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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the objection here.

Forking is part of how open source is supposed to work.

The beauty of forking/open source is the ability to contribute back to the original project or take over an abandoned project. In this case, the original project Continue.dev isn't abandoned and actually has more traction/commits than the PearAI fork. But what PearAI did not do is a traditional fork. They took the commit history, re-branded everything to PearAI, pushed it up to their own repo, and claimed that the contributors of VSCode & Continue were their own contributors on Twitter.

That's not the spirit of open source. I'm sure the authors of Continue.dev did not intend for their work to be used this way, even if the license is permissive of it.

The license is literally a statement of intent.

If they wanted to police use, they could choose a different license, like one of the GPL or CC variants.

I'm not sure how to parse this, and one possibility is worse than the other.

Did they go through and alter each commit in the history, making it look as if the committer was talking about brand B instead of brand A at the time they made the commit?

Or did they clone the commit history, and add commits to rebrand, while keeping the historical commits intact?

Well, VS code isn't abandoned either. Shall we raise the pitchforks against Continue too?

No, because Continue actually added value on top of VS Code. PearAI has not added value on top of Continue -- yet.

> That's not the spirit of open source.

That's because there's literally no such thing. It's a licensing choice, not a seance. If you don't want people to use your code, license it correctly.

There's a difference between forking to make a OSS project better and forking to create a clone just for the sake of VC funding that doesn't trickle down back to the original code.

Even if it's allowable by the permissive license of the original code, it's not a net positive for OSS.

That's your opinion. Maybe the original authors of this project don't care and are just happy that their invention is helping people.

I'll take the authors' published intent over your speculation.

Great take.

I think the assumption people are making is that the YC selection team are dumb idiots, and don't understand that all the founders of that project did was fork an open source project and ask them for some money.

(I'm not saying this is what happened; I know nothing about this project. I am saying this seems like the assumption the author of the article and some people in this thread are making. I bet that's not what happened, but if YC is actually full of dumb idiots who do zero due diligence whatsoever, then I guess I have to agree with the article's thesis.)

The objection is it’s extremely unlikely licenses are being followed and they seek to profit from good will of free software.

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