My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated] • Hacker News Board

Re: My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

#531

Post by Gregaros » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 3:15 AM UTC

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #530

Gregaros wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the value in knowing "you need to sort a string in place and then discuss how a random forest gets trained" is that it impacts your answers - for instance, by allowing you to look this up before the interview while appearing to the interviewers to he operating unfer the dame conditions as the other candidates, who did not know to. Your performance then appears as a signal of broader inwoledge and capabilit…

> lets just make sure we never need to work together Seeing as how you seem to prefer to let everyone else steal a march on you in interviews in the interest of "fairness", that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

This is correct—I do not engage ethics only when it won’t cost me, nor take convenience into account when determining where my lines are. Perhaps I’m privileged to have that option.

Re: My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

#532

Post by rswail » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 6:13 AM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #457

rswail wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I loath Nouning Verbs and Verbing Nouns, I'd really like "learnings" to always have an implied or explicit set of quotes and mean vaguely defined and not necessarily ethical stuff. There's a perfectly good noun, "lessons" and a verb, "to learn" that, when combined, provide everything "learnings" does, without the pretension of using a verbed noun. It's like "diarize" and other even worse monstrosities. Sorry…

As you might guess from my language, I'm not a native speaker. And in Norwegian, the two words could be "å lære" and "lærdom", hence why it "sounds right" in my ear to use learn and learnings.

Actually, I had no idea and my apologies. Your English is just as good as any "native".

English is a composite slut of a language, sucking in words from all over the place.

"Learnings" is a relatively new "corporate speak" English word invented to try to make people sound more intelligent when speaking or writing emails.

Re: My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

#533

Post by Pannoniae » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #484

Pannoniae wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, 100%. although there's strong propaganda to specifically make it open source (capital O and capital S)... the conspiracy-minded part of my brain thinks that it's probably because they can then use it. But yeah, I've pretty much come to the same conclusion myself too - ship source, but ship it under ARR. I think there's another innovation which hasn't really been explored yet - an "anti-copyright" cartel-style l…

I'm just not convinced that these licenses are realistically enforceable. A lot of binaries aren't going to show obvious signs in the output. I would have to reverse engineer every binary that might be using my code and look for a sign that they are violating the license so that I might be able to get a discovery request and sue them. As of right now, I just feel like the best thing to do is not put my code out there…

fair point... probably easier to detect with bytecode languages.

But even if you put binaries out, they can steal them, it's just harder... I guess, making it harder is the point as a form of deterrence. Dunno, these things are hard questions :)

Re: My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

#534

Post by harvey9 » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 7:30 AM UTC

koakuma-chan wrote: post #266

harvey9 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will just show a process named cheating-daddy. I doubt any interviewers will think that's suspicious. Half serious: why do you think a free tool focused on real time gen ai would also have a faked task manager feature?

> why do you think a free tool focused on real time gen ai would also have a faked task manager feature? So that you don't get caught?

I'm assuming it's a solo dev and it's my job to obtain a separate tool to fake task manager, not expecting a full multifunctional product.

Re: My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

#535

Post by ternaus » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 1:34 PM UTC

Not directly related but still.

A couple weeks ago I:

1. forked repository of the Albumentations library (15k stars, 5 Million monthly downloads, MIT license) and called it AlbumentationsX

2. changed the license of the fork to the Dual (restrictive AGPL to be used for free and permissive commercial if you buy license) => it is unlikely that it is legal to use it in your project as noone wants AGPL project in the list of dependencies

3. Arhived albumentations repo ---

People use albumentationsx (I can see pypi download stats + telemetry), but zero licenses were bought.

----

Coming back to the original post - what surprises me that they forked, but did not try to rewrite with LLMs. LLMs may not be that good writing complex functionality, but in rewriting something they are quite good.

In this sense, all open-source licensing is not as useful anymore as rewriting the code so that there is no way to proof the plagiarism is the new reality.

---

Looks like the future is: - closed source code - open source developed by companies that want to use it for lead generation

Re: My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

#536

Post by 0manrho » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

timewizard wrote: post #80

0manrho wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lacking sympathy for someone does not mean you condone them losing/lacking rights.

So when someone is actively losing their rights you feel the need to go out of your way to say you're unsympathetic. What did you /intend/ to convey with this? You support them, but at this dark moment, you felt the need to kick their shins also?

That you're unsympathetic. It's not a hard concept to grasp.

Sympathy(n): A feeling of pity or sorrow for the distress of another; commiseration. synonym: pity

There are limits to what people can concern themselves with, whatever the nature of that concern may be - both good and bad - by virtue of the shear magnitude of what's going on in the world and our limited ability to perceive all of it in the first place.

In the same vein that we must pick our battles, we must also pick what we give a fuck about, and some shit frankly, even if objectively wrong, just doesn't rate. An important point of order is that it's not a binary thing, but a spectrum. It's not that there's ZERO sympathy, but that there's not enough to critically cross that threshold of giving a fuck given all the other shit they may be concerning themselves with in that moment. Additionally, when a person does not give (enough of) a fuck about a given thing one moment, it may not hold true in another moment.

It'd be nice if I had the time and energy to address every injustice in the world, but that's not physically possible.

> What did you /intend/ to convey with this?

Simple. That you understand that what is happening is not right, but that you personally don't have the fucks/time/energy to give regardless.