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

I thought tech companies were supposed to move fast and break stuff.

I think that phrase was coined in an era when the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up. It caught up somewhat, but obviously there's still much leeway for improvement. Break all the wrong habits, rigid conventions and old traditions you want, just play along with the governing laws.

> the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up

That's an extremely charitable interpretation.

A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date, just that enforcement couldn't keep up because 1) nobody expected such a brazen level of breaking the law and 2) justice doesn't really apply when you have enough capital.

Its original intended meaning was sometimes breaking your social website, not laws.

> A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date

While I wouldn't disagree with your sentiment, just keep in mind that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) got implemented 2018.

I was thinking more about regulations around taxis, short-term rentals, etc for example.

As an aside, GDPR enforcement is so lacking (even today) it doesn't register on anyone's radar beyond those that fear-monger about it or sell snake oil to pseudo-comply with it. But even then, keep in mind most of what the GDPR has was already part of many countries' own legislation, and things like spyware were illegal even in the US (but again laws don't apply if you are a company and have enough capital).

As far as I understood the original meaning, it was about "not being too careful", and err on the side of breaking things, in the name of moving forward faster.

It ended up meaning something else, but back then this is how I understood it.

Little known fact: GDPR replaced the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) from 1995 which itself replaced the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, written in 1981. Now if you compare these three, there is enough details to get an undergrads degree in law, but on the high level the tenor did not change much. Those who were struggling in 2018 to meet GDPR criteria before the grace period of two years ended were most likely not struggling with details, but in blatant violation of almost 40 year old rules. Well one of the details probably mattered: the fines went up considerably.

> Those who were struggling in 2018 to meet GDPR criteria before the grace period of two years ended were most likely not struggling with details, but in blatant violation of almost 40 year old rules.

At least in Germany at the time of GDPR, the startups (and also bigger companies) were struggling with the insane amount of compliance requirements, and the uncertainty how to actually interpret these legal requirements also in terms of federal law.

In other words: these (German) companies (and startups) clearly obeyed the spirit of these, as you say, 40 year old laws, but struggled hard with the formal red-tape requirements of GDPR.

IMO that phrase came about when old tech companies (the IBMs of the world) had

  * waterfall
  * design up-front
  * source control systems that
    * defaulted all files to read-only
    * required you to "check-out" files, potentially locking other devs out from editing them [1]
  * probably didn't have unit tests so "deploying to prod" meant "doing a full QA pass, done by human beings"
  * there was no CI/CD (We had "Build Engineers")

In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.

[1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...

> As an aside, GDPR enforcement is so lacking (even today) it doesn't register on anyone's radar

That’s not really true, every app offers some version of “Download your data” these days as a result of GDPR.

> I thought tech companies were supposed to move fast and break stuff.

This mentality is relatively new. Or more like invented by Facebook and got marketed the heck by PRs and marketing firms.

And now we have people who code before they think.

> And now we have people who code before they think.

Thanks to coding agents, now we can have engineers who do neither