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

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931 points sohzm | 4 comments | 04 Jul 25 02:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.634s | source
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sebmellen ◴[04 Jul 25 05:30 UTC] No.44461387[source]▶
This being on page 2 with 247 upvotes in the three hour time period this post has been up is surprising to me. I wouldn't be surprised if @dang is suppressing it (but I'd also be happy to hear that it's not being suppressed).

It's pretty spineless for the Pickle team to come out and pretend they mistakenly re-licensed GPL code. Hilarious.

> in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache

How can you write a sentence like that in good faith?

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tomhow ◴[04 Jul 25 05:52 UTC] No.44461505[source]▶
The first rule of HN moderation is that we moderate (i.e., intervene) less if a story reflects negatively on a YC company or YC itself.

This principle goes right back to pg days, and was the first thing he taught dang [1].

That said, it doesn't mean we avoid moderation at all and it doesn't mean the guidelines all go out the window.

Different factors influence the story's rank and visibility on the front page: upvotes, flags, the flamewar detector, and settings to turn these penalties on/off. I'm actively watching the thread to keep it on the front page, as per the rule.

That said, the guidelines ask us to avoid fulmination and assume good faith. Whilst it's fair enough to criticize and question a company when they do something like this, we can also be adult enough to look the evidence before us and recognize that this was most likely a dumb mistake that they've moved quickly to correct.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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michaelmrose ◴[04 Jul 25 06:10 UTC] No.44461593[source]▶
Setting the license text is an explicit act and it seems fairly unlikely for anyone who creates software to think they can relicence GPL code or to think they didn't need to Google it first. Doing something that you meant to do isn't a mistake it's a choice.

It seems more likely that they didn't think anyone would notice.

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1. tomhow ◴[04 Jul 25 06:16 UTC] No.44461624[source]▶
> It seems more likely that they didn't think anyone would notice.

Maybe, but if that's what they thought (and I have no idea, I haven't spoken to them or anyone else about it), it's very foolish, because this kind of thing will always get noticed eventually, especially if the project becomes successful.

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2. sebmellen ◴[04 Jul 25 06:43 UTC] No.44461756[source]▶
At this point it's a common strategy used by YC companies. Do you remember this? https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-crit...
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3. ◴[04 Jul 25 07:34 UTC] No.44462073[source]▶
4. tomhow ◴[04 Jul 25 10:36 UTC] No.44463264[source]▶
YC tells founders that one of the fastest ways to kill your company is to base your product on code that's not legitimate to use (i.e., that you didn't write yourself or that is used in breach of its license). That's because it's one of the fastest ways to kill funding rounds, acquisitions and enterprise deals. Not everyone listens or understands.

It even asks (or at least it did the last time I checked) in the application form, if you wrote your code yourself, to raise the issue of IP ownership/licensing from the start.