the backstory that explains it is the same silly con valley bullshit as always: low quality people doing low quality work and hyping the ever loving fuck out of it for some dumb vc bucks.
Sorry for your story. In those days open source is REALLY HARD. Put your github link here and we will support your project by starring you and spreading your project. You definitely need to fight back.
In a general sense, open source theft is bad, obviously. I have trouble feeling bad for this specific case though, given that it is a tool for cheating in interviews and tests.
A new product with four wheels that is used to transport people from A to B is a amazing new development! Some new 4 wheeled death machine to drive through crowds of people is an detriment to society.
The original product actually sounds kinda cool, but selling it as a cheating aid is incredibly low-value, and we'd be better off without it.
I'd be happy for a platform that encourages and facilities cheating to disappear and not be used anymore. So, on that front, I'd agree. As a side point though, the fact that someone big is funding something like that means, it's not really an issue for, atleast some, people.
The license violation is a problem independent of this. If this becomes acceptable for any reason (including the one that your post seemed to suggest - original work is unethical), it will have detrimental effects on a lot of good players as well.
There’s a reason they ask the question about describing a time you “hacked a system to your advantage” in the YC application. They have always selected for founders who are willing to take advantage of legal and ethical gray areas. Reddit created fake users and farmed content from Digg, Airbnb scraped listings from Craigslist.
Over the last decade or two, the builder/hacker ethos has seemed to shift towards this grifter, money-over-everything attitude. I’m sure there’s a lot at play (crypto culture, VC self-selection, the attraction of ‘easy’ high salaries), but I’m sure it’ll get markedly worse with ai tooling and the any-publicity-is-good fomo marketing that’s taken over the startup scene.
My take is both OP’s tool and the blatant plagiarism of it are examples.
I’m sure there’s much more we don’t know about. They just didn’t get caught. Yc used to have this reputation of being one of the good guys but I guess nothing is really immune to corruption.
Things like this are why I have become disillusioned with Open Source, and why latest projects have been closed source. The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce. If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.
And it has the same fake excuse as usual "Since this was our first OSS project, we didn’t realize at first."
He sure discovered this new open source thing and it's very confusing. It's not like it's almost 40 years old at that point. I'll never understand people who lie like toddlers.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadThe original product actually sounds kinda cool, but selling it as a cheating aid is incredibly low-value, and we'd be better off without it.
I'd be happy for a platform that encourages and facilities cheating to disappear and not be used anymore. So, on that front, I'd agree. As a side point though, the fact that someone big is funding something like that means, it's not really an issue for, atleast some, people.
The license violation is a problem independent of this. If this becomes acceptable for any reason (including the one that your post seemed to suggest - original work is unethical), it will have detrimental effects on a lot of good players as well.
My take is both OP’s tool and the blatant plagiarism of it are examples.
https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
I’m sure there’s much more we don’t know about. They just didn’t get caught. Yc used to have this reputation of being one of the good guys but I guess nothing is really immune to corruption.
https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy
https://github.com/pickle-com/glass
let's not freak out - you can't "steal" open-source code, they used an incompatible license. that was accidentally too free.
people monetizing something you open-source isn't stealing.
He sure discovered this new open source thing and it's very confusing. It's not like it's almost 40 years old at that point. I'll never understand people who lie like toddlers.
Previously, a different YC company (Pear AI) copied Continue, changed the licenses, and "launched".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707495
I wonder if Pear AI is dead or pivoted, their open source repos have not been updated since May.