They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
"You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and
You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and
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;"
> They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
The founder was also on Twitter bragging about how they were the "true open source" editor in this space because they already have 100+ open source contributors, when the majority of those were just upstream VS Code contributors whose patches they had merged back into their fork.
1. It may be legally permissible, but it is impolite, to change the license away from the well-known Apache software license towards something which has not been legally vetted, and is in fact generated entirely by AI with minimal oversight.
2. There is an open question of what the supposed value add is here from the Pear team, that could not have been achieved by the people whose work they are co-opting.
3. Without a clear value proposition, the oversight given to projects by YC is called into question. I think this is the point most people are concerned by.
Your first point is not true. If Continue wanted a copyleft license, they would have done so. Continue basically said they are fine with people forking and changing the license
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license.
Which part?
Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.
Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.
So the can of worms here now shifts to piracy. Whenever it comes up, a large percentage of people here on HN support it. "you wouldn't have purchased it anyway", "the original authors don't lose anything".
The same can be said about using the Apache license and the service here in question. In fact, the difference is that it's completely legal.
A fair point. But having the internet turn on you before you get any traction is also probably going to be a death-knell for an early stage company. It doesn't bode well for their ability to make or raise money.
I can't think of a more effective way to entrench a oligopoly: small companies get screwed because if they use open source the way the big girls do they get cancelled, and they can't get big because they can't use open source the way the big girls do.
And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly?
Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
As long as we're nit-picking, we're talking about the Apache license.
But my point isn't about the specific license. It's about one set of people very generously doing lots of labor and publishing the result in hopes of making the world a little better. And then some other people exploiting that for personal gain with no regard for the first group.
That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. For example, Gutenberg enabled the creation of the publishing industry. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain. That moral problem is why copyright was considered important enough to put into the constitution. [1]
Focusing on the specific text of a specific license is missing the point. Both my point and the point of this article, which is why YC is taking heat for backing these guys.
>That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain.
This is a _gross_ misunderstanding of what publishing was like in the first few centuries of the printing press.
Copyright laws originated as a form of government censorship and control over the printing press in 15th-16th century Europe. Governments and religious authorities sought to regulate the spread of information by granting exclusive printing privileges to select printers. This allowed them to censor and control what content was published.
It was only when the people who were censored won that copyright was invented to keep them from killing everyone involved.
I never claimed that I was reporting on the whole arc of publishing law over hundreds of years. I was laying the foundation for the next sentence, which is pointing at why this was so important to put in the US Constitution. The relevant text being, "[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Which is pretty clearly about balancing the economic interests of authors and inventors against the public good. Which is indeed at the heart of modern IP laws.
That's twice now that you've replied in a way that to me seems like favoring the argumentative nitpick over the substance of what I'm saying. If I don't reply after this, it'll be because I feel like there's not much point in writing for somebody who I can't get through to.
>I never claimed that I was reporting on the whole arc of publishing law over hundreds of years. I was laying the foundation for the next sentence, which is pointing at why this was so important to put in the US Constitution.
Printed press invented: circa 1440
US Constitution drafted: circa 1780
1780 - 1440 = 340
>hundreds of years
Hmmm.
>That's twice now that you've replied in a way that to me seems like favoring the argumentative nitpick over the substance of what I'm saying.
If your argument is based on false premises then there is no substance in your conclusion.
Not being polite will get you yelled at, as is happening right now, and should not be surprising. Legally there may be nothing and they are welcome to ruin their reputation and suffer the consequences.
I find it baffling in conversations I keep having with people that someone thinks that because something is legally permissible, then it is acceptable. It's the same vein of when people cry "free speech" when they said something reprehensible, as if that somehow should protect them from how people react to their horrible statements.
I think what is driving this is one the of the fundamental problems with the tech industry and its relationship to society: the ingraining of the assumption that because something is legal to do means it is OK to do. They are not and I think there should be more outrage when something like this tries to slide by.
Had me in the first half. If free speech is only strict legal protection with no cultural backing then you still can’t reasonably express contrary views and it’s worthless.
So the fact that it is culturally taboo to, say, use racial obscenities in public discourse (not directed at any particular person) means you think the first amendment is worthless? Because that's a deeply hamfisted belief but is in fact, the world we live in.
This sounds like a bunch of unwritten rules that only apply to the poor. Anyone who can ignore people yelling at them from their yacht in international waters is perfectly fine.
I guess random lynchings are a way to pass the time when you are completely powerless by choice.
It is not that simple. Very few licenses are accepted by, e.g., Linux distributions. If you create your own modified license, for example BSD with two additional clauses that prohibit use for AI training and use in startups without significant modifications then no one will use it.
That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
That is the reason why the smug response "You allowed me to do this" isn't sufficient.
That is so according to the OSI definition. But conditions and the level of exploitation have changed, so first steps like the AGPL have emerged.
If the Microsoft-funded OSI does not agree, perhaps we need an OSI-2.0.
You will increasingly find developers that disagree with AI exploitation, so a new institution that is not Microsoft-funded would be welcome. That is how the original OSI started before they purged ESR.
Sorry but software licensed under AGPL absolutely can be used for every purpose. It's just that you have to share the (modified) code with your users if they access the software via the network. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...
> That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
No one is forcing you to release source code under permissive licenses. You're literally saying that you're doing it because you want more users. Congratulations on your imaginary internet points.
Meanwhile Bezos is very much making non-imaginary money off your work.
In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license.
In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.
Yes but they don't defend their view about enterprise product, instead saying they "chatgpt'ed" the license and "can't be bothered with legal", which is IMO even worse - I mean, as a founder how can one be so dumb to openly say that? Especially that they have access to YC's legal and administrative support?
> if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
It's not just unethical, it is clearly illegal.
If you don't own the copyright to a program's source code, you cannot legally relicense that source code! Same holds true for any other copyrightable creative work which can be licensed. This is a very clear case of copyright infringement.
Nothing in the Apache license permits the licensee to relicense the source code (meaning, entirely replace the license with a different one).
It does permit you to build derivative enterprise products, and you have no obligation to keep the source code open for derivative products. But if you do release the source code for your derivative product, any original unmodified Apache licensed portion of the code retains that license and you cannot remove it if you aren't the copyright holder for that original work.
It's like someone taking all the money from the 'take a penny, leave a penny' jar, or taking all the books from a little free library, or not putting their shopping cart in the cart return area.
A completely legal violation of the social contract. Or in layman's terms, a dick move.
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.
AFAIK, people are not upset about the forking, but everything surrounding the forking, the actual business they "created" and the LLM-generated license.
Otherwise I agree, would be very strange if someone publishes a FOSS project, someone forks it and people get outraged. But I guess wouldn't be the weirdest things social media folks been upset about in the end...
1. I disagree
2. How is it not ethical or moral? As stated above, you are allowed to resell software based on the Apache license and integrate it into a service. The original authors haven't lost anything.
You are confusing legality and morality. Legality can be an indicator of morality, in that laws tend to flow out of our moral senses. But legality is a lagging indicator, and new circumstances tend to create gaps where things are legal but not moral.
One of my favorite examples here is wire fraud. The rise of electronic communication created all sorts of new possibilities for fraud, but we didn't get the wire fraud statue until 1952. There's a biography of Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, a con man from the 1890s forward, where he crows about many of the things he got away with because of that. A number of the things he did were probably legal before 1952, but that didn't make them moral before and not moral after.
If you get a traffic ticket, you can pay a lawyer to get it knocked down to a non-moving violation, thus saving your insurance rates from spiking. This is 100% legal, but is it ethical? The other poor saps in the court haven’t lost anything, it’s not zero-sum. And yet, it somehow feels dirty to be able to wash your hands of a crime by dint of having money.
They didn't just "resell" and "integrate" this source code. Rather, they attempted to re-license it, despite not being the copyright holder in the first place. They have no legal right to remove or replace the original license.
They can build derivative works, and apply a new additional license on top, assuming the additional license is compatible with the original one, and the original one is retained for any unmodified portion of the original work. But they cannot legally remove the original license entirely, nor remove copyright/attribution from any code that they did not write.
Think about this more deeply: if permissive licenses allowed you to replace the license entirely at will with no restrictions, that would effectively mean the work is in the public domain. There would be no purpose to having any license text at all, if these licenses could be trivially removed and violated at will.
A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.
I think it's bad not just from a social perspective (because exploitation acts to diminish the amount of open code) but from an investor one. Forking a repo, committing IP crimes, and then doing some marketing jazz hands is not obviously the foundation for a successful IPO in 5 or 10 years. Indeed, for me it'd be the opposite; I'd call it a sign these founders don't have the depth to go the distance.
It's also brand damage for YC among the more thoughtful sort of founder, which at least used to be an important concern to YC. At 1000 startups a year, though, maybe they've just decided that there's a bubble, and in a bubble it doesn't make financial sense to care about things like quality or longevity. You just shovel out whatever people are buying and worry about consequences later.
If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.