Comment by CharlieDigital
1 year ago
It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in.
Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people, which as I type this seems like a sad but unsurprising move.
This is exactly what VCs are looking for. They are going to hand you a check worth several hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. They are not doing this because it's a charity; they are doing this because they are making a bet that they'll get some return on that investment.
This is the purpose of a VC: to deploy capital in a way that is likely to yield the greatest returns for the investors.
Right, we get it. But you completely ignored the commenter's main point:
If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in.
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Spoken as if there was only one single binary option for investment!
The strategy implies that the marginal value of the lack of ethics/the personality type to do that is the thing thats worth investment. If thats true, then venture capitalism and perhaps capitalism itself is super fucked: a machine for developing and rewarding the worst impulses of humanity.
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There’s also ego and fame at stake. VCs are hardly optimal.
Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
Just, Devil's Advocate. But isn't that kind of a smart strategy?
Not saying it's "nice", nor even how I would do things. But I'd imagine many, many people get excessively wealthy investing in this fashion.
I’ve never looked into it deeply, but as I understand it the opposite is true. I’ve read in passing that statistically the most successful sales people are kind, insightful and find ways to align with their customers best interests. Likewise, I’ve also read in passing that economies with cultures of respect and collaboration far outperform ones that are very competitive.
Maybe someone has more information about those topics that me?
That's why I pointed it out. It's a perfectly legitimate explanation for this type of behavior. (And, imo, abhorrent and where capitalism-as-harnessing-greed really falls apart.)
As for "smart," I assume there are some not well understood externalities to this kind of behavior, such as erosion of trust or other social ills that are hard to quantify until they reach a critical point.
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Copying everything EXCEPT the license - they knew THAT needed to change at least.
Good point.
> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
This was probably the hardest realization I came to in business/startup world.
That's precisely what most investors (at least the ones with any large amount of money) look for. They could care less if your product is good, or if you developed it ethically, or if you treat employees or customers well.
Most would invest in the next Oracle and sleep like babies if given the chance to get in early - even if they had a crystal ball to see how badly it will impact the industry and social fabric as a whole down the road 20 years later.
Especially VCs. They exist to make money. Full stop. The rest is marketing fluff for the naive masses.
> doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses
They copied without attribution. Not okay under Apache.
Starting off by making an obviously hamfisted move matters. It's a headwind to overcome.
Is it possible to overcome? Sure.
Yes, you can heal after shooting yourself in the foot.
(And, of course, removing attribution is violating licenses). However, they're unlikely to face litigation for this. The possible legal consequences aren't the actual consequences they're likely to face.
I can all but promise you these "headwinds" that they are facing in terms of negative PR are in fact a net positive. At their stage, any press is good press.
AFAICT, the attribution's been there since the beginning on their GitHub? (see: About section)[1].
I agree adding their own license was hamfisted, but honestly, if I'm funding a company I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially. The first order of business is almost always proving whether your business should even exist.
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-app?tab=readme-ov-file
The code of note is in the pearai-submodule subrepo. Check out this fun commit:
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/335436b47...
It's claimed to be accidental, but the entire commit history is full of commits saying "remove cont....." that neuter all references to Continue. They didn't even want the name in the commit history.
> I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially
They claim that they intended to make the project open source all along. Just keeping the Apache license would have been less time consuming than asking ChatGPT for one, with the added benefit of being a real license.
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I mean, whatever floats your boat, but if I'm funding a company, I hope they've spent whatever they need to spend to determine whether or not what they're doing is legal and sensible, even if that involves spending more than $1.
Cloning an open source project and having Chat-GPT write you an enterprise license is not how you "prove whether your business should even exist." It's how you scam rich people into giving you money.
> It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
It appears that they did violate the license:
https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:
a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License;
c. 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;
That's a problem to be resolved by their legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem (e.g. work out some licensing agreement).
The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses.
Everything else can be negotiated.
Sure. We can break into each other's houses. It's illegal but "that's a problem to be resolved by [our] legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem".
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This mentality, where ethics and morals are ignored, is how we get things like Theranos.
These people stole a project, illegally changed the license, and pretended it was their own. This is basically theft and fraud, and it's kind of disgusting seeing people defend it.
This is such an obnoxious way to look at operating a business and helps explain why the rest of society finds tech bros to be so insufferable.
There's a reason why big corps don't use copyleft software, if it were as simple as this they would be violating copyleft licenses left and right.
They lose claim to intellectual property rights over their own technology, even the risk (certainty) of a lawsuit over this is enough to kill the company.
And we are not talking about the company being sued for a breach of license. We are talking about this being used in any kind of dispute in court, client didn't pay? They can just allege that whatever they bought wasn't even the property of the startup, so they had no righ to sell it to them, boom good luck collecting your contract payments.
If you are a big company with a lot of business, sure you move on. But a company that is a couple of months old with this liability already? It's doomed.
Denormalize incompetence again.
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There’s legality, and bad taste.
Except they did blatantly violate the license of the code they stole and only fixed it after being called out.