Comment by mlyle
1 year ago
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.
Agreed. Looks like the founder agrees too[1], that was a pointless waste of time.
[1]: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840831339337302204
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.