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YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

byyoung3 2y ago
If continue wanted a proprietary code base, they shouldn’t have open sourced their code. That’s the entire point of close-sourcing your code.
jazz9k 2y ago
This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.
- richbell 2y ago
  > I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. 1. It reflects poorly on YC. 2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.
  - billy99k 2y ago
    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.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      If you get a traffic ticket, you can pay a lawyer to get it knocked down to a non-moving violation, thus saving your insurance rates from spiking. This is 100% legal, but is it ethical? The other poor saps in the court haven’t lost anything, it’s not zero-sum. And yet, it somehow feels dirty to be able to wash your hands of a crime by dint of having money.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      You are confusing legality and morality. Legality can be an indicator of morality, in that laws tend to flow out of our moral senses. But legality is a lagging indicator, and new circumstances tend to create gaps where things are legal but not moral. One of my favorite examples here is wire fraud. The rise of electronic communication created all sorts of new possibilities for fraud, but we didn't get the wire fraud statue until 1952. There's a biography of Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, a con man from the 1890s forward, where he crows about many of the things he got away with because of that. A number of the things he did were probably legal before 1952, but that didn't make them moral before and not moral after.
    - evanelias 2y ago
      They didn't just "resell" and "integrate" this source code. Rather, they attempted to re-license it, despite not being the copyright holder in the first place. They have no legal right to remove or replace the original license. They can build derivative works, and apply a new additional license on top, assuming the additional license is compatible with the original one, and the original one is retained for any unmodified portion of the original work. But they cannot legally remove the original license entirely, nor remove copyright/attribution from any code that they did not write. Think about this more deeply: if permissive licenses allowed you to replace the license entirely at will with no restrictions, that would effectively mean the work is in the public domain. There would be no purpose to having any license text at all, if these licenses could be trivially removed and violated at will.
  - paxys 2y ago
    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.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      It might not to you, but it does to me. I think it's bad not just from a social perspective (because exploitation acts to diminish the amount of open code) but from an investor one. Forking a repo, committing IP crimes, and then doing some marketing jazz hands is not obviously the foundation for a successful IPO in 5 or 10 years. Indeed, for me it'd be the opposite; I'd call it a sign these founders don't have the depth to go the distance. It's also brand damage for YC among the more thoughtful sort of founder, which at least used to be an important concern to YC. At 1000 startups a year, though, maybe they've just decided that there's a bubble, and in a bubble it doesn't make financial sense to care about things like quality or longevity. You just shovel out whatever people are buying and worry about consequences later.
- johnday 2y ago
  There are a few confounding factors here: 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.
  - dangitman 2y ago
    [dead]
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    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
    - johnday 2y ago
      "This is impolite" is not a truth statement, it is a value judgment. It can be impolite to do something even if someone has said that they don't mind.
- diggan 2y ago
  > 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...
- llm_trw 2y ago
  This is a conversation I keep having with people who support permissive licenses. >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. >>...
  - billy99k 2y ago
    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. The original authors don't lose anything.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      Not sure what piracy has to do with this. The point is that you've specifically let people do something then when they do it you're upset they did it. If you don't want them to do it, don't explicitly allow them to do it. There are plenty of licenses which would have stopped this.
      - wheels 2y ago
        I voted the grandparent up about the license allowing it. But things being allowed isn't a benchmark for them being decent. I don't think we should stone adulterers. But I also think cheating on your partner can mean you're an asshole.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        > Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. -- Edward Thurlow
        wheels 2y ago
        A fair point. But having the internet turn on you before you get any traction is also probably going to be a death-knell for an early stage company. It doesn't bode well for their ability to make or raise money.
- jhalcr 2y ago
  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;"
  - jsheard 2y ago
    > 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. https://x.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284 https://x.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284
- rickspencer3 2y ago
  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.
  - kunley 2y ago
    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?
  - evanelias 2y ago
    > 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.
- ptx 2y ago
  > 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.
- HyprMusic 2y ago
  Except the original code isn't Apache open-source, it's MIT[0] and still requires copyright attribution. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
- jslakro 2y ago
  I agree, it had been different with a license like MIT
- wilsonnb3 2y ago
  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.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Both Apache and MIT require attribution. They removed it.
lolinder 2y ago
Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265
paxys 2y ago
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.
- diggan 2y ago
  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?
  - paxys 2y ago
    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.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them. Isn't that just the difference between "seed funding" and "Series-A/B/C/$letter" funding? In the former, you want small amounts spread across as many parties as possible, while in the "Series" funding you do higher amounts but more concentrated, as you have more data to invest more in what you think will be the "winner". > YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it. I don't think that's true, but I've never been through the process myself. I know for a fact that the extensive written application is also part of it, that is reviewed by people before any interview even happens. I'm sure others who actually been through the process can add if anything is missing.
aster0id 2y ago
Everything is getting en-shittified, even YC itself. This has been a trend for my cohort of college graduates. Graduated right in time for a housing crisis, inflation, layoffs, etc. Can't help but feel at least a little bitter about folks who pulled the ladder up behind them.
- sambull 2y ago
  The people pulling those ladders never had to working about housing crisis, inflation, layoffs.
- paxys 2y ago
  The word enshittified has been enshittified.
- solardev 2y ago
  What generation are you? I'm an early millennial and even back then we were talking about this, how the boomers left us a dying world and a crumbling society. Then my generation failed to do anything about it, and everything only got worse. I am terrified for Gen Z and Alpha who have to come into this mess. I fear their kids, if they choose to have them, will be even worse off.
  - aster0id 2y ago
    Late millenial. I agree with everything you said.
thiel_is_hitler 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
hbbio 2y ago
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 :) https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291 https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291
- gyre007 2y ago
  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)
  - hbbio 2y ago
    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 :)
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Is your standard for ethics really, "Well it's not a criminal violation of the law?"
    - soyeahok 2y ago
      [dead]
    - wpietri 2y ago
      There's a question in a (reasonably) dead reply that I want to resurrect: > Are we to go out and memorize everyone’s personal framework/religion (cause I can tell I’m not going to) or do you have something else in mind except a dead end question that goes nowhere? No, what I expect is for people to have thought about their own personal framework. That said, it's worth at least understanding a bit about other people's frameworks, because a) people have been thinking and writing about these topics for thousands of years, and you just might learn something. And b) you are living in a world with other people, people who are not dummies. If your own moral code is, say, "grab the cash and run", there going to treat you differently. That's part of why most professional organizations will have codes of ethics. E.g., IEEE has a good one for themselves [1] and another one specifically for software engineers. [2] It's true even in areas where making money is the primary goal, like business and finance. Take the current article as an example. The PearAI founders have revealed something about their moral code. That will matter down the road. E.g., Whenever I'm hiring somebody I'll look at their resume and flag companies with known ethical problems. Maybe that gets them binned, maybe I ask them about it. And when I've founded something, the ethics of my cofounders has been among my highest criteria. That's true for a lot of founders and execs I know. [1] https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html [2] https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
nextworddev 2y ago
YC Startup School needs a course on basic business ethics
sva_ 2y ago
This article reads like gossip/drama creation Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level
- burcs 2y ago
  Yeah I noticed some pretty obvious spelling/grammatical errors too. I wonder what's going over there? "...Continue as well as the original project that Continued used, VSCode."
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Perhaps spelling/grammatical errors are how you know a human wrote it. Or at least a human went through the trouble of editing a few errors in.
xyst 2y ago
Wow, this clone and fork is pretty bad. This is the type of company that is accepted into YC batches now? Not good for the rep of YC.
- leetrout 2y ago
  Just the first one to be so bold. This happens in every batch AFAIK. YC continually invests in competing companies, sometimes back-to-back batches and sometimes in the same batch.
- llmfan 2y ago
  I can tell just from looking at most recent YC founders that they're not hackers. I could be wrong of course. I'm probably wrong. Maybe these people who are attractive, care about popular fashion and becoming popular on tweeter are actually just as capable hackers as all the hackers I actually know (none of whom care about those things). I admit YC probably knows better than me. But if I'm not wrong, and these people really aren't hackers, it means YC has decided that normies > hackers when it comes to YC. I really don't predict that's going to end well for YC.
  - llmfan 2y ago
    I mean, obviously it's a numbers game. There are only so many hackers, but there are a lot of Ivy League people and FANG people. So YC chose to open their gates. Whether this will be a profitable decision is an open question.
burcs 2y ago
Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen. I saw someone on x/twitter post this: Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi. They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they since apologized.
- sva_ 2y ago
  Vim is not a fork of Vi.
  - ahakki 2y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160107114945/http://www.moolenaar.net/interv_czech_en.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160107114945/http://www.moolen...
    - sva_ 2y ago
      What are you trying to say? The link confirms what I said
- MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
  neovim didn’t seek VC funding and advertise as if they built their own editor. The first text on neovims page is ”Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability”
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    Pear never advertised that they built everything themselves. They were very open about the fork
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  >Isn't this how open-source works. No, it doesn't! Open source comes with licenses that have various requirements.
gyre007 2y ago
I have been surprised recently how many competing companies YC have founded recently. I know VCs do this all the time but I still find it a bit strange - not sure how I would’ve felt if the same fund backed my competitor. That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …
- MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
  > That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so … And apparently now that means they are investing in founders who know how to click a button on GitHub and have an active ChatGPT subscription
cynicalpeace 2y ago
These guys are gonna get a ton of business because of this publicity. Any press is good press.
- MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
  Developer tooling, especially AI powered, has historically not been the most forgiving industry.
  - cynicalpeace 2y ago
    Good point, but they can always pivot, since they're obviously good at marketing. Seems YC made a good choice
    - green-eclipse 2y ago
      "good at marketing" by being completely incompetent?
      - cynicalpeace 2y ago
        Cue POTUS 45 meme
dsco 2y ago
Are there any areas where an AI startup can actually make an impact? All I've seen is either billion+ funded foundational models, or thin GPT wrappers - all with the same probability of being default alive.
cies 2y ago
> YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup Free market! Competition spurs innovation and drives down cost. "If YC does not back them, someone else will" -- drug dealer logic applied to VC biz
stroupwaffle 2y ago
I watched the video promoting Continue.dev and just think to myself, these AI editors don’t actually add much value. EMacs and Treesitter is much faster way to “find all references to X” in the codebase. Other questions can be answered with the naive grep implementation and marginal brain power. If all they’re investing in here is to write boilerplate code, well, that takes not much time in the grand scheme of things. Where the value add is actually in the design phase. And, as a result of these tools people are going to just skip those crucial steps. Am I missing something?
- dewey 2y ago
  > Am I missing something? Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation". There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    I don’t think expecting someone to know how to set up an editor (or not; there are plenty of turnkey distros like LazyVim) or knowing how to use the most basic of *nix tools is on par with the Dropbox reply. > there’s value in these tools, that’s why… all built businesses on top of AI Or is it because those companies realized they would rapidly lose market share if they didn’t? You don’t have to add value to become popular, you just have to make people think they’re missing out. Eventually your house of cards might come crashing down, but in the meantime, you’ve successfully enriched yourself. If you have a competing product that is technically equal or superior, it can be maddening to see the popular kid surpassing you without merit.
    - dewey 2y ago
      > You don’t have to add value to become popular Nothing in the company I work for got adopted as fast as GitHub Copilot. I think it provides value for myself too. So saying that it doesn't provide value is definitely wrong, and I was skeptical at first too.
beepbooptheory 2y ago
Why do you have to clone the thing when we have super powerful LLMs now? Aren't they supposed to make us all 10x devs and also extremely good with business? At the very least, isn't your chatbot supposed to give you good and new ideas? Because thats why you are selling it?
Artzain 2y ago
We all know YC may be super random. Just invest on solid teams regardless of product
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  Mostly just invest in Stanford grads and ex-FAANG. When they talk about founders being outsiders in their videos I LOL.
MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
It looks like they edited the front page to say it is a fork of continue. Until recently it said > PearAI is a fork of VSCode so you'll feel right at home http://web.archive.org/web/20240903093719/https://trypear.ai/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240903093719/https://trypear.ai...
CharlieDigital 2y ago
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.
- kibwen 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
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piokoch 2y ago
"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." It looks like someone created the following prompt: "Chat GPT write some parody story about current state of startups/VC state in 2024".
kunley 2y ago
"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?
- dcchambers 2y ago
  The good news is "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Any good lawyer would eat them alive in court if it came to that.
  - shombaboor 2y ago
    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
Vanclief 2y ago
We recently applied to the current YC batch and got rejected. Seeing this just made me die a little inside. We are a small SaaS that has very happy paying customers and a huge market. We solve a boring problem, with boring technologies and we are not the next OpenAI or Stripe. Yet we have easily a 10,000 X potential. I feel like YC now prioritizes funding things that can be hyped more instead of actually funding things that can be solid software businesses.
- Roark66 2y ago
  I would not be surprised if they got the funding precisely because of the controversy potential.
- tomschwiha 2y ago
  Your profile mentions something with Blockchain? I'm not too sure, but are there any use cases except for Bitcoin stuff? From the solutions I heard there are offen more practicable solutions available compared to using Blockchain tech.
  - Vanclief 2y ago
    Could you share with me the link of the profile you saw? I did work with Blockchain in the past but this current SaaS has nothing to do with that.
    - tomschwiha 2y ago
      Sure, I saw it in your GitHub bio: https://github.com/Vanclief https://github.com/Vanclief
deleted 2y ago
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shubhamjain 2y ago
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. [1]: https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176 https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176 [2]: https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072 https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072
- ramraj07 2y ago
  It’s not cloning if they don’t literally fork the code which isn’t possible for Roam research
keiferski 2y ago
Prediction: as technology becomes more “mundane” and infiltrates more aspects of life, explicitly copying another business model or business idea itself will increasingly become normalized, even expected. Nowadays this tactic gets a bad name, but in the wider world of business, it’s pretty common to take an idea from one place and sell it elsewhere, or take something that is free and sell it for money. There are a million and one Italian restaurants, but no one gets criticized for opening yet another one (except as a poor business decision.) And so I don’t think YC or the startup can really be blamed here for basically just finding an opportunity and capitalizing on it. They’re an investment firm, not a nonprofit out to improve the world. What bothers me more is the deeper sense that many things which are / were free/public/etc. are now explicitly becoming private products competing in the marketplace, and not public goods. No one seems particularly interested in making public goods anymore, which is the deeper tragedy. And when events like this or the recent WordPress debacle occur, everyone is incentivized to shut their doors and stop making things open and accessible. One of the biggest areas you can observe this in is the news/journalism. Pretty much all of the better quality sources are behind paywalls now, when they weren’t five or ten years ago. This makes business sense and perhaps it’s the only real way journalism can fund itself in the Internet age, but it also means that information is increasingly not accessible for everyone. Something like Wikipedia probably couldn’t even get started today for this very reason. I’m not sure what the way out is, other than the traditional model of patronage from rich people. Unfortunately that group seems less and less interested in funding “cultural” things like the arts or open source software, probably because they’re increasingly comprised of technocrats with no interest in culture. What would really be great for YC or another organization to do, therefore, would be to fund this kind of public good. Unfortunately that goes against everything in the startup zeitgeist.
deleted 2y ago
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ayhanfuat 2y ago
Oh the humanity! > OHIO @parenth_: You illegally relicensed Pear to an enterprise, non open source license called "Pear Enterprise Edition (EE) license" even though Continue is Apache 2.0. Your project violates multiple terms in the Apache license. @continuedev you should sue these clowns. > FRYING PAN & @CodeFryingPan: dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just Imk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  It's perfectly legal to relicense Apache 2.0 license
  - evanelias 2y ago
    Please point to the license provision that permits you to completely remove the license and replace it with a different one. I'll save you time: there isn't one. Nor would that ever make sense in any license, because broadly granting that right in a license would completely defeat the purpose of having any license terms at all.
    - spencerchubb 2y ago
      lol maybe verify your claim before using such a snarky, arrogant tone "You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License." to be clear, Apache 2.0 requires you to give a copy of the license in a derivative, but does not require you to apply Apache 2.0 to a derivative. the term you are probably looking for is copyleft, which Apache 2.0 definitely does not have
      - evanelias 2y ago
        I'm well-versed in the terms of Apache 2.0. You are misinterpreting them. The key clause here is that last one: provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License. The entire parts of the code base you didn't modify are still copyrighted by their original authors, and are still subject to the Apache 2.0 license. This is why big tech companies make third-party open source contributors agree to CLAs; without that, they would be unable to relicense the work in the future (among other reasons). In general, even with a permissive license, you can't just fork a project, make a trivial one-line change, call it a derivative work, and replace the license on the unmodified portions of the code base with an entirely different one. If that was the case, there would be no purpose whatsoever to having any license restrictions at all, because that loop-hole would allow anyone to trivially remove the license restrictions at will. This is all unrelated to copyleft btw.
paxys 2y ago
This is the standard low effort "here's a collection of random comments from X/Reddit" news article. There is no real substance, and this whole thing will blow over in a week as all the terminally online people move on to the next thing to get outraged about.
TZubiri 2y ago
"it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license 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." Denormalize incompetence again
JackOfCrows 2y ago
I mean most of the "AI" companies are all about copying everyone else's intellectual property, why not just start copying companies wholesale? That seems like real bigbrain time.
tway223 2y ago
Forking is not the issue. The real issue is the (mis-)presentation of the additional work and value they bring to the fork. Based on the code commits in the two repos it is minimal if anything at all, while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false.
- typeofhuman 2y ago
  > while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false. Here's the post from the founder: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956 https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956 You're absolutely right. This isn't a whoops, or nuance, or config/syntax/grammar error. It is a bold-face lie.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nubinetwork 2y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41689217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41689217
dangitman 2y ago
[dead]
micromacrofoot 2y ago
Well at least they don't make cruise missiles
65 2y ago
Even the AI companies are turning into slop now. With hyped markets, being rational when you're greedy becomes impossible.
MangoCoffee 2y ago
It's amusing to see some comments downplaying the significance of 'copying.' Apparently, it only becomes a concern when Chinese companies replicate Western products and ideas. Perhaps it's time to stop crying about Chinese clones.
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  actually we don’t have to tolerate ripoffs and theft. That’s the principled and helpful response to both problems.
dvektor 2y ago
Yeah somehow doesn't surprise me at all. The AI space is well on it's way to becoming as dubious as crypto/web3
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Do we have public sources on YC’s recent returns, e.g. on its ‘20 or ‘23? Pitchbook shows -16% IRR for YCCG21 (TVPI .73x, -1810 bps on benchmark) and -5% for ESP22 (TVPI .93x, +25 bps on benchmark). But those were notoriously difficult vintages.
breck 2y ago
Garry Tan in 2019: "we mock the scammers who build nothing real and get fake valuations." Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296685
dcchambers 2y ago
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.
- braza 2y ago
  > 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.
dncornholio 2y ago
So the issue with this company is that there isn't any issue. Got it.
moomin 2y ago
Looking through the comments there are a number of people here who are determined to defend the company’s lousy morals. They are missing the point. What the company did was not just shady, it a lousy business proposition all round. If defending entrepreneurs with questionable ethics is your thing, go back to defending AirBnB, Uber and WeWork. At least those firms had a strategy and made their founders rich. This thing is a dead man walking.
typeofhuman 2y ago
The article missed another huge aspect. The founder falsely claimed PearAI had "100+ contributors"[0]. Those contributions were to the original repo not to theirs. Combine this with their other actions and it really looks like they're scammers. Garry Tan's downplaying denial remarks make it look to me like they're trying to save face at YC - since it looks like they've been duped. 0: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956 https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956
sevensor 2y ago
> On Hacker News, the site for programmers owned by YC Oh are we?
dang 2y ago
Two big threads about this yesterday: Pear AI founder: We made two big mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 - Sept 2024 (188 comments) Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 - Sept 2024 (240 comments)
- thiel_is_hitler 2y ago
  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.
  - dang 2y ago
    I've unkilled your comment so readers can make up their own minds.
    - KetoManx64 2y ago
      Respect
      - thiel_is_hitler 2y ago
        [dead]
Pat_Murph 2y ago
The more I learn about YC, the shittier they become...
ellis0n 2y ago
I can state the fact that the favorite of PG and one of the top-8 worst social founders of YC, Amassad, resold the idea of my startup to Google, pretending to be an investor. But he is not a real investor, as he invested in a copy of my project, which I had been developing since 2012. In 2020, during the pandemic, I found myself without any protection. I was robbed, and my Upwork account was even destroyed. I didn’t have enough money for food. I asked for help with my project in a remote accelerator where Amassad was a judge. I presented my project and expected a constructive conversation. But then I saw that Amassad immediately created copies of it within his network with his team. This had already happened with the YC startup Sixa, which was a copy of my post from a Ukrainian forum, and I mentioned this directly in my YC application. It was ignored and later the founder of Sixa disappeared with $7M (including money from Ukrainian investors) and he’s still being searched for. I think he was either killed or managed to deceive everyone and disappear. I believe there is a crisis of honesty and technological integrity at YC now, as there’s a huge demand for managers and actors. YC feels like a massive megamarket where all the managers trade technologies like at a Chinese microelectronics market only with better PR and networking. Unpunished evil always comes back. But it’s unclear how it can be punished in YC when all that matters is money and there’s no room for accountability in investments. When there are fake projects, 20% management errors from irresponsibility, and people whose success is measured by how many enemies they have, how can justice prevail? In Amassad’s home country of Pakistan, which he left for America, a supermarket was looted in 4 hours after opening. He would be better off helping his country than stealing projects from Ukrainian founders. I think for PG, Amassad may be bitch, but he's our bitch.. the world is run by hackers. I hope we live to see the next version of the Matrix, rather than see this one destroyed. AI can helps? no, no, AI can't helps if we don't change ourselves
GPerson 2y ago
It’s not surprising that this happens when plagiarism and theft are foundational parts of the machine learning ethos. It is literally built into the ideology being bandied about at these places.
purplezooey 2y ago
... the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT. Oh my word.
adr1an 2y ago
I guess this is "enshittification all the way down!". Surely, YC made a mistake but not having a more thorough review. But I believe the phenomenon is even more widespread, we'll fixate on this one. Meanwhile, plenty of VCs are being scammed by kids. Can't blame them, really... Who's hiring? AI filtering out resumés, and so on. Sorry for coming up too cynical, but we are going through crazy times. Hopefully it will stabilize soon... ~~AI~~ LLMs can't really reason. But the public (layman, managers, and big fish) are being deceived because billions of dollars were burnt ;/

If continue wanted a proprietary code base, they shouldn’t have open sourced their code. That’s the entire point of close-sourcing your code.

jazz9k 2y ago

This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.

richbell 2y ago
> I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. 1. It reflects poorly on YC. 2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.
- billy99k 2y ago
  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.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    If you get a traffic ticket, you can pay a lawyer to get it knocked down to a non-moving violation, thus saving your insurance rates from spiking. This is 100% legal, but is it ethical? The other poor saps in the court haven’t lost anything, it’s not zero-sum. And yet, it somehow feels dirty to be able to wash your hands of a crime by dint of having money.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    You are confusing legality and morality. Legality can be an indicator of morality, in that laws tend to flow out of our moral senses. But legality is a lagging indicator, and new circumstances tend to create gaps where things are legal but not moral. One of my favorite examples here is wire fraud. The rise of electronic communication created all sorts of new possibilities for fraud, but we didn't get the wire fraud statue until 1952. There's a biography of Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, a con man from the 1890s forward, where he crows about many of the things he got away with because of that. A number of the things he did were probably legal before 1952, but that didn't make them moral before and not moral after.
  - evanelias 2y ago
    They didn't just "resell" and "integrate" this source code. Rather, they attempted to re-license it, despite not being the copyright holder in the first place. They have no legal right to remove or replace the original license. They can build derivative works, and apply a new additional license on top, assuming the additional license is compatible with the original one, and the original one is retained for any unmodified portion of the original work. But they cannot legally remove the original license entirely, nor remove copyright/attribution from any code that they did not write. Think about this more deeply: if permissive licenses allowed you to replace the license entirely at will with no restrictions, that would effectively mean the work is in the public domain. There would be no purpose to having any license text at all, if these licenses could be trivially removed and violated at will.
- paxys 2y ago
  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.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    It might not to you, but it does to me. I think it's bad not just from a social perspective (because exploitation acts to diminish the amount of open code) but from an investor one. Forking a repo, committing IP crimes, and then doing some marketing jazz hands is not obviously the foundation for a successful IPO in 5 or 10 years. Indeed, for me it'd be the opposite; I'd call it a sign these founders don't have the depth to go the distance. It's also brand damage for YC among the more thoughtful sort of founder, which at least used to be an important concern to YC. At 1000 startups a year, though, maybe they've just decided that there's a bubble, and in a bubble it doesn't make financial sense to care about things like quality or longevity. You just shovel out whatever people are buying and worry about consequences later.
johnday 2y ago
There are a few confounding factors here: 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.
- dangitman 2y ago
  [dead]
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  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
  - johnday 2y ago
    "This is impolite" is not a truth statement, it is a value judgment. It can be impolite to do something even if someone has said that they don't mind.
diggan 2y ago
> 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...
llm_trw 2y ago
This is a conversation I keep having with people who support permissive licenses. >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. >>...
- billy99k 2y ago
  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. The original authors don't lose anything.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Not sure what piracy has to do with this. The point is that you've specifically let people do something then when they do it you're upset they did it. If you don't want them to do it, don't explicitly allow them to do it. There are plenty of licenses which would have stopped this.
    - wheels 2y ago
      I voted the grandparent up about the license allowing it. But things being allowed isn't a benchmark for them being decent. I don't think we should stone adulterers. But I also think cheating on your partner can mean you're an asshole.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        > Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. -- Edward Thurlow
        wheels 2y ago
        A fair point. But having the internet turn on you before you get any traction is also probably going to be a death-knell for an early stage company. It doesn't bode well for their ability to make or raise money.
jhalcr 2y ago
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;"
- jsheard 2y ago
  > 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. https://x.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284 https://x.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284
rickspencer3 2y ago
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.
- kunley 2y ago
  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?
- evanelias 2y ago
  > 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.
ptx 2y ago
> 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.
HyprMusic 2y ago
Except the original code isn't Apache open-source, it's MIT[0] and still requires copyright attribution. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
jslakro 2y ago
I agree, it had been different with a license like MIT
wilsonnb3 2y ago
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.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Both Apache and MIT require attribution. They removed it.

lolinder 2y ago

Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265

paxys 2y ago

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.

diggan 2y ago
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?
- paxys 2y ago
  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.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them. Isn't that just the difference between "seed funding" and "Series-A/B/C/$letter" funding? In the former, you want small amounts spread across as many parties as possible, while in the "Series" funding you do higher amounts but more concentrated, as you have more data to invest more in what you think will be the "winner". > YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it. I don't think that's true, but I've never been through the process myself. I know for a fact that the extensive written application is also part of it, that is reviewed by people before any interview even happens. I'm sure others who actually been through the process can add if anything is missing.

aster0id 2y ago

Everything is getting en-shittified, even YC itself. This has been a trend for my cohort of college graduates. Graduated right in time for a housing crisis, inflation, layoffs, etc. Can't help but feel at least a little bitter about folks who pulled the ladder up behind them.

sambull 2y ago
The people pulling those ladders never had to working about housing crisis, inflation, layoffs.
paxys 2y ago
The word enshittified has been enshittified.
solardev 2y ago
What generation are you? I'm an early millennial and even back then we were talking about this, how the boomers left us a dying world and a crumbling society. Then my generation failed to do anything about it, and everything only got worse. I am terrified for Gen Z and Alpha who have to come into this mess. I fear their kids, if they choose to have them, will be even worse off.
- aster0id 2y ago
  Late millenial. I agree with everything you said.

thiel_is_hitler 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

hbbio 2y ago

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 :) https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291 https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291

gyre007 2y ago
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)
- hbbio 2y ago
  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 :)
- wpietri 2y ago
  Is your standard for ethics really, "Well it's not a criminal violation of the law?"
  - soyeahok 2y ago
    [dead]
  - wpietri 2y ago
    There's a question in a (reasonably) dead reply that I want to resurrect: > Are we to go out and memorize everyone’s personal framework/religion (cause I can tell I’m not going to) or do you have something else in mind except a dead end question that goes nowhere? No, what I expect is for people to have thought about their own personal framework. That said, it's worth at least understanding a bit about other people's frameworks, because a) people have been thinking and writing about these topics for thousands of years, and you just might learn something. And b) you are living in a world with other people, people who are not dummies. If your own moral code is, say, "grab the cash and run", there going to treat you differently. That's part of why most professional organizations will have codes of ethics. E.g., IEEE has a good one for themselves [1] and another one specifically for software engineers. [2] It's true even in areas where making money is the primary goal, like business and finance. Take the current article as an example. The PearAI founders have revealed something about their moral code. That will matter down the road. E.g., Whenever I'm hiring somebody I'll look at their resume and flag companies with known ethical problems. Maybe that gets them binned, maybe I ask them about it. And when I've founded something, the ethics of my cofounders has been among my highest criteria. That's true for a lot of founders and execs I know. [1] https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html [2] https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...

nextworddev 2y ago

YC Startup School needs a course on basic business ethics

sva_ 2y ago

This article reads like gossip/drama creation Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level

burcs 2y ago
Yeah I noticed some pretty obvious spelling/grammatical errors too. I wonder what's going over there? "...Continue as well as the original project that Continued used, VSCode."
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Perhaps spelling/grammatical errors are how you know a human wrote it. Or at least a human went through the trouble of editing a few errors in.

xyst 2y ago

Wow, this clone and fork is pretty bad. This is the type of company that is accepted into YC batches now? Not good for the rep of YC.

leetrout 2y ago
Just the first one to be so bold. This happens in every batch AFAIK. YC continually invests in competing companies, sometimes back-to-back batches and sometimes in the same batch.
llmfan 2y ago
I can tell just from looking at most recent YC founders that they're not hackers. I could be wrong of course. I'm probably wrong. Maybe these people who are attractive, care about popular fashion and becoming popular on tweeter are actually just as capable hackers as all the hackers I actually know (none of whom care about those things). I admit YC probably knows better than me. But if I'm not wrong, and these people really aren't hackers, it means YC has decided that normies > hackers when it comes to YC. I really don't predict that's going to end well for YC.
- llmfan 2y ago
  I mean, obviously it's a numbers game. There are only so many hackers, but there are a lot of Ivy League people and FANG people. So YC chose to open their gates. Whether this will be a profitable decision is an open question.

burcs 2y ago

Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen. I saw someone on x/twitter post this: Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi. They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they since apologized.

sva_ 2y ago
Vim is not a fork of Vi.
- ahakki 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20160107114945/http://www.moolenaar.net/interv_czech_en.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160107114945/http://www.moolen...
  - sva_ 2y ago
    What are you trying to say? The link confirms what I said
MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
neovim didn’t seek VC funding and advertise as if they built their own editor. The first text on neovims page is ”Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability”
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  Pear never advertised that they built everything themselves. They were very open about the fork
TiredOfLife 2y ago
>Isn't this how open-source works. No, it doesn't! Open source comes with licenses that have various requirements.

gyre007 2y ago

I have been surprised recently how many competing companies YC have founded recently. I know VCs do this all the time but I still find it a bit strange - not sure how I would’ve felt if the same fund backed my competitor. That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …

MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
> That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so … And apparently now that means they are investing in founders who know how to click a button on GitHub and have an active ChatGPT subscription

cynicalpeace 2y ago

These guys are gonna get a ton of business because of this publicity. Any press is good press.

MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
Developer tooling, especially AI powered, has historically not been the most forgiving industry.
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  Good point, but they can always pivot, since they're obviously good at marketing. Seems YC made a good choice
  - green-eclipse 2y ago
    "good at marketing" by being completely incompetent?
    - cynicalpeace 2y ago
      Cue POTUS 45 meme

dsco 2y ago

Are there any areas where an AI startup can actually make an impact? All I've seen is either billion+ funded foundational models, or thin GPT wrappers - all with the same probability of being default alive.

cies 2y ago

> YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup Free market! Competition spurs innovation and drives down cost. "If YC does not back them, someone else will" -- drug dealer logic applied to VC biz

stroupwaffle 2y ago

I watched the video promoting Continue.dev and just think to myself, these AI editors don’t actually add much value. EMacs and Treesitter is much faster way to “find all references to X” in the codebase. Other questions can be answered with the naive grep implementation and marginal brain power. If all they’re investing in here is to write boilerplate code, well, that takes not much time in the grand scheme of things. Where the value add is actually in the design phase. And, as a result of these tools people are going to just skip those crucial steps. Am I missing something?

dewey 2y ago
> Am I missing something? Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation". There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.
- sgarland 2y ago
  I don’t think expecting someone to know how to set up an editor (or not; there are plenty of turnkey distros like LazyVim) or knowing how to use the most basic of *nix tools is on par with the Dropbox reply. > there’s value in these tools, that’s why… all built businesses on top of AI Or is it because those companies realized they would rapidly lose market share if they didn’t? You don’t have to add value to become popular, you just have to make people think they’re missing out. Eventually your house of cards might come crashing down, but in the meantime, you’ve successfully enriched yourself. If you have a competing product that is technically equal or superior, it can be maddening to see the popular kid surpassing you without merit.
  - dewey 2y ago
    > You don’t have to add value to become popular Nothing in the company I work for got adopted as fast as GitHub Copilot. I think it provides value for myself too. So saying that it doesn't provide value is definitely wrong, and I was skeptical at first too.

beepbooptheory 2y ago

Why do you have to clone the thing when we have super powerful LLMs now? Aren't they supposed to make us all 10x devs and also extremely good with business? At the very least, isn't your chatbot supposed to give you good and new ideas? Because thats why you are selling it?

Artzain 2y ago

We all know YC may be super random. Just invest on solid teams regardless of product

CuriouslyC 2y ago
Mostly just invest in Stanford grads and ex-FAANG. When they talk about founders being outsiders in their videos I LOL.

MeetingsBrowser 2y ago

It looks like they edited the front page to say it is a fork of continue. Until recently it said > PearAI is a fork of VSCode so you'll feel right at home http://web.archive.org/web/20240903093719/https://trypear.ai/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240903093719/https://trypear.ai...

CharlieDigital 2y ago

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.

kibwen 2y ago
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.

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piokoch 2y ago

"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." It looks like someone created the following prompt: "Chat GPT write some parody story about current state of startups/VC state in 2024".

kunley 2y ago

"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?

dcchambers 2y ago
The good news is "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Any good lawyer would eat them alive in court if it came to that.
- shombaboor 2y ago
  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

Vanclief 2y ago

We recently applied to the current YC batch and got rejected. Seeing this just made me die a little inside. We are a small SaaS that has very happy paying customers and a huge market. We solve a boring problem, with boring technologies and we are not the next OpenAI or Stripe. Yet we have easily a 10,000 X potential. I feel like YC now prioritizes funding things that can be hyped more instead of actually funding things that can be solid software businesses.

Roark66 2y ago
I would not be surprised if they got the funding precisely because of the controversy potential.
tomschwiha 2y ago
Your profile mentions something with Blockchain? I'm not too sure, but are there any use cases except for Bitcoin stuff? From the solutions I heard there are offen more practicable solutions available compared to using Blockchain tech.
- Vanclief 2y ago
  Could you share with me the link of the profile you saw? I did work with Blockchain in the past but this current SaaS has nothing to do with that.
  - tomschwiha 2y ago
    Sure, I saw it in your GitHub bio: https://github.com/Vanclief https://github.com/Vanclief

deleted 2y ago

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shubhamjain 2y ago

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. [1]: https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176 https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176 [2]: https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072 https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072

ramraj07 2y ago
It’s not cloning if they don’t literally fork the code which isn’t possible for Roam research

keiferski 2y ago

Prediction: as technology becomes more “mundane” and infiltrates more aspects of life, explicitly copying another business model or business idea itself will increasingly become normalized, even expected. Nowadays this tactic gets a bad name, but in the wider world of business, it’s pretty common to take an idea from one place and sell it elsewhere, or take something that is free and sell it for money. There are a million and one Italian restaurants, but no one gets criticized for opening yet another one (except as a poor business decision.) And so I don’t think YC or the startup can really be blamed here for basically just finding an opportunity and capitalizing on it. They’re an investment firm, not a nonprofit out to improve the world. What bothers me more is the deeper sense that many things which are / were free/public/etc. are now explicitly becoming private products competing in the marketplace, and not public goods. No one seems particularly interested in making public goods anymore, which is the deeper tragedy. And when events like this or the recent WordPress debacle occur, everyone is incentivized to shut their doors and stop making things open and accessible. One of the biggest areas you can observe this in is the news/journalism. Pretty much all of the better quality sources are behind paywalls now, when they weren’t five or ten years ago. This makes business sense and perhaps it’s the only real way journalism can fund itself in the Internet age, but it also means that information is increasingly not accessible for everyone. Something like Wikipedia probably couldn’t even get started today for this very reason. I’m not sure what the way out is, other than the traditional model of patronage from rich people. Unfortunately that group seems less and less interested in funding “cultural” things like the arts or open source software, probably because they’re increasingly comprised of technocrats with no interest in culture. What would really be great for YC or another organization to do, therefore, would be to fund this kind of public good. Unfortunately that goes against everything in the startup zeitgeist.

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ayhanfuat 2y ago

Oh the humanity! > OHIO @parenth_: You illegally relicensed Pear to an enterprise, non open source license called "Pear Enterprise Edition (EE) license" even though Continue is Apache 2.0. Your project violates multiple terms in the Apache license. @continuedev you should sue these clowns. > FRYING PAN & @CodeFryingPan: dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just Imk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal

spencerchubb 2y ago
It's perfectly legal to relicense Apache 2.0 license
- evanelias 2y ago
  Please point to the license provision that permits you to completely remove the license and replace it with a different one. I'll save you time: there isn't one. Nor would that ever make sense in any license, because broadly granting that right in a license would completely defeat the purpose of having any license terms at all.
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    lol maybe verify your claim before using such a snarky, arrogant tone "You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License." to be clear, Apache 2.0 requires you to give a copy of the license in a derivative, but does not require you to apply Apache 2.0 to a derivative. the term you are probably looking for is copyleft, which Apache 2.0 definitely does not have
    - evanelias 2y ago
      I'm well-versed in the terms of Apache 2.0. You are misinterpreting them. The key clause here is that last one: provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License. The entire parts of the code base you didn't modify are still copyrighted by their original authors, and are still subject to the Apache 2.0 license. This is why big tech companies make third-party open source contributors agree to CLAs; without that, they would be unable to relicense the work in the future (among other reasons). In general, even with a permissive license, you can't just fork a project, make a trivial one-line change, call it a derivative work, and replace the license on the unmodified portions of the code base with an entirely different one. If that was the case, there would be no purpose whatsoever to having any license restrictions at all, because that loop-hole would allow anyone to trivially remove the license restrictions at will. This is all unrelated to copyleft btw.

paxys 2y ago

This is the standard low effort "here's a collection of random comments from X/Reddit" news article. There is no real substance, and this whole thing will blow over in a week as all the terminally online people move on to the next thing to get outraged about.

TZubiri 2y ago

"it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license 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." Denormalize incompetence again

JackOfCrows 2y ago

I mean most of the "AI" companies are all about copying everyone else's intellectual property, why not just start copying companies wholesale? That seems like real bigbrain time.

tway223 2y ago

Forking is not the issue. The real issue is the (mis-)presentation of the additional work and value they bring to the fork. Based on the code commits in the two repos it is minimal if anything at all, while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false.

typeofhuman 2y ago
> while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false. Here's the post from the founder: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956 https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956 You're absolutely right. This isn't a whoops, or nuance, or config/syntax/grammar error. It is a bold-face lie.

deleted 2y ago

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nubinetwork 2y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41689217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41689217

dangitman 2y ago

[dead]

micromacrofoot 2y ago

Well at least they don't make cruise missiles

65 2y ago

Even the AI companies are turning into slop now. With hyped markets, being rational when you're greedy becomes impossible.

MangoCoffee 2y ago

It's amusing to see some comments downplaying the significance of 'copying.' Apparently, it only becomes a concern when Chinese companies replicate Western products and ideas. Perhaps it's time to stop crying about Chinese clones.

tightbookkeeper 2y ago
actually we don’t have to tolerate ripoffs and theft. That’s the principled and helpful response to both problems.

dvektor 2y ago

Yeah somehow doesn't surprise me at all. The AI space is well on it's way to becoming as dubious as crypto/web3

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Do we have public sources on YC’s recent returns, e.g. on its ‘20 or ‘23? Pitchbook shows -16% IRR for YCCG21 (TVPI .73x, -1810 bps on benchmark) and -5% for ESP22 (TVPI .93x, +25 bps on benchmark). But those were notoriously difficult vintages.

breck 2y ago

Garry Tan in 2019: "we mock the scammers who build nothing real and get fake valuations." Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296685

dcchambers 2y ago

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.

braza 2y ago
> 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.

dncornholio 2y ago

So the issue with this company is that there isn't any issue. Got it.

moomin 2y ago

Looking through the comments there are a number of people here who are determined to defend the company’s lousy morals. They are missing the point. What the company did was not just shady, it a lousy business proposition all round. If defending entrepreneurs with questionable ethics is your thing, go back to defending AirBnB, Uber and WeWork. At least those firms had a strategy and made their founders rich. This thing is a dead man walking.

typeofhuman 2y ago

The article missed another huge aspect. The founder falsely claimed PearAI had "100+ contributors"[0]. Those contributions were to the original repo not to theirs. Combine this with their other actions and it really looks like they're scammers. Garry Tan's downplaying denial remarks make it look to me like they're trying to save face at YC - since it looks like they've been duped. 0: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956 https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956

sevensor 2y ago

> On Hacker News, the site for programmers owned by YC Oh are we?

dang 2y ago

Two big threads about this yesterday: Pear AI founder: We made two big mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 - Sept 2024 (188 comments) Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 - Sept 2024 (240 comments)

thiel_is_hitler 2y ago
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.
- dang 2y ago
  I've unkilled your comment so readers can make up their own minds.
  - KetoManx64 2y ago
    Respect
    - thiel_is_hitler 2y ago
      [dead]

Pat_Murph 2y ago

The more I learn about YC, the shittier they become...

ellis0n 2y ago

I can state the fact that the favorite of PG and one of the top-8 worst social founders of YC, Amassad, resold the idea of my startup to Google, pretending to be an investor. But he is not a real investor, as he invested in a copy of my project, which I had been developing since 2012. In 2020, during the pandemic, I found myself without any protection. I was robbed, and my Upwork account was even destroyed. I didn’t have enough money for food. I asked for help with my project in a remote accelerator where Amassad was a judge. I presented my project and expected a constructive conversation. But then I saw that Amassad immediately created copies of it within his network with his team. This had already happened with the YC startup Sixa, which was a copy of my post from a Ukrainian forum, and I mentioned this directly in my YC application. It was ignored and later the founder of Sixa disappeared with $7M (including money from Ukrainian investors) and he’s still being searched for. I think he was either killed or managed to deceive everyone and disappear. I believe there is a crisis of honesty and technological integrity at YC now, as there’s a huge demand for managers and actors. YC feels like a massive megamarket where all the managers trade technologies like at a Chinese microelectronics market only with better PR and networking. Unpunished evil always comes back. But it’s unclear how it can be punished in YC when all that matters is money and there’s no room for accountability in investments. When there are fake projects, 20% management errors from irresponsibility, and people whose success is measured by how many enemies they have, how can justice prevail? In Amassad’s home country of Pakistan, which he left for America, a supermarket was looted in 4 hours after opening. He would be better off helping his country than stealing projects from Ukrainian founders. I think for PG, Amassad may be bitch, but he's our bitch.. the world is run by hackers. I hope we live to see the next version of the Matrix, rather than see this one destroyed. AI can helps? no, no, AI can't helps if we don't change ourselves

GPerson 2y ago

It’s not surprising that this happens when plagiarism and theft are foundational parts of the machine learning ethos. It is literally built into the ideology being bandied about at these places.

purplezooey 2y ago

... the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT. Oh my word.

adr1an 2y ago

I guess this is "enshittification all the way down!". Surely, YC made a mistake but not having a more thorough review. But I believe the phenomenon is even more widespread, we'll fixate on this one. Meanwhile, plenty of VCs are being scammed by kids. Can't blame them, really... Who's hiring? AI filtering out resumés, and so on. Sorry for coming up too cynical, but we are going through crazy times. Hopefully it will stabilize soon... ~~AI~~ LLMs can't really reason. But the public (layman, managers, and big fish) are being deceived because billions of dollars were burnt ;/