Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Sure, the Apache 2.0 allows this, but the mistake is that when someone asked "is this based on SimStudio?" the answer was "we built it ourselves" instead of "yes, it's a fork, here's what we added." It went from a fixable attribution oversight to a credibility problem. You can retroactively add a LICENSE file, but can't take the lie back.
Until AI isn’t trained on all open source code ever written, regardless of license, which I doubt will ever happen, isn’t SaaS-writing AI in some sense building a larger scale & more concentrated version of what you’re hoping to destroy?
Personally, I hope and want everyone selling used cars and life insurance to be honest and upstanding. some of them are.
If you absolutely can't trust any SaaS it is equivalent to you cannot trust any vendor to do anything as they may fuck it up. You can solve that with DD.
Obviously a false dichotomy for most real life scenarios but the point being that I'd rather do it myself (any which way) than trust a bad developer, doubly so for customer-facing operations.
If there's another provider offering that function, sure, but let's talk rupees.
Also, the used car market is much more efficient than the new car market. You are a lot less likely to get ripped off, believe it or not, when you buy used. It is also three times as large as the new car market, with much lower barriers to entry and no manufacturers carving up sales regions and limiting dealer franchises in each region, and penalizing vendors that sell outside their region, e.g. creating little local monopolies. Every used car dealer has to compete with carmax and carvana and hundreds of other used car dealers that have access to the same pool of buyers and sellers. They have to fight for those buyers and sellers. That's a very different situation than the four Toyota dealers in your metro. In fact the reason why Toyota dealers are especially bad in terms of ripping people off is because the Toyota product is so good and you have to go to them to get a new Toyota. But if you want a used Toyota, suddenly have 10x the options, and not one of them has a monopoly from the manufacturer.
Not saying there aren't bad apples in used car sales, but it's a lot harder to survive long term on shady practices than if you are backed by a major manufacturer, have exclusive access to sell their cars, and also exclusive access to do recall and warranty repair. Those types of monopolies can prop up all sorts of bad practices.
My reality: I use my bank's car-buying service and pay the bank's negotiated price.
Both are indictment of today's ambient startup culture, and I'm not sure which is ultimately worse.
The project in question is here:
> DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.
If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.
Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.
"We didn't understand the licensing!" isnt usually an incredible claim, but it becomes so when it's being made by a company that manages software licensing compliance.
That's a hell of a caveat though. That is basically the entire license.
Its like saying you are allowed to kill people minus that whole law about murder. Well like obviously. You are allowed to do anything minus the rules that forbid you from doing the thing.
Generally speaking, open source ecosystem knowledge is not something that shows up in job descriptions, interviews, or regular training for non-technical staff in most software companies. Hopefully that will one day be the case but until then there is a high likelihood that misleading statements can be made accidentally.
Every company of non-trivial sizes will eventually hire someone who is a bad hire.
That's a bit like a shoplifter saying "well, outside of not paying for it, I don't see a problem?".
Apache 2.0 clearly says you must include the license, include copyright, state any changes you've made and include the NOTICE file. None of that was done, so this is a pretty clear violation of the license. The copyright holders can demand that this is fixed immediately, seek at least an injunction if that does not happen, and maybe even claim profits made from selling the software while violating the license.
They used it without having a license. The apache license would have allowed them to use it, but they didn’t meet the conditions.
This sounds equivalent to using paid software without paying to me.
The original author could well claim that “the cost of a license under the terms which they used it is $2M”. After all, the cost of software licenses is entirely arbitrary and set by the author (copyright owner).
You still have to be careful not to invest in imbeciles, but unethical is OK.
Shouldn't morality be the basis for all of the laws?
So we disagree rather vehemently, except for "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people" is bad.
This would not be moral in any serious ethical framework
Edit: Human equality is often one of the most important topics in Ethics. Why do you think so much effort is put into depicting Others as Inhuman?
We agree, but I'm not particularly talking about "serious ethical frameworks" I'm talking about the most likely scenario if we try to implement law based on morality. It will be a corrupted morality from the get-go. Hence me caring about whose morality.
> Edit: Human equality is often one of the most important topics in Ethics. Why do you think so much effort is put into depicting Others as Inhuman?
Because it takes so much to change minds to see others as inhuman?
So let's distill this down:
- You're saying law already has or should have a moral component -- we agree.
- I'm saying that whose morality matters because humans will not apply morality evenly. We aren't perfect machines. We're run in part by our biases.
- You're saying that isn't a serious ethical framework then. Agreed.
- Finally I'm saying that if we choose to implement law from this point forward with a "new morality" -- that the "new morality" will already be corrupted by the people implementing it. It won't be a "serious ethical framework" -- it will be some watered down non-perfect version that privileges an in-group over an out-group, because humans do that stuff.
This phrase in the article in particular is frustrating:
DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source tools are freely available to be used, if they are properly credited.
Oh because my license terms are more liberal, it doesn't matter as much when you break them?? Really? Bonkers that they would publish that.
They are explicitly forbidden from doing this without attribution. So yes, there is a legal problem with this. All they needed to do to avoid that was provide attribution, but Delve was staffed with such morally bankrupt and incompetent individuals that they couldn't even do that.
It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.
At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.
Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.
And now that right-wing groups are buying up all the media, we wont be hearing about it for much longer.
What really happens instead are ecological, ethical and financial stresses of all kind.
Famous recent example: prediction markets are unlawful under the Dodd-Frank's act but the Trump appointed CTFC's head has stated it will ignore it.
Steve Wozniak alone could've maybe built Apple without Steve Jobs, but his time would be wasted by doing something he (presumably) didn't enjoy very much and it would've been a much bumpier road.
So it’s not all it takes.
<s>Cheating</s> sorry hustling and <s>bullshitting</s> sorry storytelling are more important.
mine: https://videohubapp.com/
my GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
grifter: https://videocliplibrary.com/
Permission is hereby granted [...] to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...]
If you don't want other people to be able to sell it, don't use an MIT license.
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
If the copyright attribution for the original code is missing, that violates the license. MIT is not a "no rights reserved" license like 0BSD or Unlicense.
There can be punitive fines for copyright violation, moreso if the copyright is registered. I think there's some leeway there for the court.
There also may be damages. In the case of, for instance, illegal distribution of a Disney movie, Disney may be entitled to the amount of sales they supposedly lost.
It makes me think that open-source projects should routinely offer their product for sale, without the attribution requirements. Then, if another company violates their license, they have a tangible dollar figure they can point to and say exactly how much revenue was stolen.
Your example only makes sense if the company stole the code from a proprietary repo, like a hostile former employee.
As-is, it's so far off it's useless. Even though both situations involve copyright in some manner.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2012/feb/01/gpl-enforcement/#...
The coding agents succeeds because apart from wanna be SaaS indie vibe coders, other serious users of AI agents for coding are themselves pretty strong and competent software engineers that won't let slip things easily and have years of experience and a taste in what is architecturally correct and what is nonsense and when and how to steer in what direction.
Other fields - if they have to review every output of the LLM such as in finance running totals and such to verify the results of an LLM makes their usage not as much useful.
its Bunch of inexperienced people (kids really) stealing stuff from each other. (Not a proper 'Compliance' company) -The CEO is like 22 years old!!! WTF guys you think this guy knows compliance??? lol
Ie in a fast high pressure environment called Y Combinator where the 'adults' are pressuring and hyping each other's products and stealing open source, AI generating and in general trying to productize every crappy idea they can think of to capture some VC or investor who is too dumb to do proper due diligence in the AI gold-rush and hype train
On top of that engineering is so high pressured and awful these days e.g this video from the kids in silicon valley: https://youtu.be/0tLEszJs7hc?si=OXrJqPg-5PhVGnYT