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Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

smartcar.com

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Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#561

Post by jakobegger »

xgbi wrote: post #558
comex wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same verbiage, as in large chunks of text are word-for-word identical? Because that’s what’s being alleged here; it doesn’t happen by accident (the chances of two people independently writing identical text are astronomically low for any significant amount of text), and it certainly constitutes copyright infringement unless it turns out that Smartcar put the documentation under an open source license somewhere. I…

The API the guy is talking about is a freaking RFC! The wording of this is found everywhere on the internet. Just search for one of the phrases you find and you'll have plenty of matches: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+number+of+seconds+the... I understand the frustration of the guy, but this is not like they copied the business API, this is just the standard Oauth. Anyways.. I'm starting to sound like an Oto…

How did Ottonomo end up with identical random identifiers? Are those from the RFC as well?

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#563

Post by pojntfx »

gepoch wrote: post #437

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so I thought I'd post it to see what you all think... IANAL, IMHO, etc. I searched for one of the unique tokens in the docs: https://www.google.com/search?q=0facda3319 That pulls up their SDK github repo: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/doc/readme.... Which is published with a standard MIT license: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE.md Whic…

Yeah, AGPL-3.0 was invented for a reason.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#564

Post by Kinnard »

michaelmrose wrote: post #551
intertextuality wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is a big problem with git or any of the current repo gui providers. A repository should not be able to be forked if it doesn't have a SPDIX license. Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. It's usually not an issue but I have run into some small repositories that had no license, meaning I could -not- fork and modify for myself or a PR, legally. But th…

Neither git nor github can automatically discern how the law applies in context in 195 nations without consulting a lawyer and honestly neither can you. Unless you want to pay thousands of dollars per repo presumably everyone is going to continue not giving a damn. If you don't want people to clone a repo don't upload it to a public github repo. If you are thinking of cloning realize that the ability to clone it give…

This could be a problem for ricardian contracts and/or smart contracts

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#565

Post by intertextuality »

atq2119 wrote: post #559
intertextuality wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, although yes I would agree with you. -In the case- of a repository being public without a license however, forking and related things should still be disabled to prevent licensing headaches.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how git works. The main point of putting something on GitHub is to allow people to git clone it. Every git clone is a fork of the project. If you don't want something forked, don't put it on GitHub.

I understand how git works. I'm discussing the edge case scenario where someone uploads something but doesn't add a license. In that case, forking and cloning should be disabled, at the least.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#566

Post by arbie »

intertextuality wrote: post #565
atq2119 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how git works. The main point of putting something on GitHub is to allow people to git clone it. Every git clone is a fork of the project. If you don't want something forked, don't put it on GitHub.

I understand how git works. I'm discussing the edge case scenario where someone uploads something but doesn't add a license. In that case, forking and cloning should be disabled, at the least.

IIUC, you are suggesting that GitHub make new repos private by default, unless a permissive license is set.

This seems a reasonable balance.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#567

Post by gdrift »

joshfraser wrote: post #528
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer and former small business owner here. Your attorneys may have been using the same base template that was used to create your competitor's documentation. Lawyers reduce the need to copy/pasta code, just like developers do. If an attorney's game of 20 questions leads to a bunch of templates that were drawn up before they ever knew you, values are filled in for your specific use case, you're not getting ripped…

It wasn't from a template. The language was way too specific to the specific business. And the law firm didn't deny that they had copied it.

Legal contracts are copyrightable too. I've learned this when looking for a basic tenants contract trying to save on lawyer's fees which seemed too high for such a standard document. So not sure how legally safe it is to just copy such documents.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#568

Post by soulofmischief »

intertextuality wrote: post #539
mlindner wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. This is absurd. You don't have to use the "fork" button to copy a repository. It's as simple as cloning it and pushing it. Such a restriction servers no purpose at all.

Obviously such an implementation would disable cloning as well.

Then make a private repo. Hosting a public repo that a company would have to pay a mechanical turk to scrape every single file from manually by viewing the RAW data is just obtuse.

If you want it open source, understand what that means before complaining about it. Otherwise don't release your software on an open source platform.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#569

Post by soulofmischief »

arbie wrote: post #566
intertextuality wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand how git works. I'm discussing the edge case scenario where someone uploads something but doesn't add a license. In that case, forking and cloning should be disabled, at the least.

IIUC, you are suggesting that GitHub make new repos private by default, unless a permissive license is set. This seems a reasonable balance.

It's antithetical to their business strategy. They charge for premium accounts to give access to private repos. Nothing wrong with that, but OP should probably try out Gitlab if he wants an enterprise-level solution for free.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#570

Post by soulofmischief »

xgbi wrote: post #558
comex wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same verbiage, as in large chunks of text are word-for-word identical? Because that’s what’s being alleged here; it doesn’t happen by accident (the chances of two people independently writing identical text are astronomically low for any significant amount of text), and it certainly constitutes copyright infringement unless it turns out that Smartcar put the documentation under an open source license somewhere. I…

The API the guy is talking about is a freaking RFC! The wording of this is found everywhere on the internet. Just search for one of the phrases you find and you'll have plenty of matches: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+number+of+seconds+the... I understand the frustration of the guy, but this is not like they copied the business API, this is just the standard Oauth. Anyways.. I'm starting to sound like an Oto…

Even the design is the exact same, though. Did you accidentally rip off Oath's design as well?
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