While the posted stuff does look very similar, with identical random numbers etc, the APIs in question looks like pretty standard off-the-shelf OAUTH... Unless other APIs are very similar as well, it seems that Otonomo just took a shortcut in documenting their OAUTH by copying Smartcars documentation.
Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
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Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#252I expected this to be a " I had the idea first" post. But it is actually a copyright infringement post AND makes the offending company look like a bunch of hacks. If they don't have the engineering chops to build an API how are going to handle the ops of it.
Some people built the world's most popular operating system doing just that - copying Java's API.
They didn't copy paste API docs too, including typos, which is what we have here
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#253Keep going and look for ways to turn it to your advantage
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. If a remote team is writing your API documentation by copying and pasting, then what is the actual implementation team building from?
Hi, I'm the CEO of Smartcar. While I can't go into exact details, I can say from what we know so far: this occurred out of their main headquarters.
Can you clarify? "Out of" can mean either "outside of" or "within" weirdly enough.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#255Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#256I don't have any data to back it up but majority of Israeli startups have one goal: to be acquired (and are extremely good at marketing them to acquiring companies and investors). So continue your product and in a couple of years time, they would have been acquired and the product put on back burner by the acquiring company.
> I don't have any data to back it up but majority of Israeli startups have one goal: to be acquired... As someone that worked for one, and knows enough people that work in other Israeli startups, I can tell you it isn't true. True, some startups get acquired, but no more then any other place (the only difference I see is that in some tech areas Israeli talent is considered very good, so when looking for an acquisiti…
Also Israeli, can also back this up.
There are a handful of Israeli startups trying to build a large companies.
There are exceptions, and large one at those. But it's the common mentality.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#257i think this is a perfect example of:
ideas mean nothing, execution means everything.
you had the idea, but they had the connections(VC, industry, etc) and knowhow to execute on it faster and bring it to market faster.
Sad, but this is the market we have created! The rich can steal ideas, or do whatever they want, with impunity because they can defend their questionable actions in court. This is what AirBNB and Uber were built on.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#258You blew it. By posting this article and getting to the top of Hackernews you may have alerted their attention and they may rapidly change everything to not seem like copyright infringement. Then you might have weak or no claims.
Nothing to blow. This is not illegal.
That's why they wrote it up as a blog post and are trying to garner PR from it.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#259In general, you can't copyright a "working part". That's why there are 3rd party auto parts. That's pretty much true in the software area too, although Google and Oracle are over- litigating that issue.
The idea here probably isn't patentable. "Locate and unlock a car's doors remotely" is not exactly original.
Just rewording the docs is cheezy. The other party should have done a full rewrite.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Chinese You mean "Chinese companies". "The chinese" is just racist.
China is a nation, not a race. Race itself is a social construct. Nice try though!
"Race itself is a social construct."
What do people mean by this exactly? I've heard some people make the case that the exact boundaries between ethnic groups can be socially constructed, which makes sense to me (like how one draws a hard line between two groups which have some admixture).
But the idea that ethnicities have nothing to do with biology and is a purely social phenomenon sounds like a lay-person's misunderstanding of the above claim. For example, it should be obvious that using a sperm/egg donor can lead to a child of a different ethnicity even if the socialization is kept the same (which you can't necessarily do perfectly in reality, but still).