Comment by impostervt
1 year ago
Oof just watched a video from the Pear.ai guys and was happy to hear they made it into YC. I don't know much about the project, but they seem like good people.
1 year ago
Oof just watched a video from the Pear.ai guys and was happy to hear they made it into YC. I don't know much about the project, but they seem like good people.
"What we're doing isn't technically illegal so stop talking about it" isn't generally a phrase used by what I'd call good people, but we'll agree to disagree.
I don't get the objection here.
Forking is part of how open source is supposed to work.
The beauty of forking/open source is the ability to contribute back to the original project or take over an abandoned project. In this case, the original project Continue.dev isn't abandoned and actually has more traction/commits than the PearAI fork. But what PearAI did not do is a traditional fork. They took the commit history, re-branded everything to PearAI, pushed it up to their own repo, and claimed that the contributors of VSCode & Continue were their own contributors on Twitter.
That's not the spirit of open source. I'm sure the authors of Continue.dev did not intend for their work to be used this way, even if the license is permissive of it.
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There's a difference between forking to make a OSS project better and forking to create a clone just for the sake of VC funding that doesn't trickle down back to the original code.
Even if it's allowable by the permissive license of the original code, it's not a net positive for OSS.
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I think the assumption people are making is that the YC selection team are dumb idiots, and don't understand that all the founders of that project did was fork an open source project and ask them for some money.
(I'm not saying this is what happened; I know nothing about this project. I am saying this seems like the assumption the author of the article and some people in this thread are making. I bet that's not what happened, but if YC is actually full of dumb idiots who do zero due diligence whatsoever, then I guess I have to agree with the article's thesis.)
The objection is it’s extremely unlikely licenses are being followed and they seek to profit from good will of free software.