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

smartcar.com

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

#541

Post by xgbi »

theclaw wrote: post #459
gepoch wrote: post #437

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 Whic…

The MIT license appears to be on their client-side SDK. They are accusing Otonomo of cloning their API, not their SDK.

Come on, this piece is written by someone who obviously doesn't know what he his talking about..

The entirety of his examples are focused on the Oauth API, which is a standard, and all the concepts and var names he shows as a steal of API are present in each and all Oauth authentication servers.

I mean, we have in our own api about 90% of the same verbiage for our own authentication doc, this is bog standard Auth code..

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

#542

Post by conanbatt »

Gpetrium wrote: post #152
ChuckMcM wrote: post #44

That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course. And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more…

>The reality is that if an idea is really good, the people who came up with it know it better than anyone and that gives them a tremendous advantage in terms of knowing what is important and what isn't. I have to disagree with you emphasizing this point. If someone/entity manages to get your idea or code, they may be able to sell the solution at a fraction of the cost since their R&D was lower than yours. When the en…

OTOH, if a company can only sustain its business model because it has the advantage of state protection, it necessarily means naturally defensible business products get less investment and artificially defensible business products get a bump. Which is better, is hard to say.

It should be clear however that patent and patent giving has massive costs on the state and a great boon to lawyers.

And at the same time, its still not enough, as you still need to do counter-espionage at companies anyway.

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

#543

Post by 5ersi »

mikekchar wrote: post #509
hathawsh wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That question is the essence of the ongoing Oracle v. Google case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google... .

The difference is that even though the Java API was licensed under the GPL, Google did not accept the GPL license. They implemented the API without a license. Were they willing to implement their code under the GPL there would have been nothing that Oracle could have done. I'm with others who say that an API should not be copyright-able, however it appears that in this case it doesn't matter. They may have a license!…

It wasn't Google who did it, but Apache: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony

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

#544

Post by gspetr »

jstarfish wrote: post #191
aw3c2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Chinese You mean "Chinese companies". "The chinese" is just racist.

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

Race is too important in medicine to merely be a social construct.

Different races have significantly different disease rates (incidence rates), such that you cannot erase them even if you control for environment (born in the same city, at the same time, went to the same school, etc).

If you were to open a large hospital in town X, you would very much want to know X's demographic structure to make informed decisions on how many highly specialized professionals and equipment you would need to effectively treat the population.

Making design mistakes at this stage would literally cost lives.

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

#545

Post by cakoose »

whoisjuan wrote: post #323
scient wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you have no idea what you are talking about. By that logic every company thats an OAuth 2.0 provider ripped off their "whole public facing architecture". Or rather, Smartcar ripped off someone elses'.

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if they copied parameter names verbatim, it's very likely that they designed the API with the same public facing approach. Possibly with the goal of attracting Smartcar customers with the premise that they just need to change an endpoint and an api key and it would work out of the box. And BTW, your first line doesn't add anything to the conversation. Is your argument stronger by…

The APIs in the blog post were not invented by Smartcar. Like most HTTP-based APIs, Smartcar's authorization endpoints follow the OAuth 2.0 standard, which specifies the exact parameter names and how they should work: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749#section-4.2.1

Maybe Otonomo copied more than that, but the blog post only covers the OAuth stuff, so it's incorrect to conclude that Otonomo "stole the whole public facing architecture".

Yea, Otonomo obviously lifted from Smartcar's docs, which is lazy and unclassy, but it's not _that_ big of a deal. I bet most people who implement OAuth end up using an existing company's API docs as a guide; they just usually know better than to copy entire sentences.

The Smartcar blog post is over the top. It makes it seem like their OAuth docs are their value proposition. I really hope it didn't take "months of ideation, engineering, chatting with customers, and iteration" to dream them up.

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

#546

Post by nige123 »

A way to avoid this problem is to use a combined copyright + trademark licence.

"smartcar" feels like a weak trademark and is likely not registrable. "Otonomo" is inherently more distinctive - making it a stronger mark.

To avoid this problem - "smartcar" needed a stronger trade mark in the first place. Secondly the API copyright licence needs to work in combination with the improved "smartcar" trademark.

The Artistic Licence 2.0 for Perl 6 is an example of a copyright licence that works in combination with a trade mark.

Copyright licences are incredibly flexible - it's possible to restrict server-side implementations for example. Depending on the business objectives it should be possible to strike the right balance - binding the API to your trademark via the copyright licence - could be a good move if your API is a market-maker.

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

#548

Post by notimetorelax »

intertextuality wrote: post #526
dmh2000 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Github terms of service, if you make a repo public, others are free to view and fork it, apparently even if you place a commercial license on it, or no license. The lawyers will have to figure out if that means copy, use or whatever. https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a-repository

I believe this is a big problem with git or any of the current repo gui providers. A repository should not be able to be forked if it doesn't have a SPDIX license. Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. It's usually not an issue but I have run into some small repositories that had no license, meaning I could -not- fork and modify for myself or a PR, legally. But th…

Laws are different in different countries, e.g. it is not against the law to consume pirated content in Switzerland, but is illegal to share it further. So, if I have a pet project for my personal use then I can pretty much use anything I can find on the internet.

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

#549

Post by tlrobinson »

intertextuality wrote: post #539
mlindner wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. This is absurd. You don't have to use the "fork" button to copy a repository. It's as simple as cloning it and pushing it. Such a restriction servers no purpose at all.

Obviously such an implementation would disable cloning as well.

Why bother putting it on GitHub then? I expect to be able to git clone anything I find on GitHub. It's on you to determine how you can legally use the code.

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

#550

Post by [deleted] »

intertextuality wrote: post #526
dmh2000 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Github terms of service, if you make a repo public, others are free to view and fork it, apparently even if you place a commercial license on it, or no license. The lawyers will have to figure out if that means copy, use or whatever. https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a-repository

I believe this is a big problem with git or any of the current repo gui providers. A repository should not be able to be forked if it doesn't have a SPDIX license. Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. It's usually not an issue but I have run into some small repositories that had no license, meaning I could -not- fork and modify for myself or a PR, legally. But th…

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