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Comment by mangoman | Hacker News Reader

There’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open source? It reads to me like “Hey, we thought the open source goose project was just okay, so we forked it to do it better. But we’re not going to contribute it back to and instead rename it.”

I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…

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…and you can get almost identical features by simply installing the GitHub app inside Slack, and then asking Copilot to work on something, this should take < 5m to set up for any organisation using Slack and GitHub.

I don’t know enough about either but if their approach was to make it substantially more opinionated, which is likely in the case of an org that’s subject to audits, it would make sense to keep it separate.

They seem to have just optimized its integration with their existing tooling and workflows. That doesn't sound largely useful to the broader community. It's also probably different enough from goose at this point that rebranding it makes sense. I do think such integrations are hugely important for productivity and usefulness of this sort of tool. It seems like the post is advocating for doing deep 1p integration to further improve the utility of coding agents.

How would they contribute back when their fork is a customization of how it works?

> We’ve customized the orchestration flow in an opinionated way to interleave agent loops and deterministic code

Is goose in such disrepair that you can just drop code changes into it and the smol developer auto-accepts it, happy that anyone is doing the work?

Or is goose actually it's own project with 250 issues and 74 PRs and might have its own ideas about how it's built?

I don't have specific information about Minions, but I do know about Stripe's architecture and internal tooling.

The article isn't really talking about changes they made to goose, it's describing how they went about integrating goose with the rest of their developer infrastructure (ie. the AWS-based remote devbox system, Toolshed, etc).

The elephant in that room is that all these LLM's were trained on boatloads of open source software that they can remix enough to not violate any copyrights.

As an open source contributor, in some ways this makes me much more frustrated than someone making a closed source fork of a BSD licensed project.

My take for a very long time has been that any model trained in violation of copyright should not itself be copyrightable. It should be public domain.

This would mean any model for which the trainer did not have permission to create a derivative work either implied by the work’s current license or obtained by them would have to release their model’s weights.

You could argue that it’s fair use, but a fair use quotation of a work does not become the property of the one quoting it. If I quote a line from a song or a novel I do not now own rights to that line. So there’s precedent for this.

Isn't all content generated by generative models already in public domain. Having something in the public domain doesn't force you to release it.

At the very least, that would be fair.

I feel like legal frameworks sometimes lose track of fairness

When everyone is using the same foundation (LLMs) this will become more and more common as a way to sell perceived benefits.

Welcome to the free software movement!

Copyleft license would not help if they are only using it internally

AGPL would

Not unless they were exposing it over a network to non-Stripe people, AFAIK.

Do you have access to Stripes minion service so you can demand the source code?

No copy left license requires contributing your changes.

If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting

Just because it’s legal and allowed doesn’t mean it’s not off putting.

Personally, I have no issue with them making their own internal fork, but then blogging about their thing without contributing it back leaves a little bad taste. If it’s so good, then contribute it back, since they benefited from the volunteers.

You can't have it both ways. As a library author choose MIT to encourage commercial usage because companies are afraid of GPL, but then complain that companies are actually using it in a MIT license way without contributing back.

I can find it off putting regardless. Especially since I’m not the person who released it under MIT license.

License it GPL, and it will be fed to a model as training data to recreate it copyright free anyways.

Training falls outside of copyright concerns because of fair use, so proprietary or free is orthogonal. This is how the world is currently trending.

Law, spirit of the law, common decency. Rare currency these days, I know...

You don’t have to agree that it’s off-putting, but if you’re “struggling to understand why” that demonstrates a serious lack of empathy and awareness of social dynamics.

> If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting

What? Who cares about the license agreement? Lawyers and bureaucrats maybe. The real issue with _any_ software project is whether it is meant to be a step toward a more livable and peaceful world or not. Sure, some people make guided missile software to murder people for profit, but that's just obviously antisocial behavior, regardless of how well it complies with license agreements.

If you put up a sign on your house saying "businesses, feel free to come use my driveway for whatever you want" and McDonald's sets up a restaurant there then you won't have much sympathy from me.

Well sure, maybe in this case the driveway owner hasn't been slighted, as they consented to the use, but that doesn't mean that suddenly some other person critiquing Mickey D's for factory farming and using prison-slave labor to make uniforms is misguided. You can't just say, "Well, I'm struggling to see why it's off-putting for McDonald's to use that driveway for their slavery-poison-food operation".

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