Tell HN: Tiptap (YC S23) used my prior employer's code without attribution

#1

Post by throwaway126809 » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

I am using a throwaway because I no longer work for or represent the company where I wrote, and who owns, this source code. I don't want to bring them into this. I speak for myself.

Many years ago TipTap asked if they could use our source code. We told them yes, of course, with proper attribution; this is MIT licensed code. Go for it.

Years later I found they had, for a time, forked the code into their codebase, but replaced our copyright with their own while not preserving its commit history. Several public releases included this misattributed code. As far as I can tell (IANAL), this is illegal according to the terms of the MIT license.

They had since rewritten the particular functionality, and I ended up deciding it wasn't worth raising a fuss over since it wasn't being used anymore.

I was dismayed to see a company with such questionable OSS practices get launched on YC yesterday. I'm throwing this out there in case there are other ProseMirror library developers that were approached by this company. They might be attributing your source code as their own.

Re: Tell HN: Tiptap (YC S23) used my prior employer's code without attribution

#2

Post by mdwalters » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 6:35 PM UTC

Just contact the developers, and tell them to add attribution.

Re: Tell HN: Tiptap (YC S23) used my prior employer's code without attribution

#3

Post by mtmail » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

> They had since rewritten the particular functionality, and I ended up deciding it wasn't worth raising a fuss over since it wasn't being used anymore.

Not clear to me what making a fuss over it now will change.

Re: Tell HN: Tiptap (YC S23) used my prior employer's code without attribution

#4

Post by JoeyBananas » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

with MIT licensed code is not worth fighting hard over because it requires so little from the licensees.

> IANAL

There is no non-commercial clause of the MIT license. They are allowed to fork it and change the license while not giving up the source.

Re: Tell HN: Tiptap (YC S23) used my prior employer's code without attribution

#5

Post by timoisik » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 3:18 AM UTC

Hey, Timo here, co-founder of Tiptap. Sorry for this situation. I am actually not aware about this. Can you please share more information, so that we can investigate this. When did this happen? Can you show me the places in the code that we copied?