I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang. We’re building PearAI, an open source AI code editor.
Of course it is a cryptobro…
dawgt i chatgpt’d the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there’s a problem with the license just lmk i’ll change it. we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal
Yep, already hate that guy. Talks and behaves like an absolute dipshit.
I read your comment before the article and I thought you had made the second quote up lol, unbelievable. And people are throwing money at these guys?
Sam Bankman Fried looks and talks like half of the people I know who failed out of college, and people trusted him with billions.
True to his name, his bank got fried.
The Bankman fried the clients.
Sam’s the Bankman.
Road to success (2024 AI Hype Edition):
- Clone VSCode.
- Rename it as LSCode, squash all history, and create some random commits with
--author="Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>". - Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
- Profit.
For the second step there is git blame-someone-else
Slack is just a skin over IRC, so this isn’t a new type of behavior.
If they’ve already proven they can steal and lie, of course they’ll get VC money.
This is how open source is supposed to work. Everything they’re doing is now going to improve the open source codebase. This is good.
👅👢
How is it boot licking to get money from rich people to develop open source software?
Lemmy is FOSS that was funded by a grant from NLNet. Its the same outcome as this.
If anyone is licking boots, its the rich people licking the FOSS boots
Except this isn’t money going to a FOSS project, it’s money to some guys whose only keyboard is StackOverflow’s The Key.
If its forked from a Foss project then its necessarily a Foss project. That’s why we use Foss licenses.
Right, exactly, which is why they launched with a FOSS license. Oh, wait–
Imagine the money going to VSCode which actually is the one getting contributions
If you’re upset, just ask them for the source. If they don’t respond, sue.
In any case, we’re all going to get the source and we’ll all benefit from this.
The source is literally just VSCode with a different label. What benefit does that have?
Vscode is released under a MIT license and the Continue extension is released under Apache. Neither is copyleft, so the forked codebase doesn’t need to be open source
Ah you’re right. Blame Vscode for using MIT. Maybe now is a good time to tell them to change it to GPL, so this can’t happen again.
Not at all, really. Forking is fine and building a business off of it is fine (I don’t personally see the value in it but apparently Y Combinator saw fit to invest in this so what do I know). Where they fucked up was replacing the existing free software license with some “AI” generated mumbo jumbo, because they were “too busy building” to “bother with legal.”
You didn’t have to “bother” with creating a license, because there already was one. No one in free software should be rolling their own custom license (GPT generation aside) because there exist perfectly good ones already.
It doesn’t matter what the license chatgpt spat out says. If they forked from a Foss base repo, then all of the code they make will be FOSS too. This is great.
No, they are just in violation of the original license. That doesn’t mean they have to comply with it by properly open sourcing the project. Generally it’s also OK to just delete everything.
There were plenty of cases where commercial software included open source stuff in a way that violated its license, and the accepted way to fix the license violation was for the software/hardware vendor to stop using the violated project going forward. Usually they don’t even have to for example scrub old firmware downloads that improperly included FOSS bits.
The damages causes to the developers are equal to the profits made by the company that took their code and made improvements to it, without sharing it upstream as legally required
OK, cool. Just remember that the only entity who can sue in this situation is Microsoft (because when you contribute code to VS Code, you must sign a CLA that says you give Microsoft full perpetual rights to distribute your code under any license they wish - it is Microsoft who then “graciously” releases your code under a copy left license while also building their proprietary version of VS Code using it).
And Microsoft cannot use the code if it gets released under a copyleft license - that wouldn’t allow them to build their proprietary build with it. So the only one who can do anything has less than zero (because it would improve only the FOSS forks, which are meant to be inferior) interest in making these guys publish the source code as proper FOSS.
OK, so it sounds like anger should he directed at Microsoft here, not the dude that forked it
It’s not how open source works but how venture funding works which is boggling minds here
I genuinely just don’t understand what’s going on in the tech sector anymore
You know it’s bad when the guy previously worked at Coinbase
we don’t either.
Feels like the dotcom era all over again, but they’re better at stringing the scam along this time. Enough of the people need to believe the lie that it’s getting artificial longevity.
VC funding is basically gambling, trying to find the next billion dollar company. So they throw money at anything that has any semblance of traction to get in early and cash out when the time comes.
Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE’S money.
You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.
These people destroy everything for greed.
how did they get access to other people’s money?
Probably by being attractive
Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.
All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.
and then the government fucked up and tried to save some of the filthy corps.
The funniest thing here is that they changed the license after the fork. The license was a custom one they wrote using ChatGPT.
deleted by creator
They’re not going to survive
Are you kidding me?
Alexander Bell stole the telephone.
Edison regularly stole inventions from Tesla among others.
Steve Jobs fucking mind raped Woz.
The American Dream is taking someone else’s hard work and profiting off of it.
deleted by creator
I’m considering stealing your comment and selling it to the highest bidder. How much ether do you think it would take to knock you out?
No ether needed. All you need is to do this publically.
But they made half a million.
And there are literally hundreds of similar companies raking in billions in investments that magically vanish while the founders live a luxury live and move on.
The real question is: why do VCs shit so much money into obvious frauds? Are they this stupid or do they just hope to pass it on to the greater fool?
$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.
But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…
The bigger fool might also be the taxpayer. Oops the company we funded vanished - now we have a $500k loss to write off…
Sadly, I believe you’re correct on that… sigh…
Overall billionaires wasting their money to pay for idiots that then waste it in consumption would be a tax positive, I believe. We should encourage that behavior instead of them buying assets and then extracting rents like the parasites they are. I don’t care if they get to write off the money they lose from their income.
Look at this nobhead flicking Vs like he’s Liam Gallagher.
How does one “fork” a repo like this and then is proud about 100+ contributors he got? I believe they know exactly what they are doing and just don’t care.
I saw something a few days ago where they were said to have mass-replaced the name of the software with their new name (in the code). Supposedly, little or nothing else changed. Y Combinator used to be better than this, at least I thought they were.
I simply can’t wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.
But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, “dawg i chatgpt’d the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there’s a problem with the license just lmk i’ll change it. we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal” when they are made aware of the fact.
This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.
Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence
It’s not the first time. They also backed an obvious scam MMO that promised the world and more, while it was nothing more than an asset flip.
I heard that the creator of the MMO had people they knew within ycombinator at the time. I wonder if it’s something similar this time around. Eitherway, it’s not a good look for ycombinator
Is that the MMO where they read Ready Player One and said “Yep, I’m ready to build a mesh peer-to-peer MMO because that means there will be no discernable lag for an infinite number of people, just like in the book”?
Bold of you to assume they read the book.
Tbh I don’t think I wanna interact with ai anymore
It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.
In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.
This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.
This is great. So all their VC-funded work will get released publicly, and we all benefit.
I don’t see why people are upset that FOSS projects are getting VC funding for development…
Haha. Maybe.
I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can’t control the code base but weirder things have happened.
If Mr. Money bags comes to you with a contract that says anything about IP or equity, tell them to fuck off
Removed by mod
