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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

#621

Post by gpsx »

holtalanm wrote: post #605
gpsx wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that? In some regards yes, and some no. I think the intellectual property is in the APIs/"headers". That is what Android uses from Java and what this company is copying from SmartCar. Its not easy to write a good API. (But, I should say, once you have the headers it is not as tough to populate them with code.) As for coping actual documentation, that is just plain stupid but not the _worse_ crime here.…

> Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers. It is not the same simply because Java is an open-source project. SmartCar, on the other hand, is not. I would argue that, because of the nature of open-source, Google should have been able to do as they pleased to facilitate a…

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, particularly based on a mere four words. I was talking to people who I have heard argue "it's only the headers".

I appreciate your response. I am not clear on if that particular information is open source. A quick Google search does not seem to give a good (single) answer.

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

#622

Post by craftinator »

swsieber wrote: post #613
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.

There _is_ a difference between forking and cloning. Forking is always allowed by the github license: > other GitHub users have the right to view and fork your repository _within the GitHub site_ ^^ That's from the github website. Note that they only have permission to fork from within the website. So such a restriction serves as a legal barrier - it leaves no legal way to copy the code.

GitHub doesn't have the ability to choose what is legal. Or a better way to put it, the law does not follow GitHub's Terms of Use. You can violate them all day long and have no legal repercussions. The most important thing about people putting software in open report is that demonstrates their intention to make their software available to the public, which makes a big difference in a court of law.

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

#623

Post by craftinator »

soulofmischief wrote: post #610
intertextuality wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP, I'm GP. Second, I fully understand git, github, gitlab, etc. I'm specifically discussing a situation wherein someone has uploaded non-licensed code to github. I am not advocating for this. I am discussing what should be the default behavior for a repo if unlicensed. Another alternative is not having the repo be usable at all (so not private) if one attempts to bring it public without a license.

Get over yourself. I was referring to OP of this particular sub-thread, meaning you. And you are continuing to misunderstand how this works. If you can view it, you can copy it. Nothing prevents someone from viewing a public repo. So nothing prevents someone from copying it. Therefore any attempt to make it difficult is just a PITA. That's why Github has a default license for all non-licensed public repos. Because it…

Angry, but correct.

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

#624

Post by jaxn »

jmb12686 wrote: post #530
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be a regional thing, similar to how in some areas of the American south, "Coke" is a generic term for all sodas. But at least in my area (Portland, OR), what you're saying is definitely not true. I've never heard someone use Apple trademarks as generic terms. The generic term people use for a touchscreen smartphone is...a smartphone. Likewise, a generic term for a tablet is "tablet". I've never heard some…

Where I grew up (borderline Midwest, generally associated with the South), it is common to ask “What kind of Coke would you like?” And an acceptable answer to said question could be “Mountain Dew”, “Dr Pepper”, or any competing soda brand. After I moved away from my hometown (though still in the general midwestern region) I found it fascinating how hyper local the nomenclature for soda can be (or rather “pop” or “cok…

We may be from the same place.

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

#625

Post by krageon »

Kinnard wrote: post #564
michaelmrose wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither git nor github can automatically discern how the law applies in context in 195 nations without consulting a lawyer and honestly neither can you. Unless you want to pay thousands of dollars per repo presumably everyone is going to continue not giving a damn. If you don't want people to clone a repo don't upload it to a public github repo. If you are thinking of cloning realize that the ability to clone it give…

This could be a problem for ricardian contracts and/or smart contracts

Those don't solve anything, because the core problem is a human one. It needs to be legal in all the countries that they might apply to, and that still requires a lot of expertise. The person you are responding to says "this is a problem technology can't fix", I assume this is the reason.

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

#626

Post by taneq »

itake wrote: post #513
mrgordon wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh not really. The API client is MIT licensed but that doesn't mean the API itself is MIT licensed. Smartcar obviously would not release their server code as it is proprietary so the question becomes whether it is unethical or illegal to copy the design of it without seeing the code. Most people would also say it is unethical to copy your competitor's docs down to the examples and randomly generated tokens. Note tha…

This situation makes me think of the video game industry and people recreating self hosted World of Warcraft servers by reversing the client code. Blizzard was able to shut down the private servers. https://github.com/mangoszero/server https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/07/...

There are still plenty of active private servers running.

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

#627

Post by pkilgore »

osrec wrote: post #603
pkilgore wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disrupted how in this case? Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core…

I don't know how exactly, but perhaps we could have an open git repository-esque method for refining contracts. Right now, one law firm refines its own contracts over the lifetime of the firm. Why not democratise the entire process and make it open? Then lawyers can stop ripping people off for this sort of non-work and instead focus on actually providing legal counsel (which is what you truly should be paying a lawye…

> Invoice > Task. By. Rate. > -------------- > Fix form. Paralegal $ 100 > Knowing what Lawyer. $ 4,900 > form to fix.

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

#628

Post by pkilgore »

osrec wrote: post #603
pkilgore wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disrupted how in this case? Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core…

I don't know how exactly, but perhaps we could have an open git repository-esque method for refining contracts. Right now, one law firm refines its own contracts over the lifetime of the firm. Why not democratise the entire process and make it open? Then lawyers can stop ripping people off for this sort of non-work and instead focus on actually providing legal counsel (which is what you truly should be paying a lawye…

  Honest legal Invoice

  Task.             By.        Rate.
  ------------------------------------
  Fix form.         Paralegal  $ 100

  Knowing what      Lawyer     $ 3,900
  form to fix.

  Accepting.        Firm       $ 1000
  liability
  ------------------------------------
We already live in a world where reuse of forms save clients money.

True disruption changes the obvious problem above: how do you replace the cost of professional judgement and trust?

If you're an engineer today, you don't get paid poorly because Mongo and Postgres already exist. You get paid well if you know whether a document store or a RDS is the best fit for the systems problem at hand based on a careers worth of experience.

As someone who has done both for a living, it's shocking how much overlap there is (overlap that I assume exists in among doctors, accountants, consultants).

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

#629

Post by curt15 »

pjmlp wrote: post #592
5ersi wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google had the choice to deal with Sun, but they though given Sun's account state they would get away with it, to the point that buying Sun to own Java wasn't even considered.

The question regarding Apache is interesting though -- how is what they did legally different from what GNU/Linux did to commercial Unix?

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

#630

Post by joemi »

ceejayoz wrote: post #287
joemi wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the linked article? It's not verbatim. It's clear that it was heavily based on Smartcar's docs, but it's most certainly not verbatim.

Did you? There's no way they got the same random state and client UUID via chance. That's a direct copy/paste. So are various tables they provided screenshots of.

I'm not saying they didn't copy small portions of the original, such the highlighted UUIDs. But they most certainly did not copy the entire documentation (or even large portions) _verbatim_. They _paraphrased_ large portions of the documentation. "Verbatim" ("in exactly the same words as were used originally") has a purposefully different meaning than "paraphrase" ("express the meaning of (the writer or speaker or something written or spoken) using different words").
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