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YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
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Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#72Earlier 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. >>...
And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly? Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
We're not talking about open source code. We are talking about the MIT license.
The two are not the same.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#73People 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.
It's meant to be a "smart gamble", not "throw money everywhere and see what does well". Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour, if they don't correct it now it will happen again.
Correct what exactly? Did they release this as their final product as the first milestone?
From what I gleaned the company has barely started and the founder recently(?) quit his job. They raised money on an idea and forked another project, changed the branding, and used it as the base to build a prototype
That doesn't mean this is the end product that YC invested in.
Lots of companies created MVPs this way before using funding and their new runway of time to do it properly.
If they do release it as the end product with little effort that’s basically fraud
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#74People 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.
It's meant to be a "smart gamble", not "throw money everywhere and see what does well". Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour, if they don't correct it now it will happen again.
> Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour
Lol if you’re not aware, they came up with the gold standard in simple seed investment contracts used by nearly every pre-series-a startup in existence. Adding clauses like “don’t fork open source code” is just pointless and cumbersome legal bs that does nothing but get in the way.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#75People 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.
> If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.
Possibly related post from yesterday:
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#76This 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 completely allowed under the apache open source license.
Which part?
Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.
Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#77I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years. In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed. I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while bu…
The problem here is not that they stole the idea, it's that they literally just took an open-source codebase and filed off the serial numbers to claim it as their own proprietary work, and they did so in the most comically inept way possible.
From the OP:
PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#78I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years. In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed. I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while bu…
Wild take, copying matters. If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market. This very idea that ideas don't matter is hogwash, you can say that idea alone is not enough, but it matters. This is why big companies sometimes get sued by the govt, they copy smaller companies ideas, add it into their already established product for free and stifle growth for the world.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. 1. It reflects poorly on YC. 2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.
A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.
It might not to you, but it does to me.
I think it's bad not just from a social perspective (because exploitation acts to diminish the amount of open code) but from an investor one. Forking a repo, committing IP crimes, and then doing some marketing jazz hands is not obviously the foundation for a successful IPO in 5 or 10 years. Indeed, for me it'd be the opposite; I'd call it a sign these founders don't have the depth to go the distance.
It's also brand damage for YC among the more thoughtful sort of founder, which at least used to be an important concern to YC. At 1000 startups a year, though, maybe they've just decided that there's a bubble, and in a bubble it doesn't make financial sense to care about things like quality or longevity. You just shovel out whatever people are buying and worry about consequences later.
Re: YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
#80This 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.
Except the original code isn't Apache open-source, it's MIT[0] and still requires copyright attribution.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt