Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 276 posts

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#21

Post by billy99k »

llm_trw wrote: post #14
jazz9k wrote: post #2

This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.

This is a conversation I keep having with people who support permissive licenses. >Oh no, you're allowed to do whatever you want, but you shouldn't. >>Then why is Amazon allowed to do it if they shouldn't? >It's not polite. >>...

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.

The original authors don't lose anything.

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#23

Post by whateveracct »

arder wrote: post #20
paxys wrote: post #4

People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year . They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb. If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.

Well this just goes to the core of your view on the role of luck in life. Are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year and 5 of them are run by geniuses who single handedly disrupt loads of markets. Or are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year full of roughly equally good people 5 of which get extremely lucky and make boatloads of money. Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.

> Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.

uhh this is not the same as TFA. this is a very quippy, pg-esque way of excusing the behavior though.

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#24

Post by llm_trw »

billy99k wrote: post #21
llm_trw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a conversation I keep having with people who support permissive licenses. >Oh no, you're allowed to do whatever you want, but you shouldn't. >>Then why is Amazon allowed to do it if they shouldn't? >It's not polite. >>...

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. The original authors don't lose anything.

Not sure what piracy has to do with this.

The point is that you've specifically let people do something then when they do it you're upset they did it.

If you don't want them to do it, don't explicitly allow them to do it. There are plenty of licenses which would have stopped this.

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#25

Post by gyre007 »

hbbio wrote: post #11

The worst part is that instead of backing out and let's say kicking them out of the batch, YC doubled down praising the (pretty poor imho) justification that may also have been written by ChatGPT, like the license :) https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291

I don’t thinks its the worst, but it did feel in bad taste. YC have put money and trust in them, so why would they kick them down? Would you? They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves (Note: I am not a YC founder or affiliated with YC in any way)

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#26

Post by burcs »

Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen.

I saw someone on x/twitter post this:

Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi.

They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they since apologized.

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#27

Post by burcs »

sva_ wrote: post #19

This article reads like gossip/drama creation Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level

Yeah I noticed some pretty obvious spelling/grammatical errors too. I wonder what's going over there?

"...Continue as well as the original project that Continued used, VSCode."

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#28

Post by gyre007 »

I have been surprised recently how many competing companies YC have founded recently. I know VCs do this all the time but I still find it a bit strange - not sure how I would’ve felt if the same fund backed my competitor. That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …

Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

#29

Post by jsheard »

jhalcr wrote: post #16
jazz9k wrote: post #2

This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.

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, an…

> 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.

https://x.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284

Post reply on HN