this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024

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This AI Startup "Copied" an Open-Source Project and Got Half a Million Dollar Funding by Y Combinator (news.itsfoss.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

For the second step there is git blame-someone-else

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago

Slack is just a skin over IRC, so this isn’t a new type of behavior.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago

Tbh I don't think I wanna interact with ai anymore

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

ahem

[–] [email protected] 77 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I genuinely just don't understand what's going on in the tech sector anymore

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

You know it’s bad when the guy previously worked at Coinbase

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE'S money.

You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.

These people destroy everything for greed.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

how did they get access to other people's money?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Probably by being attractive

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

and then the government fucked up and tried to save some of the filthy corps.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

we don't either.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago

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.

https://twitter.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284

[+] [email protected] -24 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

OK, so it sounds like anger should he directed at Microsoft here, not the dude that forked it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

It's not how open source works but how venture funding works which is boggling minds here

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

👅👢

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Except this isn't money going to a FOSS project, it's money to some guys whose only keyboard is StackOverflow's The Key.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

If its forked from a Foss project then its necessarily a Foss project. That's why we use Foss licenses.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

The source is literally just VSCode with a different label. What benefit does that have?

[–] [email protected] 120 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Sam Bankman Fried looks and talks like half of the people I know who failed out of college, and people trusted him with billions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

True to his name, his bank got fried.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The Bankman fried the clients.

Sam's the Bankman.

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