Comment by danielpkl
6 months ago
Hi everyone, this is Daniel from the Pickle team. Glass is a new open source project from us that we plan to build on and improve. We built several original features for it like live summaries, real-time STT Transcript and one-click "Ask" from summary that we're very excited about. However in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache. This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end. We made a quick fix and are working right now to do a proper fix that addresses the issues fully and cleanly. We are sorry to the original author of the project, Soham (CheatingDaddy), and thank him for pointing this out. We are also sorry to the open source community for messing up here. Thanks everyone for caring about this.
Hiding the entire history of this incident[1] behind a force push[2] to make it seem as if credit was given and proper license was chosen from the start really displays a lack of integrity, and tells me it’s definitely malicious (which should be quite clear from zero mention of the original project to begin with, but this act reinforces that) rather an inadvertent screwup.
[1] https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commits/5c462179acface88...
[2] https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commit/4c51d5133c4987fa1...
I don’t think the rebase is malicious. Would they even be allowed to continue distributing the older commits (where they claim an Apache license) or would that be to perpetuate the license violation?
I'm too jaded to pointlessly debate all the misunderstandings about copyright and licenses. Bottom line is, this case is clearly not going to court, so there's no entity allowing or not allowing them to do anything, the only thing that matters is does this act of hiding enrages the original author even more? My answer to that is yes. Plus that old commit is still there, accessible after a couple of rather obscure clicks, so it's not even taken down if you want to debate technicalities.
I think the assumption that the license.txt in a given revision is accurate an applicable is erroneous. One is expected to follow the license.txt in the main repo regardless of revision.
2 replies →
A few weeks ago people on here where mad at a company (Microsoft?) for NOT force pushing the corrected credit of a source code.
You just can't win.
A good lesson that you should NOT do shady shit?
13 replies →
> This was incorrect and sloppy work […]
You meant: this was illegal and unethical work.
You might be lucky with the original author not suing you. I'm not sure your backers will be equally kind. I certainly wouldn't, depending on what exactly you told your investors we may be looking at straight up securities fraud here.
You meant: this was illegal and unethical work.
But... but... but... Velocity! And moats! And we're VC-funded! Doesn't that mean we can do whatever we want?
> And we're VC-funded! Doesn't that mean we can do whatever we want?
Side remark: Since YC claims all the time that they invest in people, not in ideas, YC should perhaps part from the people behind Pickle very fast, since by their investment YC rubber-stamped that the people behind Pickle are great ones (but not necessarily the product of Pickle), something that YC perhaps does not want to uphold anymore. :-)
Calling it sloppy work is too charitable. It's one thing for others to give you a benefit of the doubt, it's absolutely crazy that you yourself are doing it. It's clear if the other guy did not speak up, you would not have "corrected" the incorrect attribution. Your entire repo uses the work from someone else, and you did not even credit the person who built it until he called you out for the deception.
The correct approach is to license your code as GPL v3 with Soham as the author. It's a simple fix.
You won’t be forgiven unless you restore the license to GPL v3.
You restored the license to GPL v3: https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commit/5c462179acface889...
You won't be forgiven unless you credited sohzm and state that cheating-daddy is a direct inspiration
I love comments like this ^. It provides a solution to the table, rather than conversing the problem over dinner.
IMO This sounds pretty fair to me. Publicly apologize somewhere, and link OP to it. I like that. Or come on, at least Venmo "the kid" $1000 -- "a kid" who saved you time, and is putting food on your table.
"A kid" whose idea you took and profited on. Wow, just realizing upon writing this -- what if Pickle CEO has kids, and one your kid reads this?
If you had any semblance of respect for the work of others and what is right you would sincerely apologize and shut the project down instead of rolling with it.
Or how about an apology to handle it better with the company moving forward, and engage communication with the repo creator to involve him.
Really it's more of the gesture, to set the example, since we've all seen this before, and AFAIK, there haven't been too many amicable outcomes.
Hard to say that your work isn't derived from a GPL project if you quite openly are reimplementing a GPL project you used at the core of your own project.
> This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end. We made a quick fix and are working right now to do a proper fix that addresses the issues fully and cleanly.
There is no fix. Your work is derived and should be/will be licensed as GPL. You do not want to accidentally succeed and then find you have nothing. You are being a smart-ass here.
> This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end
Cut the grandoise talk. You stole someone's work and now you just shrug it off as "incorrectly attributed as Apache". That's not a mistake, that's a deliberate action plan. The force push others have mentioned is the proof. Atleast be honest in your apology.
I hope YC takes serious action and eliminates you guys from their cohort if you're still in one. This reflects very poorly on them otherwise.
Credit the original creator as a consultant and give him equity
Can I ask if this was an LLM mistake?
Ok you crook.
Nice try