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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

#141

Post by drawkward »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #124
drawkward wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in. Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people, which as I type this seems like a sad but unsurprising move.

> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people This is exactly what VCs are looking for. They are going to hand you a check worth several hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. They are not doing this because it's a charity; they are doing this because they are making a bet that they'll get some return on that investment. This is the purpose of a…

Spoken as if there was only one single binary option for investment!

The strategy implies that the marginal value of the lack of ethics/the personality type to do that is the thing thats worth investment. If thats true, then venture capitalism and perhaps capitalism itself is super fucked: a machine for developing and rewarding the worst impulses of humanity.

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

#142

Post by ahakki »

sva_ wrote: post #43
burcs wrote: post #26

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…

Vim is not a fork of Vi.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160107114945/http://www.moolen...

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

#143

Post by CharlieDigital »

lawgimenez wrote: post #120
CharlieDigital wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a problem to be resolved by their legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem (e.g. work out some licensing agreement). The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses. Everything else can be negotiated.

[flagged]

You've got the wrong impression; I left the startup that closed the $100m C because I didn't agree with some of their practices (or lack thereof).

I'm just sharing my perspective having seen success and failure in the startup space over the last 4 years first hand from teams that have succeeded and teams that have failed.

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

#144

Post by kevin_nisbet »

kibwen wrote: post #77
CharlieDigital wrote: post #68

I'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 un…

The funny? thing is, this isn't the only YC company I've seen do this.

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

#145

Post by llm_trw »

wpietri wrote: post #122
llm_trw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about open source code. We are talking about the MIT license. The two are not the same.

As long as we're nit-picking, we're talking about the Apache license. But my point isn't about the specific license. It's about one set of people very generously doing lots of labor and publishing the result in hopes of making the world a little better. And then some other people exploiting that for personal gain with no regard for the first group. That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. For example,…

>That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain.

This is a _gross_ misunderstanding of what publishing was like in the first few centuries of the printing press.

Copyright laws originated as a form of government censorship and control over the printing press in 15th-16th century Europe. Governments and religious authorities sought to regulate the spread of information by granting exclusive printing privileges to select printers. This allowed them to censor and control what content was published.

It was only when the people who were censored won that copyright was invented to keep them from killing everyone involved.

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

#146

Post by MangoCoffee »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #68

I'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…

>Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter

LOL. Why is the West complaining about China 'copying' their ideas and products? It seems hypocritical. Why are Western companies crying foul about China?

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

#148

Post by jslakro »

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.

I agree, it had been different with a license like MIT

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

#149

Post by james_marks »

lolinder wrote: post #103
CharlieDigital wrote: post #68

I'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…

> bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not. Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes: "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open." The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so t…

> These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.

More likely both.

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

#150

Post by llmfan »

xyst wrote: post #22

Wow, this clone and fork is pretty bad. This is the type of company that is accepted into YC batches now? Not good for the rep of YC.

I can tell just from looking at most recent YC founders that they're not hackers.

I could be wrong of course. I'm probably wrong. Maybe these people who are attractive, care about popular fashion and becoming popular on tweeter are actually just as capable hackers as all the hackers I actually know (none of whom care about those things). I admit YC probably knows better than me.

But if I'm not wrong, and these people really aren't hackers, it means YC has decided that normies > hackers when it comes to YC. I really don't predict that's going to end well for YC.

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