5 ms·

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 soft

by 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.

by 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.