Comment by minimaxir
1 year ago
Context: PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it. (relevant discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032)
As an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.
> I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense
It's worse than that; this whole kerfuffle came to people's attention after the founder posted a brag tweet about leaving a $300k job at Coinbase to go YC. Only to claim ignorance about the license and everything else later.
"Sorry officer I didn't know I couldn't just rewrite a license to whatever I wanted despite having ample access to legal resources. Yes officer I am a CEO. No officer I will not remain silent."
Terrifying, always afraid to touch unlicensed code. Tried to give most of my public code extremely open licenses because I’d assume some guy crawling the internet for a piece of code probably has enough stress in his life.
No no who says we're smal indide hackers. It has to be that we're the genius god gifted visionaries fixated on a future for humanity that is invisible to mere mortal peasants hence mistakes are inevitable.
That's in general not specific to any situation.
> PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it.
More specifically PearAI forked the OSS code editor Continue, which was itself funded by YC, and got YC funding for it. Also the editor they forked is itself a fork of VS Code, but is not to be confused with Void Editor, which is a third YC funded VS Code fork with AI features. It's YC funded VS Code forks with AI all the way down.
So fork of the fork got funded. Interesting. Now I believe it is true that "you don't have to have even a product"
This is crazy. And then I hear about solid products/companies that don’t get any/very little funding at all because it has no “AI” and it baffles the mind.
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This sounds like the preamble to a Michael Lewis story to the next tech bubble.
> OSS code editor Continue
Are you talking about continue.dev?
That's not an editor itself, nor is if a fork of VS Code; it's an extension for VS Code (and JetBrains).
My mistake, I haven't used Continue and was led to believe they have their own VS Code distro. PearAI forked VS Code and forked Continues VS Code extension and smushed them together then. They also just wired Continues code up to Claude/GPT4 so the models aren't novel either.
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This is an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal.
I wonder if it's possible to get funding for a fork of an already funded fork that you launched recently.
Might even be an easy money glitch: every couple of years or so you fork your YC funded code editor, get YC funding for the new fork, and cruise on that money for a while.
(all of the above is said tongue in cheek)
> ...an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal
Don't give blockchain bros any ideas...
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Well said! That last sentence was very elegant.
Don't see a problem with YC "dutching" and spreading their bets across multiple forks/teams.
I just forked the vs code repo and didn't screw up statements on a license for a business model. I'm clearly the superior hedge and I'll be waiting for my check.
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It does dispel the myth that YC is simply investing in founders. They are really investing in the ideas that the partners like and then finding teams who are capable of delivering on it.
Which is of course fine but you see Dalton's Request for Startups and I've not seen only a tiny handful in the last two batches.
Due to YC's large batch sizes and the consolidation of industries such as AI, increasing numbers of YC startups are now directly competing with each other.
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Seems like YC should pair more of these smaller companies together, I honestly don’t know if that would help or not. Most YC funded projects aren’t really profitable to begin with.
It’s like somewhere in between getting grant funding for a university project and real corporate work.
I mean, this was precisely PG's genius - taking the right set of unwashed nerds, pairing them up appropriately and then mentoring the end result. That model gave birth to Reddit and Auctomatic.
I don't get it either - why spend $2m on 4 YC companies under different group partners, creating a hunger games of sorts, instead of convincing all of them to combine their talent for $500k. Sure, egos will be bruised and they might fight over who's boss, but the chances of the final product succeeding would be much higher.
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Tell us of the time you hacked a real-life (non-computer) system
To that I say “fork yeah”, the old GitHub slogan. I haven’t seen Continue complaining about it. It’s far less toxic than Sentry or Hashicorp which are on the other side of the issue. Pear could have been a bit less blatant I guess, but I think it’s fine that they took advantage of the license.
Edit: I just realized the old t-shirt slogan of GitHub was “Fork you.” Even better.
Is Sentry based on FOSS?
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"We moved fast, stole someone else's work, claimed it was our own, sold it to investors, we're smol indie hackers, just like you uwu."
UwU
i agree with your sentiment, and them botching the license was clearly a problem, but at the same time i think a dev waives their right to be indignant about someone forking and commercializing their code when they provide a perpetual, irrevocable, commercial license to do so. if continue was GPL’d or something i would respect the uproar more
Sounds like YC could improve in their due diligence.
Maybe they hired the Sequoia people that vetted SBF.
They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack re: how buttoned up they are about licensing. Particularly when they appear to have started sharing source code before YC's investment, and the last time I spoke to an attorney who advises on open source licensing he was expensive.
Nah. YC should cut them. It doesn't take an expert to know that you shouldn't ask AI to generate legal documents for you.
My bet is: this won't age well.
It's like saying 25 years ago that it doesn't take an expert to know that you shouldn't put your credit card on the internet.
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> They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack
Reading the room, people are upset about grifters, scams and fakery in general. The outrage is obviously built up over seeing our industry decline to buzzwords, bait and switch, and general enshittification. This is just one particularly clear-cut instance of opportunistic grift caught in the act. It’s like that IoT juice press – it’s not that harmful, but it’s a symbol of what people hate.
[dead]
I kind of see your point, but they're clearly learning on the job, and AFAICT the mistakes didn't damage anyone else too badly.
imo, the way you first do something + your first responses to serious criticism are the most telling regarding character. because afterwards, you can just play the act of "we're sorry because the backlash was really big and we have to clean up".
>they're clearly learning on their job
They are experienced software developers coming from $300K jobs at Coinbase. As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0. As former employees at highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase they know better than letting ChatGPT make up new legal texts.
They are cynical manipulators hiding behind a made up fictive "careless Gen Z tech bros" image.
They're VC funded software developers, gods in the image of mere mortals. There's probably nothing they are not experts in.
Crypto scammers turned AI scammers, the world continues to turn.
> [they worked at] Coinbase
I mean... crypto companies are well known for being chock full of decent and honest employees who aren’t zealots or bandwagon jumpers in any way, shape or form.
Just like a lot of recently created “AI” companies.
Coming from Coinbase isn't such the prestigious signal of integrity and hard work that that they seem to think it is.
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> As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0.
I’ve worked at a company with hundreds of devs where I caught an obvious error (a reference to a section that did not exist) in the pre-employment agreement. To imply that most devs are carefully reading documentation in general, much less legalese, is laughable.
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> highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase
Um.
They are new grads
This outrage talk is ridiculous, you don’t have the morale high ground to judge people, they didn’t break anything, taking VC money isn’t bad, the incident was caused by sore losers looking for drama, etc etc
They very clearly did break something because a lot of people got upset and said they broke something, and then they admitted they broke something.