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.
Taxes are a nitpicky example, but indeed in Germany where everything is full of regulations and red tape that only some bureaucrats understand, there indeed exist founders who argue this way for these convoluted laws:
For example have a look at the popular videos of the following channel (in German): https://www.youtube.com/@Nordwolle/videos
I got fined anyway.
[0]: Not in the US.
Software Engineering is more than coding. Basic license management incl. library vetting is part of it. If you decide to ignore that, you do not run a business enterprise, you run a criminal enterprise.
This depends on whether you consider Compliance to be part of software engineering or a separate discipline. At least in most companies the compliance department is different from the software development/IT department, because the necessary skills are very different and barely transfer.
There exist people who are anti-copyright, which has the implications that such people are (by the golden rule) also basically fine with having their works copied.
GPL vs. MIT is basics!
In a twist of fate, YC itself seems to be gamed like those broken companies.
So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on.
Being a great software developer does not make you a lawyer (not even a bad lawyer).
That is why when such a marketing claim comes up, the first question to ask is from which base they built the respective product in 4 days, and which kind of additional value the respective company added during this process.
By your argument, I can just torrent moviez and appz because I'm not a lawyer and can't be bothered with minutae of copyright law.
Indeed, there exist people who argue that in many areas law has become so complicated and unclear what is allowed or not that you cannot thus expect from ordinary citizens to obey the laws anymore - even if these citizens are willing to.
Thus politicians do have an obligation to make the laws as clear, logical and comprehensible as possible, otherwise they loose their legitimization of expecting citizens to obey them.
That's no excuse for a VC-backed startup just ignoring it and YOLOing their way.
This actually disincentivises small creators (open source maintainers and contributors, in this case) from participanting in the very thing copyright is supposed to foster.
This is what happens when you have people without sufficient domain experience making decisions.