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Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

It's possible their spokesperson was not informed about SimStudio being the basis for Delve. Lots of people in sales and marketing do not know little about how open source software works.

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I'm not sure "Person who answered a question didn't actually know the answer" is such a good defense, almost worse than "We didn't understand the license", because the implications of having such people in your company seems way wider then.

That is very much true. Lack of knowledge in a legal context is a very weak defense.

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.

Compliance tech company who doesn't know about open-source. Interesting.

Then maybe say „I don’t know, let me get back to you“ instead of „no, we built it ourselves“?

Yes, great response. But is the failing here an individual one 'This person is bad at their job and needs more training/be replaced' or a company one 'This company only hires bad people and we shouldn't use them'

Every company of non-trivial sizes will eventually hire someone who is a bad hire.

Understandably it can be difficult for the machines of HN to truly understand, but humans don't normally have that kind of exacting control over what comes out of their mouth. Those who have carefully developed the skill of having that control don't waste their time working at struggling startups.

If you’re the spokesperson, I kind of expect you to think before you speak. I don’t think that’s a HN machine thing.

No, it is. Humans understand that to err is human and thus have compassion for other humans. Human expectations are placed on full timelines, not instants in time. A human saying the wrong thing simply doesn't matter to other humans as they know that words are part of a larger dialog and surrounded by a vast array of other context.

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