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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier’s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher’s that routed people to “random fields in Mexico”.

Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move. Launching it with the same name as the original repo is just flagrant.

This guy thought he was going to ride this controversy to some free publicity for himself, using other people’s work. He flew too close to the sun and got caught out on every level.

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> Stealing an open source repo

It's in poor taste for sure but let's not pretend that the chosen license is doing him any favors: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours/blob/813cf85/LICENSE

Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy. Profit-driven entities love when smart people publish MIT code that they can feed off of without giving anything back.

Nor is the copycat project prevented from using the name without a trademark. For instance one couldn't repackage Mozilla or Blender under those names:

- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75558938&caseSearchType=U...

- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85852073&caseSearchType=U...

Can confirm. I used to hate when people published their code under MIT instead of GPL. But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.

> But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.

I hope that eventually you gain from society exactly what you’ve given.

I see this sort of opinion on every AI thread and it's funny to me because that's exactly what AI is, and people don't seem to get mad about the general use case of it generating code but when it's asked to post a specific project over to license-wash it, suddenly people get mad, like, that's what AI was doing all along. And to get this out of the way first, maybe you don't use AI, but I'm speaking of general trends on HN.

He already is, any software that his company releases, people can just use an AI agent to replicate it and have their own version of.

> I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.

Genuine piece of shit, nice.

The solution is simple. Don't license your code MIT. MIT enables this

Absolutely and I don't disagree.

But locking the door is also the solution to getting your house ransacked because you left the entrance open; doesn't mean the robber isn't a piece of shit.

The irony is that nobody is going to want to use software in the future that isn't open source. Why would I pay for software that I can't extend myself?

It will be absolutely hilarious when open source projects adopt the jqwik approach and start prompt injecting their code, comments, and any/all other text content. The LLM users’ histrionics will be delicious.

They still need to keep the conditions the mit sets though and keep the copyright notice.

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software

> Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy.

How is it a fallacy? The ability to pull in MIT/BSD code into a commercial product without providing the source is an extra freedom over (say) the GPL. The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?

Some folks may not like that extra bit of freedom, and want to put the restriction that you have to (re-)share the code — and that's fine — but it is less free.

It gives you the freedom to make others unfree, (by distributing software to them that they can’t inspect, modify, share) so it depends on whether you care about freedom for some individuals or freedom for everyone.

> The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?

IMO,the end-user is the person downloading and using the software from the app store, not the free-riding intermediary who repackages it. Copyleft ensures the end users can modify their software by guaranteeing access to its source code, and it accomplishes this by constraining any privileges of would-be intermediary repackagers from impinging this fundamental end-user right.

When judging which software offers more rights, you must first establish which party you prefer to have primacy: downstream developers, or the users of the software who run the released packages on their devices.

MIT license does not mean you can copy everything around the software, like the name of the product, and strip the license. There are still requirements in the license for the copyright notice to accompany the software.

Isn’t it MIT-licensed?

That’s not theft. The author explicitly told people he wants them to do this; the company is just taking him up on the offer.

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

It appears that this essential part of the MIT license was violated.

The MIT license does not allow you to claim that you invented the software when you did not in fact invent the software.

> Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move

Do you think he stole it directly, or an LLM reproduced it complete with existing bugs?

I very much doubt an LLM is going to do that without explicitly being prompted to do so.

It is what he claims happened: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...

Curious. My money is on that guy lying again.

If anyone ever had AI copy an entire open source project accidentally, I would be interested to hear it.

Even the widely shared reports about specific snippets being reproduced relied on the user intentionally prompting for it.

Honestly, after being caught lying already, it's hard to believe him.

He should not be believed. That’s the consequences of perjury: one lie disqualifies all other testimony.

Unless he shows evidence of independent re-development like his LLM agent history or at the very least git commits, I'll consider that a lie

Whether he stole it directly, by doing the 'work', or indirectly via an LLM, stealing it is wrong. If you generate something using an LLM, you have a responsibility to ensure you're not infringing on someone else's work.

I don’t disagree, and in this case a simple google search would have sufficed, it in the more general case, how?

The LLM is more likely to fix any bugs it finds rather than explicitly reproducing it line by line, which it's actually quite bad at doing anyway, except for small, well-known pieces of code in its training set.

I refer you to his mea culpa: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...

I find that synopsis very hard to believe, seems he's shifting blame onto an LLM instead of taking responsibility for his actions. He said he'd significantly alter the feature set, so why didn't that happen? That's a single prompt to Claude. He more than likely just told the LLM to clone the repo and ship it as is, not actually working on it in any capacity. In that case it wasn't the AI "reproducing" a bug as there was no reproduction in the first place.

The author had fixed the bug. Had he cloned the repo, that bug would have not existed in the ripoff version, which points to the simplest explanation being that it was Claude, as the ripoff author said.

Depends when it was cloned, as the article does say the author later fixed the bug, so we are unsure when it was fixed.

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