The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something.
I think the problem is more that they weren't honest about the origins, even if we disregard the point where they themselves break the license terms.
> DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.
If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.
It's possible their spokesperson was not informed about SimStudio being the basis for Delve. Lots of people in sales and marketing do not know little about how open source software works.
I'm not sure "Person who answered a question didn't actually know the answer" is such a good defense, almost worse than "We didn't understand the license", because the implications of having such people in your company seems way wider then.
That is very much true. Lack of knowledge in a legal context is a very weak defense.
Generally speaking, open source ecosystem knowledge is not something that shows up in job descriptions, interviews, or regular training for non-technical staff in most software companies. Hopefully that will one day be the case but until then there is a high likelihood that misleading statements can be made accidentally.
Understandably it can be difficult for the machines of HN to truly understand, but humans don't normally have that kind of exacting control over what comes out of their mouth. Those who have carefully developed the skill of having that control don't waste their time working at struggling startups.
That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing, minus lacking the attribution. People are too illiterate on software licenses. If you're going to use open source software, learn the licenses you're using! I'm pretty sure GitHub literally shows you what you can and cannot do with specific licenses.
Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.
I think you're missing the crux of the problem here.
"We didn't understand the licensing!" isnt usually an incredible claim, but it becomes so when it's being made by a company that manages software licensing compliance.
I barely finished high school and I can understand them, not sure why some find it so hard to, even the license texts themselves are relatively easy to read, understand and reason about, and there is tons of further reading material all over the web, some from actual law-firms that can help you understand how it applies in your country too.
I can maybe understand not fully grasping how the GPLs work (I sometimes have to look at GNUs page of compatible and incompatible licenses myself) but something as simple as apache or MIT should be so dead simple it hurts
You don't see a problem with a startup dedicated to handling legal compliance for customers repeatedly botching even rudimentary legal compliance of its own?
> The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something.
They used it without having a license. The apache license would have allowed them to use it, but they didn’t meet the conditions.
This sounds equivalent to using paid software without paying to me.
The original author could well claim that “the cost of a license under the terms which they used it is $2M”. After all, the cost of software licenses is entirely arbitrary and set by the author (copyright owner).
Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.
I would say it was a collapse of ethics, not morality. Most people have morals (their own belief system on what is fair), but their morals may not be ethical (rule-based morals to achieve fairness). I personally attribute it to cars and the internet.
The internet removed consequences. You can say the most vile thing imaginable to another human being and… nothing happens. No social cost, no awkward eye contact at the grocery store, no reputation hit in your actual community. Just a dopamine hit and a notification count.
Cars did something sneakier. We spend hours every week sealed in a metal box, alone or with the same people. No random encounters, no friction with people who think differently. Just you, your podcast, and whatever is important in your tiny echo chamber.
Put those two together and you get people with deeply held morals and zero framework for applying them to anyone outside their bubble. Ethics requires seeing strangers as real. We've engineered that out of daily life.
Agreed, the ultimate state-monopoly on use of force, right to private property, legislated penalties and remedies, the time and expense of pursuing fairness, in the absence of full moral consideration, or common sense for lack of a better term, is a giveaway to entrenched authority, attorneys or deep-pockets, and not a sensible approach to dynamic real world right and wrong.
Exactly the article brushes over this too, painting it as not abbig deal. But IMO it is a huge deal. Open source licensees have very few terms usually, making the terms that do exist extremely important to satisfy so that a user is in good standing.
This phrase in the article in particular is frustrating:
DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source tools are freely available to be used, if they are properly credited.
Oh because my license terms are more liberal, it doesn't matter as much when you break them?? Really? Bonkers that they would publish that.
Not defending it, but the meme itself is derivative quote from the developer of TempleOS. He suffered from Schizophrenia and believed the CIA was tracking him. He believed you could tell a CIA agent due to them glowing, and would refer to them as "glowy nwords" very regularly.
The term "glowy" has taken on a life of its own despite the original context. The image itself is from it's 4chan days. Probably poor taste to include a version with Terry's full quote.
I'm sympathetic to Terry saying that. The guy had measurable brain damage, and it's hard to blame someone for doing things when it's their damaged brain that decides to do them. It's like getting mad at a diabetic for having high blood sugar.
But I can certainly squint at other people when they spread Terry's quotes and memes.
Personally I like GPL for core systems type of software, like an OS. I don't care what license you put desktop applications under, could be MIT, could be proprietary. I make software for a living, open source has a cost. If you want to profit off your open source software and have a competitive advantage against people forking it, you should 100% license it accordingly. I put a lot of thought into my projects before licensing them, I would hope others do as well.
In reality, GPL is also a cuck license. There is absolutely nothing stopping somebody in India forking your open source game, throwing ads in it, and uploading it to an app store. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing, "outcompeting" your non-product and providing a strictly worse experience to people who don't know they could get it for free / without ads.
It doesn't even really need to be India, it could just as well be stolen by someone in your country. The vast majority of open source developers don't have the time to invest into copyright protection. Trying to actually enforce your license is signing up for a years-long nightmare of wasting your time, energy, and money dealing with the legal system for, in the end, no real value to yourself. If you release something as open source, you pretty much need to be ready to accept that your license is meaningless when it meets contact with reality.
This is all the more true with LLMs existing now, which are freely used to launder copyright licenses. Maybe in the past GPL would've made Microsoft or Google, at least, think twice about using your code, but now their developers will prompt GPT to reimplement your code.
This is why I prefer the AGPL over the GPL. But isn't this the entire point of open source? So long as it is attributed/following the license, who cares if they're selling it or not?
Using the GPL like this doesn't help unless you are willing to sue people. If you can't or won't sue people, all that happens is that the software with the GPL license is avoided by people who want to use it in GPL-incompatible ways but have a conscience, while bad people still take it and use it anyway, and since you're not going to sue them, they don't care that they're violating the license.
Yep. While maybe it's "not cool," (I guess, depending on how much work Delve did in their fork, in which case it could be "totally cool"), there is no legal problem with doing this and if someone is "blowing the whistle" about this, they don't really understand open source.
The thing that strikes me as odd is how is it that Delve becomes an unicorn superstar (by iself), and the company they steal stuff off of, is much much less of a success story.
It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.
At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.
Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.
If they really did, they just need to attribute to the original project, its Apache 2 licensed, not AGPL or something that requires sharing code. I swear Software License Literacy needs to be a require course for all CS students.
I'm not a legal expert to be fair, but it would definitely be the bare legal requirement, though them lying about it is probably what will get them in bigger trouble.
Try hosting a copy of some Disney movies and nintendo game rips on your website, and when they notice, offer to "just delete them". See how that plays out.
Packaging up open source projects and selling them is done all the time is done all the time and is a good business model since you can outsource a lot of the work and bug fixing to people who will do it for free instead of having to pay someone.
The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something.
The project in question is here:
https://github.com/simstudioai/sim
I think the problem is more that they weren't honest about the origins, even if we disregard the point where they themselves break the license terms.
> DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.
If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.
It's possible their spokesperson was not informed about SimStudio being the basis for Delve. Lots of people in sales and marketing do not know little about how open source software works.
I'm not sure "Person who answered a question didn't actually know the answer" is such a good defense, almost worse than "We didn't understand the license", because the implications of having such people in your company seems way wider then.
That is very much true. Lack of knowledge in a legal context is a very weak defense.
Generally speaking, open source ecosystem knowledge is not something that shows up in job descriptions, interviews, or regular training for non-technical staff in most software companies. Hopefully that will one day be the case but until then there is a high likelihood that misleading statements can be made accidentally.
Then maybe say „I don’t know, let me get back to you“ instead of „no, we built it ourselves“?
Understandably it can be difficult for the machines of HN to truly understand, but humans don't normally have that kind of exacting control over what comes out of their mouth. Those who have carefully developed the skill of having that control don't waste their time working at struggling startups.
That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing, minus lacking the attribution. People are too illiterate on software licenses. If you're going to use open source software, learn the licenses you're using! I'm pretty sure GitHub literally shows you what you can and cannot do with specific licenses.
Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.
https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE
I think you're missing the crux of the problem here.
"We didn't understand the licensing!" isnt usually an incredible claim, but it becomes so when it's being made by a company that manages software licensing compliance.
I barely finished high school and I can understand them, not sure why some find it so hard to, even the license texts themselves are relatively easy to read, understand and reason about, and there is tons of further reading material all over the web, some from actual law-firms that can help you understand how it applies in your country too.
I can maybe understand not fully grasping how the GPLs work (I sometimes have to look at GNUs page of compatible and incompatible licenses myself) but something as simple as apache or MIT should be so dead simple it hurts
They assume if people knew it was just a fork of an open source tool then they would use the free, open source version instead of paying for the fork.
I don't disagree, but actively lying about it is still a violation of the license.
I'd be more concerned about a shareholder lawsuit if Delve told their investors that they owned the IP of said platform.
You don't see a problem with a startup dedicated to handling legal compliance for customers repeatedly botching even rudimentary legal compliance of its own?
> The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something.
They used it without having a license. The apache license would have allowed them to use it, but they didn’t meet the conditions.
This sounds equivalent to using paid software without paying to me.
The original author could well claim that “the cost of a license under the terms which they used it is $2M”. After all, the cost of software licenses is entirely arbitrary and set by the author (copyright owner).
Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.
Good thing our legal system doesn't.
There is no implication in the parent comment that it should.
The fact that we can't comprehend even talking about anything beyond legality sometimes is just mind-boggling. We are sick.
Really feels like there is a moral collapse all around.
Seeing some people’s post about prediction (gambling) markets is another eye opener on this topic.
Also the latest elected government of US is another one.
Not sure if it was always like this or I grew up. But it for sure seems like there is a collapse.
Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.
I would say it was a collapse of ethics, not morality. Most people have morals (their own belief system on what is fair), but their morals may not be ethical (rule-based morals to achieve fairness). I personally attribute it to cars and the internet.
The internet removed consequences. You can say the most vile thing imaginable to another human being and… nothing happens. No social cost, no awkward eye contact at the grocery store, no reputation hit in your actual community. Just a dopamine hit and a notification count.
Cars did something sneakier. We spend hours every week sealed in a metal box, alone or with the same people. No random encounters, no friction with people who think differently. Just you, your podcast, and whatever is important in your tiny echo chamber.
Put those two together and you get people with deeply held morals and zero framework for applying them to anyone outside their bubble. Ethics requires seeing strangers as real. We've engineered that out of daily life.
Agreed, the ultimate state-monopoly on use of force, right to private property, legislated penalties and remedies, the time and expense of pursuing fairness, in the absence of full moral consideration, or common sense for lack of a better term, is a giveaway to entrenched authority, attorneys or deep-pockets, and not a sensible approach to dynamic real world right and wrong.
If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and cover-up, you're going to have a bad time.
But they didn't attribute it. Or does this not really matter?
It does matter, that's one of the requirements.
Exactly the article brushes over this too, painting it as not abbig deal. But IMO it is a huge deal. Open source licensees have very few terms usually, making the terms that do exist extremely important to satisfy so that a user is in good standing.
This phrase in the article in particular is frustrating:
DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source tools are freely available to be used, if they are properly credited.
Oh because my license terms are more liberal, it doesn't matter as much when you break them?? Really? Bonkers that they would publish that.
This hilarious meme continues to prove itself correct again and again https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...
Does that blog post have a glowing smiley face with "A BUNCH OF N***ERS" written in on it in pixelated text?
Would think twice about linking that one in polite company.
Not defending it, but the meme itself is derivative quote from the developer of TempleOS. He suffered from Schizophrenia and believed the CIA was tracking him. He believed you could tell a CIA agent due to them glowing, and would refer to them as "glowy nwords" very regularly.
The term "glowy" has taken on a life of its own despite the original context. The image itself is from it's 4chan days. Probably poor taste to include a version with Terry's full quote.
I'm sympathetic to Terry saying that. The guy had measurable brain damage, and it's hard to blame someone for doing things when it's their damaged brain that decides to do them. It's like getting mad at a diabetic for having high blood sugar.
But I can certainly squint at other people when they spread Terry's quotes and memes.
Hot damn, I did not notice the Terry Davis meme on the blog post had that. I wonder if they noticed the font at all or not.
Didn't notice it, to be honest.
he's gone way off the /pol/tard deepend. He used to be a pretty good source for GNU/Linux tutorials but man he's insufferable
Personally I like GPL for core systems type of software, like an OS. I don't care what license you put desktop applications under, could be MIT, could be proprietary. I make software for a living, open source has a cost. If you want to profit off your open source software and have a competitive advantage against people forking it, you should 100% license it accordingly. I put a lot of thought into my projects before licensing them, I would hope others do as well.
My default is almost always MIT though.
In reality, GPL is also a cuck license. There is absolutely nothing stopping somebody in India forking your open source game, throwing ads in it, and uploading it to an app store. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing, "outcompeting" your non-product and providing a strictly worse experience to people who don't know they could get it for free / without ads.
It doesn't even really need to be India, it could just as well be stolen by someone in your country. The vast majority of open source developers don't have the time to invest into copyright protection. Trying to actually enforce your license is signing up for a years-long nightmare of wasting your time, energy, and money dealing with the legal system for, in the end, no real value to yourself. If you release something as open source, you pretty much need to be ready to accept that your license is meaningless when it meets contact with reality.
This is all the more true with LLMs existing now, which are freely used to launder copyright licenses. Maybe in the past GPL would've made Microsoft or Google, at least, think twice about using your code, but now their developers will prompt GPT to reimplement your code.
This is why I prefer the AGPL over the GPL. But isn't this the entire point of open source? So long as it is attributed/following the license, who cares if they're selling it or not?
Using the GPL like this doesn't help unless you are willing to sue people. If you can't or won't sue people, all that happens is that the software with the GPL license is avoided by people who want to use it in GPL-incompatible ways but have a conscience, while bad people still take it and use it anyway, and since you're not going to sue them, they don't care that they're violating the license.
Yep. While maybe it's "not cool," (I guess, depending on how much work Delve did in their fork, in which case it could be "totally cool"), there is no legal problem with doing this and if someone is "blowing the whistle" about this, they don't really understand open source.
How is there no legal problem with violating the license terms, which explicitly require attribution?
It's not a copyright violation because the readme says open source somewhere!!! /s
> A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.
In the long list of Delve's misdeeds, this is probably the least of them.
The thing that strikes me as odd is how is it that Delve becomes an unicorn superstar (by iself), and the company they steal stuff off of, is much much less of a success story.
It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
I think in real life, cheaters win.
Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.
At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.
Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.
The words for this is "regulatory capture" and "deregulation". And yes, its been happening for a long time.
And now that right-wing groups are buying up all the media, we wont be hearing about it for much longer.
Basically YC + MIT background is a license to raise infinite capital. So they just needed to check some revenue boxes etc.
the writeup is helpful but i'd want to see how it handles edge cases
The scrubbing of old posts says much
If they really did, they just need to attribute to the original project, its Apache 2 licensed, not AGPL or something that requires sharing code. I swear Software License Literacy needs to be a require course for all CS students.
You do not get to “just” retroactively fix copyright infringement (which is what this was). Try it with Disney sometimes.
I'm not a legal expert to be fair, but it would definitely be the bare legal requirement, though them lying about it is probably what will get them in bigger trouble.
Try hosting a copy of some Disney movies and nintendo game rips on your website, and when they notice, offer to "just delete them". See how that plays out.
Old news.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609310
Sorry your thread didn’t gain traction, but this isn’t old news by any means. No need to be salty.
Packaging up open source projects and selling them is done all the time is done all the time and is a good business model since you can outsource a lot of the work and bug fixing to people who will do it for free instead of having to pay someone.
The selling wasn't the problem here. The problem was lying about what they were doing and violating the terms of the license.