Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

mkhalil wrote: post #411

mkhalil wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commend you for your honesty. Also, I don't think that he was totally wrong in calling it out, but the phrasing he used was very unnecessary. It would be better phrased as a question, like: "Don't you think it's racist to refer to them as "The Chinese"?" or something less dumb than accusing you of racism. I understand HN is a tech place, but since race can play a factor in practically all subjects, it can be a heal…

> Knee jerk rapid reactions aren't an example of "spoken about maturely." I literally said his response was dumb so I'm not really sure what your point is by claiming I am considering his reaction mature. I understand if you misread my comment, but I'm baffled otherwise. Thankfully, this is the internet and we can talk it through if we want. (edit: typo)

I'm not really sure what your point is by claiming I am considering his reaction mature.

Actually, your comment could indeed be read that way. Therefore I'm obliged to push back against such a position, even if you didn't mean it precisely that way. I'm generally having a conversation for the sake of the 3rd party. The lurkers are the majority of this site's users.

Thankfully, this is the internet and we can talk it through if we want.

My un-provable suspicion is that civil discourse itself is being targeted by nefarious forces. It's either that, or the emergent incentive structures of social media as currently constructed are having the same effect. Or both. It's bad either way.

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

#432

Post by DavidAdams » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

tcgv wrote: post #415

> Otonomo’s docs are a systematically written rip-off of ours > Did none of the over 100 Otonomo employees (according to LinkedIn) think that what they were doing was wrong? > Today we are taking legal action. We have sent Otonomo a cease and desist, demanding that they immediately stop ripping off our hard work. Is publicly available documentation protected by intellectual property rights? Since I'm not familiar wit…

> Is publicly available documentation protected by intellectual property rights?

Yes, by copyright. Copyright is one of the most straightforward and easiest to enforce IP rights.

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

#433

Post by MereInterest » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #418

int_19h wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the iPod/Pad/Phone stuff isn't US-centric - these are colloquially used to refer players/tablets/smartphones in many different languages.

I can hardly remember someone using an Apple(or any brand really) product name for the whole product category, it's rare in my experience. Sometimes there's a (grand)parent calling every game console "nintendo", but that's about it.

How about Q-tip? Band-aid? Adrenaline? Kleenex? There's quite a lot of them floating around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

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

#434

Post by femto113 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

inlined wrote: post #237

joeax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty egregious, but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself. The other company still has the write all the backend code, and given their track record of just ripping stuff off, may not have the engineering chops to pull it off. In addition, as Smartcar continuously improves their product and API, the other company can only react to these changes. If I was the O…

> but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself You never know. When someone ripped off Parse we were able to deduce which version of our JS SDK was ripped off by which bugs weren’t fixed. We had a weird moral dilemma: we were upset at the copycat yet concerned that their users had security vulnerabilities unpatched. [Edit: added quote to clarify to what I was responding]

In the mid-nineties a company named Avanti stole code from Cadence Design Systems (where I worked at the time, though I had no involvement in the case). This was first discovered by an engineer noticing that error messages in the two systems were similar in ways that made no intuitive sense. Case was unusual in that several Avanti executives actually wound up going to jail for the theft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems,_Inc._v...

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

#435

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

alexmlamb2 wrote: post #260

jstarfish wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is a nation, not a race. Race itself is a social construct. Nice try though!

"Race itself is a social construct." What do people mean by this exactly? I've heard some people make the case that the exact boundaries between ethnic groups can be socially constructed, which makes sense to me (like how one draws a hard line between two groups which have some admixture). But the idea that ethnicities have nothing to do with biology and is a purely social phenomenon sounds like a lay-person's misund…

> What do people mean by this exactly?

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

#436

Post by int_19h » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #413

int_19h wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the iPod/Pad/Phone stuff isn't US-centric - these are colloquially used to refer players/tablets/smartphones in many different languages.

Of those, the only one I would say that's actually fairly generic is ipod, but that's also the one that's been relegated largely useless as it's an "also" feature of everything else. I don't event here people refer to their non-iphone as an iphone, or their tablet as an ipad. People have have one of those might refer to theirs, and the class in general this way, but given they are actually in the minority of owners f…

It all depends on the countries. FWIW, in my experience outside of US and other First World countries, "iPad" for "tablet" is by far the most common, and "iPhone" for "smartphone" is also pretty common. This is more typical of the older (roughly 50+) generation though.

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

#437

Post by gepoch » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

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

Which says (among other things): "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

Which may have significantly complicated their copyright claim if Otonomo includes the MIT license and attribution to smartcar.. At the same time, I can't find Otonomo's docs anywhere.

Something to think about when setting up your GitHub license!

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

#438

Post by netsharc » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #21

This may be a silver lining - a competitor has shown that the work you have done, exactly the work you have done is worth 55 million in VC funding. There are enough people on here who can point you in the right direction, or arrange introductions. Spend at least one of those millions on PR and lawyers to ensure it's clear who has the moral high ground, and who should be hired if a company has to choose between you -…

Is it worth 55 mil, or is it just networking?

I can imagine the "Kickstarter scam" running in the VC scene, the Kickstarter scam being: you show ads for a product on Kickstarter with the line "300 thousand dollars in backers already! Get yours too!", but that money isn't from genuine backers, coming from your friends instead. Then a chump seeing the ad will think "Oh, this new gadget is popular, it must be good, let me buy 1 for the introductory price!" and gives you his money. Then you just keep the chumps updated with "Sorry for the delays, we have manufacturing difficulties" month after month.

So in the VC scene, you could get your friend to invest in your idea for $$$, get other investors interested, and... profit? I can imagine it'd be nice to spend the genuine VC money on company Lamborghinis and penthouses for a few months, declare bankruptcy, rinse and repeat (just steal the API from the next "Smartcar"...).

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

#439

Post by theaccordance » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

I would have found the article more damning had the author cited examples beyond standards-based protocols like OAuth

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

#440

Post by daanlo » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

I am not from the automotive industry, but if they are selling predominantly to automotive OEMs then I suppose Otonomo can be in serious trouble. Even a pending IP infringement case could potentially stop OEMs from working with them. Plus OEMs don't typically like companies that infringe IP, afaik.