8 ms·

Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own

• giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something. The project in question is here: https://github.com/simstudioai/sim https://github.com/simstudioai/sim
  • wredcoll 6mo ago
    Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.
    • voidfunc 6mo ago
      Good thing our legal system doesn't.
      • happytoexplain 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        • ozgrakkurt 6mo ago
          Really feels like there is a moral collapse all around. Seeing some people’s post about prediction (gambling) markets is another eye opener on this topic. Also the latest elected government of US is another one. Not sure if it was always like this or I grew up. But it for sure seems like there is a collapse.
          • plant-ian 6mo ago
            Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.
            • unknownx113 6mo ago
              it's definitely a little of both. Founders my age (18-25 range) have spent the last 10 years of their life seeing that morally reprehensible behaviour is rewarded. Whether it be Trump, Musk, whoever - the reward circuit in their brain sees that being a scumbag results in success. The people who don't act that way keep their mouth shut or get publicly executed (metaphorically). It's funny that people still criticize Jobs for being hard when he was 10x a better person than 99% of AI founders.
          • withinboredom 6mo ago
            I would say it was a collapse of ethics, not morality. Most people have morals (their own belief system on what is fair), but their morals may not be ethical (rule-based morals to achieve fairness). I personally attribute it to cars and the internet. The internet removed consequences. You can say the most vile thing imaginable to another human being and… nothing happens. No social cost, no awkward eye contact at the grocery store, no reputation hit in your actual community. Just a dopamine hit and a notification count. Cars did something sneakier. We spend hours every week sealed in a metal box, alone or with the same people. No random encounters, no friction with people who think differently. Just you, your podcast, and whatever is important in your tiny echo chamber. Put those two together and you get people with deeply held morals and zero framework for applying them to anyone outside their bubble. Ethics requires seeing strangers as real. We've engineered that out of daily life.
            • unknownx113 6mo ago
              this is really mind-boggling to me as someone who grew up on the (old) internet. I think the reward factor is also a large part of it, for most of the last 10 years young people have seen that unethical behaviour results in success. For a developing brain, it's easy to see how that resulted in the current state of SV.
          • dminik 6mo ago
            Sometimes the impression I get from commenters on HN is that they would sell their own grandmother for money. Much less than just not considering morals/ethics, it's seen as a weakness here.
            • unknownx113 6mo ago
              Too true. I won't say who it was but a prominent partner in my batch referred to, essentially, a lack of morality as a "competitive advantage". I went back to the east coast after lol
          • unknownx113 6mo ago
            the behaviour that was one socially unacceptable in Silicon Valley has become mainstream. The woke stuff went way too far and, like everything, the pendulum swung back the other direction with equal force. VCs are largely the problem as they set the tone. I have a lot of personal acquaintances that work in VC, and legitimately all of them fall on the spectrum of morally dubious to outright reprehensible.
        • cwmoore 6mo ago
          Agreed, the ultimate state-monopoly on use of force, right to private property, legislated penalties and remedies, the time and expense of pursuing fairness, in the absence of full moral consideration, or common sense for lack of a better term, is a giveaway to entrenched authority, attorneys or deep-pockets, and not a sensible approach to dynamic real world right and wrong.
      • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        In what possible world is "our legal system cares more about law than morality" a good thing? Shouldn't morality be the basis for all of the laws?
        • Henchman21 6mo ago
          Whose morality exactly?
          • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
            It actually doesn't really matter whose. There are a lot of good ethical frameworks to start from that would lead to better outcomes than our current system of "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people"
            • Henchman21 6mo ago
              It rather matters to me if in your morality some people I care about are "problems". It matters to me if your morality is based on a religion specifically -- I find no reason to follow the worlds faiths, they seem much more concerned with control and/or prohibition of individual action than with fostering good societies or people. Being specific, I find the current incarnation of Christianity in the US to be particilarly immoral -- yet if we're going to start making law based on morality this is the most likely source to be applied where I live. So we disagree rather vehemently, except for "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people" is bad.
              • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
                > It rather matters to me if in your morality some people I care about are "problems This would not be moral in any serious ethical framework Edit: Human equality is often one of the most important topics in Ethics. Why do you think so much effort is put into depicting Others as Inhuman?
                • 6mo ago
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      • LocalH 6mo ago
        Maybe it should
    • s5300 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • jacquesm 6mo ago
      In this case though morality is their product. So they go down hard.
  • embedding-shape 6mo ago
    I think the problem is more that they weren't honest about the origins, even if we disregard the point where they themselves break the license terms. > DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends. If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.
    • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
      That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing, minus lacking the attribution. People are too illiterate on software licenses. If you're going to use open source software, learn the licenses you're using! I'm pretty sure GitHub literally shows you what you can and cannot do with specific licenses. Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up. https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE
      • embedding-shape 6mo ago
        I barely finished high school and I can understand them, not sure why some find it so hard to, even the license texts themselves are relatively easy to read, understand and reason about, and there is tons of further reading material all over the web, some from actual law-firms that can help you understand how it applies in your country too.
        • mghackerlady 6mo ago
          I can maybe understand not fully grasping how the GPLs work (I sometimes have to look at GNUs page of compatible and incompatible licenses myself) but something as simple as apache or MIT should be so dead simple it hurts
        • balamatom 6mo ago
          The uncomfortable truth is that people aren't half as dumb as they give themselves credit for. Not being able to understand something is rarely, if ever, a skill issue.
  • mvkel 6mo ago
    Yep. While maybe it's "not cool," (I guess, depending on how much work Delve did in their fork, in which case it could be "totally cool"), there is no legal problem with doing this and if someone is "blowing the whistle" about this, they don't really understand open source.
    • malcolmgreaves 6mo ago
      > A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.
    • mrgoldenbrown 6mo ago
      How is there no legal problem with violating the license terms, which explicitly require attribution?
      • NewJazz 6mo ago
        It's not a copyright violation because the readme says open source somewhere!!! /s
    • nickvec 6mo ago
      You clearly did not read the article. Why post something so confidently when you're not even informed on the topic?
    • solid_fuel 6mo ago
      > there is no legal problem with doing this They are explicitly forbidden from doing this without attribution. So yes, there is a legal problem with this. All they needed to do to avoid that was provide attribution, but Delve was staffed with such morally bankrupt and incompetent individuals that they couldn't even do that.
    • mvkel 6mo ago
      Replying to my own comment -- didn't realize it was Apache, thought it was MIT. Flame on!!
  • axus 6mo ago
    If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and cover-up, you're going to have a bad time.
    • neilv 6mo ago
      Unless you're playing a numbers game by in investing in "naughty" people, and aligning them to mutually-beneficial exit. You still have to be careful not to invest in imbeciles, but unethical is OK.
  • Steve16384 6mo ago
    But they didn't attribute it. Or does this not really matter?
    • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
      It does matter, that's one of the requirements.
    • NewJazz 6mo ago
      Exactly the article brushes over this too, painting it as not abbig deal. But IMO it is a huge deal. Open source licensees have very few terms usually, making the terms that do exist extremely important to satisfy so that a user is in good standing. This phrase in the article in particular is frustrating: DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source tools are freely available to be used, if they are properly credited. Oh because my license terms are more liberal, it doesn't matter as much when you break them?? Really? Bonkers that they would publish that.
  • starkparker 6mo ago
    You don't see a problem with a startup dedicated to handling legal compliance for customers repeatedly botching even rudimentary legal compliance of its own?
  • WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
    > The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something. They used it without having a license. The apache license would have allowed them to use it, but they didn’t meet the conditions. This sounds equivalent to using paid software without paying to me. The original author could well claim that “the cost of a license under the terms which they used it is $2M”. After all, the cost of software licenses is entirely arbitrary and set by the author (copyright owner).
  • deng 6mo ago
    > outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? That's a bit like a shoplifter saying "well, outside of not paying for it, I don't see a problem?". Apache 2.0 clearly says you must include the license, include copyright, state any changes you've made and include the NOTICE file. None of that was done, so this is a pretty clear violation of the license. The copyright holders can demand that this is fixed immediately, seek at least an injunction if that does not happen, and maybe even claim profits made from selling the software while violating the license.
  • croes 6mo ago
    Ask yourself why they didn’t do that in the first place.
  • cestith 6mo ago
    Copyright infringement is always a problem.
• dmitrygr 6mo ago
  The scrubbing of old posts says much
  • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
    If they really did, they just need to attribute to the original project, its Apache 2 licensed, not AGPL or something that requires sharing code. I swear Software License Literacy needs to be a require course for all CS students.
    • dmitrygr 6mo ago
      You do not get to “just” retroactively fix copyright infringement (which is what this was). Try it with Disney sometimes.
      • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
        I'm not a legal expert to be fair, but it would definitely be the bare legal requirement, though them lying about it is probably what will get them in bigger trouble.
        • dmitrygr 6mo ago
          I encourage you to try selling copies of some Disney movies and Nintendo game rips on your website, representing them as your own work, and when they notice, to offer to "just delete them".
          • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
            This is beyond what we're talking about though, you're referring to copyright infringement. I'm referring to an open source licensed software that ALLOWS commercial use, the only requirement is attribution. Your example only makes sense if the company stole the code from a proprietary repo, like a hostile former employee.
• torginus 6mo ago
  The thing that strikes me as odd is how is it that Delve becomes an unicorn superstar (by iself), and the company they steal stuff off of, is much much less of a success story. It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
  • MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
    I think in real life, cheaters win. Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules. At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there. Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.
    • superxpro12 6mo ago
      The words for this is "regulatory capture" and "deregulation". And yes, its been happening for a long time. And now that right-wing groups are buying up all the media, we wont be hearing about it for much longer.
      • epolanski 6mo ago
        When politicians and pundits talk about deregulation the viewer is thinking about less hassle to set up a company or do inter state trade. What really happens instead are ecological, ethical and financial stresses of all kind.
    • altairprime 6mo ago
      The U.S. has always idolized charismatic grifters. Tech revolutionized charisma, by showing that interpersonal charisma isn’t the correct filter: asociability, or perhaps the more familiar amorality, is. The ability of someone to extract and upstream value without engaging in ethics is correctly labeled as more important than being warm and friendly.
    • 6mo ago
• PhilipRoman 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
    Personally I like GPL for core systems type of software, like an OS. I don't care what license you put desktop applications under, could be MIT, could be proprietary. I make software for a living, open source has a cost. If you want to profit off your open source software and have a competitive advantage against people forking it, you should 100% license it accordingly. I put a lot of thought into my projects before licensing them, I would hope others do as well. My default is almost always MIT though.
  • applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
    In reality, GPL is also a cuck license. There is absolutely nothing stopping somebody in India forking your open source game, throwing ads in it, and uploading it to an app store. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing, "outcompeting" your non-product and providing a strictly worse experience to people who don't know they could get it for free / without ads. It doesn't even really need to be India, it could just as well be stolen by someone in your country. The vast majority of open source developers don't have the time to invest into copyright protection. Trying to actually enforce your license is signing up for a years-long nightmare of wasting your time, energy, and money dealing with the legal system for, in the end, no real value to yourself. If you release something as open source, you pretty much need to be ready to accept that your license is meaningless when it meets contact with reality. This is all the more true with LLMs existing now, which are freely used to launder copyright licenses. Maybe in the past GPL would've made Microsoft or Google, at least, think twice about using your code, but now their developers will prompt GPT to reimplement your code.
    • withinboredom 6mo ago
      This is why I prefer the AGPL over the GPL. But isn't this the entire point of open source? So long as it is attributed/following the license, who cares if they're selling it or not?
• chuckadams 6mo ago
  In the long list of Delve's misdeeds, this is probably the least of them.
  • acdha 6mo ago
    Perhaps but it’s quite informative as a cultural indicator: someone who sells open source code for millions despite not having a license to do so is almost certainly cheating in other areas as well. Like if my CFO was cheating on their spouse, it wouldn’t directly tell me that they were cheating the company but given that prior it’s significantly more likely that they view other promises as only binding if you get caught.
• charcircuit 6mo ago
  Packaging up open source projects and selling them is done all the time is done all the time and is a good business model since you can outsource a lot of the work and bug fixing to people who will do it for free instead of having to pay someone.
  • mrgoldenbrown 6mo ago
    The selling wasn't the problem here. The problem was lying about what they were doing and violating the terms of the license.
• SanjayMehta 6mo ago
  Old news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609310
  • nickvec 6mo ago
    Sorry your thread didn’t gain traction, but this isn’t old news by any means. No need to be salty.
    • SanjayMehta 6mo ago
      Not salty. Just amused. Am pretty sure that this dang fellow has my posts filtered out of the RSS feed.
  • acdha 6mo ago
    Recent news, but I do sympathize that your earlier thread didn’t get attention. One thing I think helped this one is that HN has more people who care about open source abuse than Delve specifically so this headline gets more attention.
    • nickvec 6mo ago
      Yeah, I felt like the TechCrunch title was a bit clickbaity ("The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse"), so I opted to write my own title, which I feel helped get this thread on the front page.
  • Dylan16807 6mo ago
    That was posted 12 hours earlier. What's your definition of old?
    • SanjayMehta 6mo ago
      /s
• WAbdal 6mo ago
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• vesnanomikai 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• kikitaffner 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• randyrand 6mo ago
  So they added marketing and support on top. Sounds like how you run a business.
• AIorNot 6mo ago
  instead of calling this corporate malfeasance lets call it what it for what it really is: its Bunch of inexperienced people (kids really) stealing stuff from each other. (Not a proper 'Compliance' company) -The CEO is like 22 years old!!! WTF guys you think this guy knows compliance??? lol Ie in a fast high pressure environment called Y Combinator where the 'adults' are pressuring and hyping each other's products and stealing open source, AI generating and in general trying to productize every crappy idea they can think of to capture some VC or investor who is too dumb to do proper due diligence in the AI gold-rush and hype train On top of that engineering is so high pressured and awful these days e.g this video from the kids in silicon valley: https://youtu.be/0tLEszJs7hc?si=OXrJqPg-5PhVGnYT https://youtu.be/0tLEszJs7hc?si=OXrJqPg-5PhVGnYT
  • wg0 6mo ago
    More on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahDQ6SSK1Y0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahDQ6SSK1Y0
• saadn92 6mo ago
  What probably happened here is depressingly common in early-stage startups. Someone finds an open source tool that does 80% of what they need, forks it, strips the branding, and then ships it. Nobody thinks about the license because the company is in "move fast" mode and there's no process for it yet. Sure, the Apache 2.0 allows this, but the mistake is that when someone asked "is this based on SimStudio?" the answer was "we built it ourselves" instead of "yes, it's a fork, here's what we added." It went from a fixable attribution oversight to a credibility problem. You can retroactively add a LICENSE file, but can't take the lie back.
  • tikhonj 6mo ago
    I wonder how much of that is posturing (less charitably, lying to outsiders) and how much is the organization effectively lying to itself. Both are indictment of today's ambient startup culture, and I'm not sure which is ultimately worse.
    • nickvec 6mo ago
      Based on DeepDelve's recent follow-up article, I would assume the former. https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a-service-98a https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a...
      • redanddead 6mo ago
        this is nuts
      • bavell 6mo ago
        Wow that's bad. Unsure if this is an outlier or typical for YC companies.
        • unknownx113 6mo ago
          sadly this behaviour has become largely encouraged by YC
    • 6mo ago
• wg0 6mo ago
  Don' think SoC compliance is as automatable as much as investors hoped to. This mistrust and over trust in AI is based on a technology that Google invented and didn't pay much attention to themselves because they knew it isn't as reliable or that useful to the point where its output is so definitely reliable that it requires zero human input. The coding agents succeeds because apart from wanna be SaaS indie vibe coders, other serious users of AI agents for coding are themselves pretty strong and competent software engineers that won't let slip things easily and have years of experience and a taste in what is architecturally correct and what is nonsense and when and how to steer in what direction. Other fields - if they have to review every output of the LLM such as in finance running totals and such to verify the results of an LLM makes their usage not as much useful.
  • nikanj 6mo ago
    It's fully automatable. The secret ingredient is fraud.
• theturtletalks 6mo ago
  That's one thing I'm loving about AI adoption and everyone vibe coding, the importance of open-source. When I was learning how to code, it blew my mind when I realized proprietary companies were built on the shoulders of great open-source projects. These provide a nice UI/UX and the marketing, but AI coding is making that less and less of a moat.
• ryguz 6mo ago
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• gclawes 6mo ago
  Delved too greedily and too deep, it sounds like
• huflungdung 6mo ago
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• jwilber 6mo ago
  No shame rewarded as expected in the post-cluely world of contemporary VC.
  • ghqst 6mo ago
    what's interesting to me about Cluely is that they had one of the smartest programmers I know there doing really cool stuff with React... and then they got laid off when the core team moved to New York
• yboris 6mo ago
  I had someone steal my MIT open source software (that I sell for $5) and they are selling it for $11 or more. My software is 8+ years old; they are lying to the customers that they have been developing theirs for years. Very frustrating. mine: https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ my GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App grifter: https://videocliplibrary.com/ https://videocliplibrary.com/
  • simantel 6mo ago
    How can someone steal MIT-licensed software? The license says: Permission is hereby granted [...] to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...] If you don't want other people to be able to sell it, don't use an MIT license.
    • flexagoon 6mo ago
      The license also says: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. If the copyright attribution for the original code is missing, that violates the license. MIT is not a "no rights reserved" license like 0BSD or Unlicense.
  • tasuki 6mo ago
    Also you didn't mention you send $3.5 of the $5 to charity! Their Discord has three members, so perhaps it's not very popular? The "creator" lists themselves as "Peoples Grocers" and their website is a weird not-even-half-assed copy of Simon Willison's Weblog: https://peoplesgrocers.com/ https://peoplesgrocers.com/
    • nickvec 6mo ago
      Yikes. jfyi @simonw
  • alsetmusic 6mo ago
    Looks like something I can definitely use. I just bought your app. Hope the thief's computer crashes and they don't have backups.
• bitwize 6mo ago
  With all these shenanigans surrounding Delve it's a good thing I switched to YoureAbsolutelyRight.io.
• 4b11b4 6mo ago
  Seems to be encouraged at YC
• 4d4m 6mo ago
  Is it a companies fault for extracting value where you didn't see it earlier or is this an argument about Companies taking permissive-licensed code (MIT/Apache), barely improving it, and selling it?
• rheakapoor 6mo ago
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• HironoOcto 6mo ago
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• deleted 6mo ago
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