5 ms·

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 a

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 7mo ago
Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.
- voidfunc 7mo ago
  Good thing our legal system doesn't.
  - happytoexplain 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ozgrakkurt 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
      Whose morality exactly?
      - bluefirebrand 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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?
        7mo ago
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - LocalH 7mo ago
    Maybe it should
- s5300 7mo ago
  [dead]
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  In this case though morality is their product. So they go down hard.
embedding-shape 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  > A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.
- mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
  How is there no legal problem with violating the license terms, which explicitly require attribution?
  - NewJazz 7mo ago
    It's not a copyright violation because the readme says open source somewhere!!! /s
- nickvec 7mo ago
  You clearly did not read the article. Why post something so confidently when you're not even informed on the topic?
- solid_fuel 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Replying to my own comment -- didn't realize it was Apache, thought it was MIT. Flame on!!
axus 7mo ago
If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and cover-up, you're going to have a bad time.
- neilv 7mo 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 7mo ago
But they didn't attribute it. Or does this not really matter?
- giancarlostoro 7mo ago
  It does matter, that's one of the requirements.
- NewJazz 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
Ask yourself why they didn’t do that in the first place.
cestith 7mo ago
Copyright infringement is always a problem.

wredcoll 7mo ago

Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.

voidfunc 7mo ago
Good thing our legal system doesn't.
- happytoexplain 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ozgrakkurt 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Whose morality exactly?
    - bluefirebrand 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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?
        7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- LocalH 7mo ago
  Maybe it should
s5300 7mo ago
[dead]
jacquesm 7mo ago
In this case though morality is their product. So they go down hard.

embedding-shape 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
> A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.
mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
How is there no legal problem with violating the license terms, which explicitly require attribution?
- NewJazz 7mo ago
  It's not a copyright violation because the readme says open source somewhere!!! /s
nickvec 7mo ago
You clearly did not read the article. Why post something so confidently when you're not even informed on the topic?
solid_fuel 7mo 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 7mo ago
Replying to my own comment -- didn't realize it was Apache, thought it was MIT. Flame on!!

axus 7mo ago

If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and cover-up, you're going to have a bad time.

neilv 7mo 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 7mo ago

But they didn't attribute it. Or does this not really matter?

giancarlostoro 7mo ago
It does matter, that's one of the requirements.
NewJazz 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago

Ask yourself why they didn’t do that in the first place.

cestith 7mo ago