves
There are bad, socially unacceptable things that are also not crimes (for instance: lying in a lot of contexts). Crimes (for the most part) are just the more extreme bad things someone can do.
If you think the bar for distancing from someone is "committing a crime," your bar is far too low. Unfortunately, that minimal bar is a meme that has been pushed with some success by people who want to get away with shady shit.
EDIT: Looks like they have since changed the license to Apache 2.0 but it's still in violation of the original MIT license and does not contain the required copyright notice.
It'd be unethical for YC to kick them out. PearAI signed an agreement with the startup incubator and presumably didn't misrepresent their product. The main criticism is that YC made a bad business decision by backing a non-innovative product. That's an issue that should be handled privately between YC and the founders, not through public humiliation.
If I get hired at a job I expect my boss to (publicly) back me if another team criticizes my work, then tell me the issues in a 1-on-1. If I have investors I expect them to (publicly) back my business strategy and privately tell me their concerns.
"Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
I hope it's not a new trend: doing some unethical sh*t and justifying that "AI" did that.
I guess handing over creation of a legal document to chatgpt, done in a narrowly selected YC startup which is supposed to be smartest founders around, that's insulting the intelligence of everyone, isn't it?
Edit: forgot to underline: they had all the legal and administrative support of YC yet they gave this task of creating legal document to chatGPT.
How can this be even remotely a norm?
i also think that's why this story sorta went viral, it blended the worst aspects of AI in the tech popular culture by bragging about theft and saying dawg unironically
There's two very separate reasons I find this a bad look for YC.
1. The very cavalier response from the founders about the licensing issue. "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Had they immediately owned up to the mistake and said "This was an oversight on our part and we are immediately restoring the content of the Apache license" it would not have been an issue. But Open Source only works if people follow the rules.
2. In general, this is just an indication that YC is not the quality filter it once was. It seems they are more interested in founders online following (the founders are both YouTubers with significant channel sizes) than they are about the business itself.
> 2. In general, this is just an indication that YC is not the quality filter it once was. It seems they are more interested in founders online following (the founders are both YouTubers with significant channel sizes) than they are about the business itself.
I noticed same thing with the latest batches (2019+) where founders sometimes with only a welcome page in the site, an e-mail list, and a blog going to Linkedin and doing a lot of self-promoting to generate steam in the company instead to deliver something good.
This reminds me of another clone that YC backed: Athens Research[1]. Supposedly, open-source alternative to Roam Research. The company barely lasted for two years before shutting down[1]. While it's laudable to create open-source alternative, I always believed copying in such cases should be spiritual, not blatant, where even your name is just a derivative of the original.
YC's decision-making has become very questionable in the past few years, and though it's cliche to say this, it just resembles a textbook fad-chasing VC firm. YC latest batch includes LumenOrbit, a startup building data-center in the space[2]. The idea is not only impractical, it's simply pointless. I am no space scientist, but I could smell the BS just from the mission statement. Amazing that smart guys at YC couldn't.
They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
"You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and
You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and
You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;"
> They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
The founder was also on Twitter bragging about how they were the "true open source" editor in this space because they already have 100+ open source contributors, when the majority of those were just upstream VS Code contributors whose patches they had merged back into their fork.
1. It may be legally permissible, but it is impolite, to change the license away from the well-known Apache software license towards something which has not been legally vetted, and is in fact generated entirely by AI with minimal oversight.
2. There is an open question of what the supposed value add is here from the Pear team, that could not have been achieved by the people whose work they are co-opting.
3. Without a clear value proposition, the oversight given to projects by YC is called into question. I think this is the point most people are concerned by.
Your first point is not true. If Continue wanted a copyleft license, they would have done so. Continue basically said they are fine with people forking and changing the license
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license.
Which part?
Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.
Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.
So the can of worms here now shifts to piracy. Whenever it comes up, a large percentage of people here on HN support it. "you wouldn't have purchased it anyway", "the original authors don't lose anything".
The same can be said about using the Apache license and the service here in question. In fact, the difference is that it's completely legal.
And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly?
Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
Not being polite will get you yelled at, as is happening right now, and should not be surprising. Legally there may be nothing and they are welcome to ruin their reputation and suffer the consequences.
I find it baffling in conversations I keep having with people that someone thinks that because something is legally permissible, then it is acceptable. It's the same vein of when people cry "free speech" when they said something reprehensible, as if that somehow should protect them from how people react to their horrible statements.
I think what is driving this is one the of the fundamental problems with the tech industry and its relationship to society: the ingraining of the assumption that because something is legal to do means it is OK to do. They are not and I think there should be more outrage when something like this tries to slide by.
It is not that simple. Very few licenses are accepted by, e.g., Linux distributions. If you create your own modified license, for example BSD with two additional clauses that prohibit use for AI training and use in startups without significant modifications then no one will use it.
That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
That is the reason why the smug response "You allowed me to do this" isn't sufficient.
In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license.
In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.
Yes but they don't defend their view about enterprise product, instead saying they "chatgpt'ed" the license and "can't be bothered with legal", which is IMO even worse - I mean, as a founder how can one be so dumb to openly say that? Especially that they have access to YC's legal and administrative support?
> if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
It's not just unethical, it is clearly illegal.
If you don't own the copyright to a program's source code, you cannot legally relicense that source code! Same holds true for any other copyrightable creative work which can be licensed. This is a very clear case of copyright infringement.
Nothing in the Apache license permits the licensee to relicense the source code (meaning, entirely replace the license with a different one).
It does permit you to build derivative enterprise products, and you have no obligation to keep the source code open for derivative products. But if you do release the source code for your derivative product, any original unmodified Apache licensed portion of the code retains that license and you cannot remove it if you aren't the copyright holder for that original work.
It's like someone taking all the money from the 'take a penny, leave a penny' jar, or taking all the books from a little free library, or not putting their shopping cart in the cart return area.
A completely legal violation of the social contract. Or in layman's terms, a dick move.
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.
AFAIK, people are not upset about the forking, but everything surrounding the forking, the actual business they "created" and the LLM-generated license.
Otherwise I agree, would be very strange if someone publishes a FOSS project, someone forks it and people get outraged. But I guess wouldn't be the weirdest things social media folks been upset about in the end...
1. I disagree
2. How is it not ethical or moral? As stated above, you are allowed to resell software based on the Apache license and integrate it into a service. The original authors haven't lost anything.
A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.
Readit News
Pear AI founder: We made two big mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 - Sept 2024 (188 comments)
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 - Sept 2024 (240 comments)
In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed.
I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while building the initial PoCs).
Some have failed, some have succeeded wildly, some have hit their limits of growth, some have a great product that solves an obvious problem yet get zero traction.
Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there are 3 companies in the same domain doing the same thing; then it simply comes down to insider connections, sales, marketing, and pricing.
In the end, the team that wins isn't always the one with the best product; there is a fair bit of luck and timing, marketing is super important, and having the right leadership team in place makes all the difference. The non-product aspects of a successful business are supremely underappreciated, especially by the technical folks. Bad products can become good products eventually; bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
So it makes sense for YC or any VC to bet broadly because the reasons why a team succeeds and another fails is so intangible with so much luck and timing involved as well that making broad bets -- even if two YC-batch companies are very similar in terms of domain and product -- is just sound business.
Edit: to be clear, these are not my principles (no need to attack me personally); these are simply my observations about teams that have succeeded and teams that have floundered. I left 1 company because because in principle, I disagreed with their loose operational style in a regulated space.
From the OP:
PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.
This is comical but not the core fuck-up: PearAI failed to attribute, thereby violating Community’s license.
It might be salvageable if they can convince customers they aren’t dragging everyone who uses them into a legal morass. But that will likely take more funding, and “help me pay lawyers” isn’t a great pitch.
Good artist copy, great artists steal. PearAI tried and failed to copy. Y Combinator's value-adding play is in striking a licensing and indemnification deal between PearAI and Community. (If Community is smart, they'll demand an arm and a leg. They're owed it.)
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
What morons
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If they had said it's based on X. Or that they're going in a different direction. Or even that they're going in the same direction but will best that other team. Who cares? YC should bet on multiple companies in the same space. It's only logical.
What bothers people is the lie.
Also. They did break the terms of the license. They replaced the Apache license with their own enterprise license. They said they have the rights to relicense the code. Apache requires that they disclose the origin of the code and what modifications they made. And they lied to YC about that, they don't have any of these rights.
It's not sound business to lie to investors. It's not sound business to violate licenses.
Use those tools to your advantage if you are small.
Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes:
"We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so their instinct was to ask ChatGPT to generate one that they "thought was open" and they didn't even blink when it generated one with "Enterprise" in the title.
These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.
https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840831339337302204
More likely both.
We are talking about a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude.
And that's doing a big disservice to the AI space coming from a high-profile incubator such as YC.
If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a terrible warning.
FTX, Binance, Uber, etc.
The company I was in that raised a $100m C was in a real mess behind the scenes operating in a highly regulated space (one of the reasons I left; I disagreed with certain practices in principle).
Well, IMHO, when considering a project, knowing that you are solving for a customer demand problem is very different than from a VC minded problem. I personally would never advise or be part of such an “Arrangement.” These are my clear principles, and my success will come or fail, but my integrity will never be questioned.
I think it's at least a warning klaxon. We're entering this market by copying a competitor (not just in UI/UX, but literally byte-for-byte). How are we going to beat them? How do we ensure the same does not happen to us?
AI-powered coding is such a ridiculously crowded arena. I would be pretty apprehensive. Even if I was dead-set on doing an AI startup, I would still look for a different market.
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Most VCs invest in teams first, products/ideas second.
LOL. Why is the West complaining about China 'copying' their ideas and products? It seems hypocritical. Why are Western companies crying foul about China?
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There is this tendency among a subset of the tech community to look down on copying. I think this is probably coming from more junior people who recently came out of university where plagiarism is punished, or people in academia such as in PhD programs which are trained to highly value originality.
I think people think otherwise because they used to be more selective, and haven't noticed just how much their volume has grown over the years. Early on it was a few dozen startups per year, then a hundred or so, and eventually the current state of greenlighting almost two startups every day on average (we're 275 days into the year and YC has racked up 509 companies in this years batches so far). They're less of a startup accelerator and more of a startup shotgun at this point.
Does anyone really look at the line-up of funded startups from a VC and think they're all winners?
The earlier you invest, the larger the risk and looser the diligence.
Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour, if they don't correct it now it will happen again.
From what I gleaned the company has barely started and the founder recently(?) quit his job. They raised money on an idea and forked another project, changed the branding, and used it as the base to build a prototype
That doesn't mean this is the end product that YC invested in.
Lots of companies created MVPs this way before using funding and their new runway of time to do it properly.
If they do release it as the end product with little effort that’s basically fraud
Lol if you’re not aware, they came up with the gold standard in simple seed investment contracts used by nearly every pre-series-a startup in existence. Adding clauses like “don’t fork open source code” is just pointless and cumbersome legal bs that does nothing but get in the way.
As an incubator, you own the practices of the companies in your portfolio.
It does not take a lot of rotten fruits to ruin the brand.
Possibly related post from yesterday:
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032
Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.
Clicking a button on GitHub is different from existing in the same industry.
Unless I am missing an Apache licensed code base that powers all of Visa…
uhh this is not the same as TFA. this is a very quippy, pg-esque way of excusing the behavior though.
https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291
It's clear they are not deserving of YC backing, nor are they trustworthy, as they seem to have misrepresented their involvement in building the software. They're not in crypto anymore :)
There are bad, socially unacceptable things that are also not crimes (for instance: lying in a lot of contexts). Crimes (for the most part) are just the more extreme bad things someone can do.
If you think the bar for distancing from someone is "committing a crime," your bar is far too low. Unfortunately, that minimal bar is a meme that has been pushed with some success by people who want to get away with shady shit.
Not a crime != OK.
[0] https://github.com/trypear/pearai-app/blob/e921c7ae272168577...
EDIT: Looks like they have since changed the license to Apache 2.0 but it's still in violation of the original MIT license and does not contain the required copyright notice.
If I get hired at a job I expect my boss to (publicly) back me if another team criticizes my work, then tell me the issues in a 1-on-1. If I have investors I expect them to (publicly) back my business strategy and privately tell me their concerns.
What about the license change? Not a crime?
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I hope it's not a new trend: doing some unethical sh*t and justifying that "AI" did that.
I guess handing over creation of a legal document to chatgpt, done in a narrowly selected YC startup which is supposed to be smartest founders around, that's insulting the intelligence of everyone, isn't it?
Edit: forgot to underline: they had all the legal and administrative support of YC yet they gave this task of creating legal document to chatGPT. How can this be even remotely a norm?
1. The very cavalier response from the founders about the licensing issue. "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Had they immediately owned up to the mistake and said "This was an oversight on our part and we are immediately restoring the content of the Apache license" it would not have been an issue. But Open Source only works if people follow the rules.
2. In general, this is just an indication that YC is not the quality filter it once was. It seems they are more interested in founders online following (the founders are both YouTubers with significant channel sizes) than they are about the business itself.
I noticed same thing with the latest batches (2019+) where founders sometimes with only a welcome page in the site, an e-mail list, and a blog going to Linkedin and doing a lot of self-promoting to generate steam in the company instead to deliver something good.
YC's decision-making has become very questionable in the past few years, and though it's cliche to say this, it just resembles a textbook fad-chasing VC firm. YC latest batch includes LumenOrbit, a startup building data-center in the space[2]. The idea is not only impractical, it's simply pointless. I am no space scientist, but I could smell the BS just from the mission statement. Amazing that smart guys at YC couldn't.
[1]: https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176
[2]: https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072
If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.
"You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;"
The founder was also on Twitter bragging about how they were the "true open source" editor in this space because they already have 100+ open source contributors, when the majority of those were just upstream VS Code contributors whose patches they had merged back into their fork.
https://x.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284
1. It may be legally permissible, but it is impolite, to change the license away from the well-known Apache software license towards something which has not been legally vetted, and is in fact generated entirely by AI with minimal oversight.
2. There is an open question of what the supposed value add is here from the Pear team, that could not have been achieved by the people whose work they are co-opting.
3. Without a clear value proposition, the oversight given to projects by YC is called into question. I think this is the point most people are concerned by.
Dead Comment
Which part?
Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.
Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.
>Oh no, you're allowed to do whatever you want, but you shouldn't.
>>Then why is Amazon allowed to do it if they shouldn't?
>It's not polite.
>>...
The same can be said about using the Apache license and the service here in question. In fact, the difference is that it's completely legal.
The original authors don't lose anything.
Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
I find it baffling in conversations I keep having with people that someone thinks that because something is legally permissible, then it is acceptable. It's the same vein of when people cry "free speech" when they said something reprehensible, as if that somehow should protect them from how people react to their horrible statements.
I think what is driving this is one the of the fundamental problems with the tech industry and its relationship to society: the ingraining of the assumption that because something is legal to do means it is OK to do. They are not and I think there should be more outrage when something like this tries to slide by.
That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
That is the reason why the smug response "You allowed me to do this" isn't sufficient.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.
It's not just unethical, it is clearly illegal.
If you don't own the copyright to a program's source code, you cannot legally relicense that source code! Same holds true for any other copyrightable creative work which can be licensed. This is a very clear case of copyright infringement.
Nothing in the Apache license permits the licensee to relicense the source code (meaning, entirely replace the license with a different one).
It does permit you to build derivative enterprise products, and you have no obligation to keep the source code open for derivative products. But if you do release the source code for your derivative product, any original unmodified Apache licensed portion of the code retains that license and you cannot remove it if you aren't the copyright holder for that original work.
A completely legal violation of the social contract. Or in layman's terms, a dick move.
AFAIK, people are not upset about the forking, but everything surrounding the forking, the actual business they "created" and the LLM-generated license.
Otherwise I agree, would be very strange if someone publishes a FOSS project, someone forks it and people get outraged. But I guess wouldn't be the weirdest things social media folks been upset about in the end...
1. It reflects poorly on YC.
2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.