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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing, minus lacking the attribution. People are too illiterate on software licenses. If you're going to use open source software, learn the licenses you're using! I'm pretty sure GitHub literally shows you what you can and cannot do with specific licenses.

Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.

https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE

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I think you're missing the crux of the problem here.

"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.

> license allows them to do what they are doing, minus lacking the attribution.

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.

I barely finished high school and I can understand them, not sure why some find it so hard to, even the license texts themselves are relatively easy to read, understand and reason about, and there is tons of further reading material all over the web, some from actual law-firms that can help you understand how it applies in your country too.

I can maybe understand not fully grasping how the GPLs work (I sometimes have to look at GNUs page of compatible and incompatible licenses myself) but something as simple as apache or MIT should be so dead simple it hurts

The uncomfortable truth is that people aren't half as dumb as they give themselves credit for. Not being able to understand something is rarely, if ever, a skill issue.

They assume if people knew it was just a fork of an open source tool then they would use the free, open source version instead of paying for the fork.

I don't disagree, but actively lying about it is still a violation of the license.

And if you're releasing open source software, learn the licenses you're using! You probably didn't intend a multimillion dollar AI startup to be able to just take your thing and call it their own.

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