Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
> In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier’s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher’s that routed people to “random fields in Mexico”.
Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move. Launching it with the same name as the original repo is just flagrant.
This guy thought he was going to ride this controversy to some free publicity for himself, using other people’s work. He flew too close to the sun and got caught out on every level.
> Stealing an open source repo
It's in poor taste for sure but let's not pretend that the chosen license is doing him any favors: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours/blob/813cf85/LICENSE
Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy. Profit-driven entities love when smart people publish MIT code that they can feed off of without giving anything back.
Nor is the copycat project prevented from using the name without a trademark. For instance one couldn't repackage Mozilla or Blender under those names:
- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75558938&caseSearchType=U...
- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85852073&caseSearchType=U...
MIT license does not mean you can copy everything around the software, like the name of the product, and strip the license. There are still requirements in the license for the copyright notice to accompany the software.
Can confirm. I used to hate when people published their code under MIT instead of GPL. But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
The irony is that nobody is going to want to use software in the future that isn't open source. Why would I pay for software that I can't extend myself?
> But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
I hope that eventually you gain from society exactly what you’ve given.
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> I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
Genuine piece of shit, nice.
> Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy.
How is it a fallacy? The ability to pull in MIT/BSD code into a commercial product without providing the source is an extra freedom over (say) the GPL. The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?
Some folks may not like that extra bit of freedom, and want to put the restriction that you have to (re-)share the code — and that's fine — but it is less free.
> The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?
IMO,the end-user is the person downloading and using the software from the app store, not the free-riding intermediary who repackages it. Copyleft ensures the end users can modify their software by guaranteeing access to its source code, and it accomplishes this by constraining any privileges of would-be intermediary repackagers from impinging this fundamental end-user right.
When judging which software offers more rights, you must first establish which party you prefer to have primacy: downstream developers, or the users of the software who run the released packages on their devices.
It gives you the freedom to make others unfree, (by distributing software to them that they can’t inspect, modify, share) so it depends on whether you care about freedom for some individuals or freedom for everyone.
They still need to keep the conditions the mit sets though and keep the copyright notice.
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software
Isn’t it MIT-licensed?
That’s not theft. The author explicitly told people he wants them to do this; the company is just taking him up on the offer.
"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
It appears that this essential part of the MIT license was violated.
The MIT license does not allow you to claim that you invented the software when you did not in fact invent the software.
> Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move
Do you think he stole it directly, or an LLM reproduced it complete with existing bugs?
The LLM is more likely to fix any bugs it finds rather than explicitly reproducing it line by line, which it's actually quite bad at doing anyway, except for small, well-known pieces of code in its training set.
I refer you to his mea culpa: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...
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I very much doubt an LLM is going to do that without explicitly being prompted to do so.
It is what he claims happened: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...
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Whether he stole it directly, by doing the 'work', or indirectly via an LLM, stealing it is wrong. If you generate something using an LLM, you have a responsibility to ensure you're not infringing on someone else's work.
I don’t disagree, and in this case a simple google search would have sufficed, it in the more general case, how?