Discussion

The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse

torginus: The thing that strikes me as odd is how is it that Delve becomes an unicorn superstar (by iself), and the company they steal stuff off of, is much much less of a success story.It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.

dmitrygr: The scrubbing of old posts says much

giancarlostoro: If they really did, they just need to attribute to the original project, its Apache 2 licensed, not AGPL or something that requires sharing code. I swear Software License Literacy needs to be a require course for all CS students.

giancarlostoro: The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something.The project in question is here:https://github.com/simstudioai/sim

axus: If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and coverup, you're going to have a bad time.

embedding-shape: I think the problem is more that they weren't honest about the origins, even if we disregard the point where they themselves break the license terms.> DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.

giancarlostoro: That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing. People are too illiterate on software licenses. If you're going to use open source software, learn the licenses you're using! I'm pretty sure GitHub literally shows you what you can and cannot do with specific licenses.Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE

embedding-shape: I barely finished high school and I can understand them, not sure why some find it so hard to, even the license texts themselves are relatively easy to read, understand and reason about, and there is tons of further reading material all over the web, some from actual law-firms that can help you understand how it applies in your country too.

dmitrygr: You do not get to “just” retroactively fix copyright infringement (which is what this was). Try it with Disney sometimes.

PhilipRoman: This hilarious meme continues to prove itself correct again and again https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...

giancarlostoro: Personally I like GPL for core systems type of software, like an OS. I don't care what license you put desktop applications under, could be MIT, could be proprietary. I make software for a living, open source has a cost. If you want to profit off your open source software and have a competitive advantage against people forking it, you should 100% license it accordingly. I put a lot of thought into my projects before licensing them, I would hope others do as well.My default is almost always MIT though.

chuckadams: In the long list of Delve's misdeeds, this is probably the least of them.

swingboy: They assume if people knew it was just a fork of an open source tool then they would use the free, open source version instead of paying for the fork.

wredcoll: Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.

voidfunc: Good thing our legal system doesn't.

happytoexplain: There is no implication in the parent comment that it should.The fact that we can't comprehend even talking about anything beyond legality sometimes is just mind-boggling. We are sick.

ozgrakkurt: Really feels like there is a moral collapse all around.Seeing some people’s post about prediction (gambling) markets is another eye opener on this topic.Also the latest elected government of US is another one.Not sure if it was always like this or I grew up. But it for sure seems like there is a collapse.

MeetingsBrowser: I think in real life, cheaters win.Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.

mvkel: Yep. While maybe it's "not cool," (I guess, depending on how much work Delve did in their fork, in which case it could be "totally cool"), there is no legal problem with doing this and if someone is "blowing the whistle" about this, they don't really understand open source.

malcolmgreaves: > A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.

mikert89: Basically YC + MIT background is a license to raise infinite capital. So they just needed to check some revenue boxes etc.

SanjayMehta: Old news.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609310

Jiro: Using the GPL like this doesn't help unless you are willing to sue people. If you can't or won't sue people, all that happens is that the software with the GPL license is avoided by people who want to use it in GPL-incompatible ways but have a conscience, while bad people still take it and use it anyway, and since you're not going to sue them, they don't care that they're violating the license.

applfanboysbgon: In reality, GPL is also a cuck license. There is absolutely nothing stopping somebody in India forking your open source game, throwing ads in it, and uploading it to an app store. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing, "outcompeting" your non-product and providing a strictly worse experience to people who don't know they could get it for free / without ads.It doesn't even really need to be India, it could just as well be stolen by someone in your country. The vast majority of open source developers don't have the time to invest into copyright protection. Trying to actually enforce your license is signing up for a years-long nightmare of wasting your time dealing with the legal system for, in the end, no real value to yourself. If you release something as open source, you pretty much need to be ready to accept that your license is meaningless when it meets contact with reality.This is all the more true with LLMs existing now, which are freely used to launder copyright licenses. Maybe in the past GPL would've made Microsoft or Google, at least, think twice about using your code, but now their developers will prompt GPT to reimplement your code.

plant-ian: Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.

nickvec: Sorry your thread didn’t gain traction, but this isn’t old news by any means. No need to be salty.

neutronicus: Does that blog post have a glowing smiley face with "A BUNCH OF N***ERS" written in on it in pixelated text?Would think twice about linking that one in polite company.

MSFT_Edging: Not defending it, but the meme itself is derivative quote from the developer of TempleOS. He suffered from Schizophrenia and believed the CIA was tracking him. He believed you could tell a CIA agent due to them glowing, and would refer to them as "glowy nwords" very regularly.The term "glowy" has taken on a life of its own despite the original context. The image itself is from it's 4chan days. Probably poor taste to include a version with Terry's full quote.

withinboredom: This is why I prefer the AGPL over the GPL. But isn't this the entire point of open source? So long as it is attributed/following the license, who cares if they're selling it or not?

evanjrowley: It's possible their spokesperson was not informed about SimStudio being the basis for Delve. Lots of people in sales and marketing do not know little about how open source software works.

embedding-shape: I'm not sure "Person who answered a question didn't actually know the answer" is such a good defense, almost worse than "We didn't understand the license", because the implications of having such people in your company seems way wider then.

evanjrowley: That is very much true. Lack of knowledge in a legal context is a very weak defense.Generally speaking, open source ecosystem knowledge is not something that shows up in job descriptions, interviews, or regular training for non-technical staff in most software companies. Hopefully that will one day be the case but until then there is a high likelihood that misleading statements can be made accidentally.

mghackerlady: I can maybe understand not fully grasping how the GPLs work (I sometimes have to look at GNUs page of compatible and incompatible licenses myself) but something as simple as apache or MIT should be so dead simple it hurts

mghackerlady: he's gone way off the /pol/tard deepend. He used to be a pretty good source for GNU/Linux tutorials but man he's insufferable

giancarlostoro: Hot damn, I did not notice the Terry Davis meme on the blog post had that. I wonder if they noticed the font at all or not.

vesnanomikai: the writeup is helpful but i'd want to see how it handles edge cases