Comment by kibwen
1 year ago
> 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".
Why do you think there is a distinction between civil and criminal law?
1 reply →
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.
[flagged]
That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here.
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You've got the wrong impression; I left the startup that closed the $100m C because I didn't agree with some of their practices (or lack thereof).
I'm just sharing my perspective having seen success and failure in the startup space over the last 4 years first hand from teams that have succeeded and teams that have failed.
It doesn't seem to me, by the contrary. They're describing the harsh reality whether one likes it or not. As it's stated about reality in the Cambridge dictionary: "the state of things as they are, rather than as they are imagined to be". But it seems a good idea to rethink how we use the word "success", even if it's "success" at the eyes of many.
I like the story "The Honest Farmer", retold by Ella Lyman Cabot, I found in "The Moral Compass", pg. 262, edited by William J. Bennett, which introduces the story with this: "The dictionary defines integrity as 'an uncompromising adherence to a moral code' and says the word traces its origins to a Latin term meaning 'untouched'. Here is integrity, untouched and unshaken by altered circumstances."