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

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932 points sohzm | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 02:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.592s | source
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JonChesterfield ◴[04 Jul 25 10:38 UTC] No.44463274[source]▶
"Fair enough. Since this was our first OSS project, we didn’t realize at first. We’ve now revised it. Thanks for your contribution."

We didn't notice that we copied your codebase, changed the name then pretended to have built it in four days?

Good grief.

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gpderetta ◴[04 Jul 25 11:52 UTC] No.44463726[source]▶
"we are sorry we got caught"
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reactordev ◴[04 Jul 25 12:03 UTC] No.44463787[source]▶
I would be running for the hills if I were YC. This is the kind of attitude that ends up in lawsuits.
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Nextgrid ◴[04 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44464390[source]▶
YC is the company that (to this day!) has Yotta - a borderline scam to take advantage of financially-illiterate people - on their website after the whole thing has completely blown up and most customers lost their savings: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yotta

Oh, and now they have their own rendition of the "Aviator" game often advertised by unregulated Eastern-European online casinos: https://members.withyotta.com/moonshot/. You can't make this shit up!

I wrote off YC after this. Maybe early on it was a mark of quality and good due-diligence, but now I'd argue it's the outright opposite - if it's funded by YC, buyer beware.

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mathiaspoint ◴[04 Jul 25 13:37 UTC] No.44464441[source]▶
Did you not understand what YC was? They're essentially an investment bank that doesn't accept new clients. They make money, they're not a charity. Quality only matters insofar as it drives sales and doesn't create liabilities.
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1. aleph_minus_one ◴[04 Jul 25 14:16 UTC] No.44464781[source]▶
> Did you not understand what YC was? They're essentially an investment bank that doesn't accept new clients.

They rather sell themselves as early-stage startup incubator.

See https://www.ycombinator.com/

"We help founders at their earliest stages regardless of their age."

"We improve the success rate of our startups."

"We give startups a huge fundraising advantage."

and https://www.ycombinator.com/about

"The overall goal of YC is to help startups really take off. They arrive at YC at all different stages. Some haven’t even started working yet, and others have been launched for a year or more. But whatever stage a startup is at when they arrive, our goal is to help them to be in dramatically better shape 3 months later."

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2. mathiaspoint ◴[04 Jul 25 14:24 UTC] No.44464843[source]▶
What do you think a "startup incubator" does exactly?
3. vlovich123 ◴[04 Jul 25 21:31 UTC] No.44468018[source]▶
The exchange the cache of their brand and access to their network + 50k and the company gives up 20% equity. That doesn’t sound too dissimilar from any other VC - their incentives are only loosely aligned to their portfolio companies.