My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

You won't be forgiven unless you credited sohzm and state that cheating-daddy is a direct inspiration

There is no fix. Your work is derived and should be/will be licensed as GPL. You do not want to accidentally succeed and then find you have nothing. You are being a smart-ass here.

[1] https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commits/5c462179acface88...

[2] https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commit/4c51d5133c4987fa1...

IMO This sounds pretty fair to me. Publicly apologize somewhere, and link OP to it. I like that. Or come on, at least Venmo "the kid" $1000 -- "a kid" who saved you time, and is putting food on your table.

"A kid" whose idea you took and profited on. Wow, just realizing upon writing this -- what if Pickle CEO has kids, and one your kid reads this?

Cut the grandoise talk. You stole someone's work and now you just shrug it off as "incorrectly attributed as Apache". That's not a mistake, that's a deliberate action plan. The force push others have mentioned is the proof. Atleast be honest in your apology.

I hope YC takes serious action and eliminates you guys from their cohort if you're still in one. This reflects very poorly on them otherwise.

You just can't win.

Really it's more of the gesture, to set the example, since we've all seen this before, and AFAIK, there haven't been too many amicable outcomes.

You meant: this was illegal and unethical work.

You might be lucky with the original author not suing you. I'm not sure your backers will be equally kind. I certainly wouldn't, depending on what exactly you told your investors we may be looking at straight up securities fraud here.

If so, well, I guess good for you; but the rest of us sometimes screw up. There needs to be a path for redemption. Admit you were at fault, make it right, do better next time.

ETA And, it doesn't matter whether people do the above steps because they "really mean it", or because they're just afraid of the consequences otherwise; any more than it matters, from a societal perspective, if people refrain from stealing or murdering because they're good people, or because they're afraid of being thrown in jail.

But... but... but... Velocity! And moats! And we're VC-funded! Doesn't that mean we can do whatever we want?

Side remark: Since YC claims all the time that they invest in people, not in ideas, YC should perhaps part from the people behind Pickle very fast, since by their investment YC rubber-stamped that the people behind Pickle are great ones (but not necessarily the product of Pickle), something that YC perhaps does not want to uphold anymore. :-)

And even if they handled it very gracefully afterwards, don’t expect everyone to be happy about it. That’s Mashimo’s problem isn’t it, someone’s gonna criticize regardless. No shit!

Btw, I have never ever taken someone else’s work and brand it as my own without credit, or cheat someone in any other way (or at the very least, never intentionally). Thank you for asking. I don’t think that’s a high bar to clear.

So just to point out, here you're complaining about them not performing step 1 on the redemption path sufficiently well. That's a fair criticism; but I'd point out that the "Just admit you screwed up and don't try to explain because you're just making excuses for yourself" principle is neither so self-evident nor so well-known that it's fair to expect everyone to magically know it.

What Mashimo's problem is that with regard to the "make it right" step, it's really not clear what to do in this case regarding the git history. Do you take it out? People complain you're trying to hide your sins. Do you leave it in? People complain the other way too.

This shows that the right answer is not self-evident; which means we need to cut people slack. It also means that we as a community need to figure out what is the right way to "make it right" when people do a bogus relicensing, so that there's a clear path to redemption.

But your response to Mashimo wasn't trying to help define a clear path to redemption; your response was basically, "If there's no path to redemption, that's your problem, you shouldn't have screwed it up in the first place."

That attitude is only going to harm our community in the long run. If there's no way to redeem yourself, why bother doing anything at all? Just keep claiming rights over the source code and tell the author "so sue me", knowing there's no way he'll get a fraction of his legal fees back. Or, abide by the letter of the law but don't admit fault.

> Btw, I have never ever taken someone else’s work and brand it as my own without credit

So it's, "Some things need a path for redemption and other things don't." And as it happens, the things that don't need a path for redemption are things you've never done.

I'm not putting them in jail. I can't even criticize them online? Who's in the way of their redemption, whatever that means? Yeah I'm proud I'm not guilty of shady shit, now kindly get off my lawn with your moral relativism.

I hope the strongest appropriate consequences for this come their way, though likely nothing will happen.

Meanwhile you're just trying to handwave it all away

You're just having some abstract, theoretical conversation that has no basis in what has happened

I'm having a conversation about principles; and my principle is that there should be a path to redemption. When people screw up, instead of just knee-jerk piling on because we can, we should ask, "What would be a reasonable thing to expect them to do to make it right?"

> Whatever the path is - could even be paying or even hiring the original dev

Sure, this would be a strong action on the "making it right" direction.

> they haven't done ANYTHING in that direction.

This just isn't true. They said they said they were in the wrong. They changed the license, removing all traces of the illegal license. That's not nothing.

Yes, they also downplayed their mistake, which kind of undermines the "admit fault" step. Yes, they could have gone much further to make things right, by for instance hiring the original dev.

They could have done better, but they also could have done worse.

Any sensible person would agree with you in the abstract.

But you're having the conversation in a thread where the person who should be seeking redemption has done the opposite. What you seem to considerinimally redeeming and seemingly even applauding, MANY people consider to be making the situation worse - a disingenuous apology, and only because they got caught. THAT is what we're piling on about, not the initial (egregious) infraction.

Anyway, I'm done here.

At best the license.txt that accompanies a particular revision can serve as a sign post of what license applies it is not dispositive and if the sign post is wrong it was your bad for failing to understand what license applied before distributing.