It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people, which as I type this seems like a sad but unsurprising move.
Just, Devil's Advocate. But isn't that kind of a smart strategy?
Not saying it's "nice", nor even how I would do things. But I'd imagine many, many people get excessively wealthy investing in this fashion.
As for "smart," I assume there are some not well understood externalities to this kind of behavior, such as erosion of trust or other social ills that are hard to quantify until they reach a critical point.
I think the externalities may be hard to quantify but they are well-understood by now (and are things like erosion of trust, which you mentioned).
Just look at the societal attitudes towards Silicon Valley now vs. 25 years ago. VCs complain about how society now so full of negativity towards technology, but they only have themselves to blame for that. They shit the bed, and people got wise.
Maybe someone has more information about those topics that me?
> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
This is the purpose of a VC: to deploy capital in a way that is likely to yield the greatest returns for the investors.
The strategy implies that the marginal value of the lack of ethics/the personality type to do that is the thing thats worth investment. If thats true, then venture capitalism and perhaps capitalism itself is super fucked: a machine for developing and rewarding the worst impulses of humanity.
They frown when they try to advocate for more rights, better employment conditions, and better pay.
Such is the nature of modern capitalism.
The Costco's and James Sinegal's of the world are few and rare; I wish we'd see more companies and leadership teams that valued labor and were more ethical. But a survey of the most successful CEO's (Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al) and companies leads us to believe that such principles are often opposed to the machinations of capitalism.
It's business under the laws, regulations, customs, and choices of American business in 2024.
I say that because, while 'capitalism' is a significant element, many people (not you) justify or rationalize their behavior or the current 'system' by asserting it's a law of human nature or economics, not their choices that yield their behavior and the system, and both can change. It's like criminals who say 'hate the game, not the player'.
Inevitability is a lazy argument for lazy thinkers and irresponsible people (again, to emphasize, the parent didn't make it). It's the corruption of power - they can do what they want, and therefore nobody can compel them to think harder and get better results.
So I think it's essential to draw the distinction.
> (Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al)
Other than Ellison, even the others didn't act this way a decade ago. Silicon Valley was built by a different ethos - 'don't be evil'. Power corrupts.
At any rate, emergent behaviors can arise from complex systems, and thats exactly what I am alleging of (venture) capitalism at this stage of its evolution. If you have differences of opinion, by all means share them.
See: children mangled in factories, minimum wage laws, the oil industry, pretty much every OSHA regulation.
If capitalism were at all capable of recognizing any externalities at all, we wouldn't have to create a vast legal system to protect workers, they would be treated safely and fairly because that is an ethically valuable thing to do.
If capitalism were capable of considering morals, ethics, or even the law in general, we would live in a much better world. However, capitalists regularly dodge taxes while extracring wealth from any natural or human resources that exist. They then simply hoard that wealth. Remember we're living in the worst wealth inequality in this country's history. Global warming caused by the oil industry is wrecking the planet. Amazon warehouse workers get docked pay for using the bathroom and AI companies are pointing cameras at drivers to measure how often they blink.
I have no clue how you can look at the world around you and not see the rampant exploitation and value extraction. The US is in a very bad way because of it. Increased poverty, homelessness, starvation.
Hell, just look at our for-profit medical industry. People regularly go bankrupt due to ludicrous and exploitative price gouging. Tell me how ethical capitalism creates a system where hospitals are owned by private investment firms who squeeze the sick and dying for every cent they have and more.
Capitalism does not, and fundamentally cannot consider ethics. Only profit.
If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in.
You're thinking ethically; without the shrewdness and single-minded focus on profit that VC's have.
No I'm not, and it's manifestly clear that I'm not.
This was probably the hardest realization I came to in business/startup world.
That's precisely what most investors (at least the ones with any large amount of money) look for. They could care less if your product is good, or if you developed it ethically, or if you treat employees or customers well.
Most would invest in the next Oracle and sleep like babies if given the chance to get in early - even if they had a crystal ball to see how badly it will impact the industry and social fabric as a whole down the road 20 years later.
Especially VCs. They exist to make money. Full stop. The rest is marketing fluff for the naive masses.
They copied without attribution. Not okay under Apache.
Is it possible to overcome? Sure.
Yes, you can heal after shooting yourself in the foot.
(And, of course, removing attribution is violating licenses). However, they're unlikely to face litigation for this. The possible legal consequences aren't the actual consequences they're likely to face.
I agree adding their own license was hamfisted, but honestly, if I'm funding a company I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially. The first order of business is almost always proving whether your business should even exist.
Cloning an open source project and having Chat-GPT write you an enterprise license is not how you "prove whether your business should even exist." It's how you scam rich people into giving you money.
They claim that they intended to make the project open source all along. Just keeping the Apache license would have been less time consuming than asking ChatGPT for one, with the added benefit of being a real license.
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/335436b47...
It's claimed to be accidental, but the entire commit history is full of commits saying "remove cont....." that neuter all references to Continue. They didn't even want the name in the commit history.
It appears that they did violate the license:
https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:
a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License;
c. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;
The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses.
Everything else can be negotiated.
They lose claim to intellectual property rights over their own technology, even the risk (certainty) of a lawsuit over this is enough to kill the company.
And we are not talking about the company being sued for a breach of license. We are talking about this being used in any kind of dispute in court, client didn't pay? They can just allege that whatever they bought wasn't even the property of the startup, so they had no righ to sell it to them, boom good luck collecting your contract payments.
If you are a big company with a lot of business, sure you move on. But a company that is a couple of months old with this liability already? It's doomed.
Denormalize incompetence again.
These people stole a project, illegally changed the license, and pretended it was their own. This is basically theft and fraud, and it's kind of disgusting seeing people defend it.