My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]
95 comments
·July 4, 2025ipsum2
This is the second time in less than a year something similar has happened.
Previously, a different YC company (Pear AI) copied Continue, changed the licenses, and "launched".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707495
I wonder if Pear AI is dead or pivoted, their open source repos have not been updated since May.
Disposal8433
And it has the same fake excuse as usual "Since this was our first OSS project, we didn’t realize at first."
He sure discovered this new open source thing and it's very confusing. It's not like it's almost 40 years old at that point. I'll never understand people who lie like toddlers.
litexlang
Sorry for your story. In those days open source is REALLY HARD. Put your github link here and we will support your project by starring you and spreading your project. You definitely need to fight back.
litexlang
[dead]
VoidWhisperer
In a general sense, open source theft is bad, obviously. I have trouble feeling bad for this specific case though, given that it is a tool for cheating in interviews and tests.
roncesvalles
A GPL violation is a GPL violation.
stitched2gethr
I made an OSS tool to help you cheat on your taxes, screw your business partner, or ensure your ex wife cannot see the children. Someone stole the source and is backed by a major VC firm. Is the thought different at all or exactly the same? Just raising the question.
eddythompson80
It's exactly the same of course? Why would it be different?
weird-eye-issue
Google search and the internet can help you with all of those. Maybe we should ban the internet.
worik
What about weapons?
The point is being "GPL evil" is GPL. Taking the code, not obtaining the copyright, and re-licensing it is a clear violation of copyright law and immoral.
We are not little children in the playground. Two wrongs do not make a right, and rights are most important for bad people
tombert
Things like this are why I have become disillusioned with Open Source, and why latest projects have been closed source. The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce. If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.
rfl890
Well, if you're writing open source because you want to write open source, then none of this matters. If you are worried about corporations stealing your work, that should drive you away from OSS. OSS should stay "hobbyist" for the individual developer.
tombert
Sure but it sort of devalues labor.
If a corporation is stealing your OSS code (and violating a license) then that implies that they think your code has value, they might have paid a person to write that code but instead some hobbyist built it for free and a corporation steals it.
A few months ago, I made a pull request to LMAX Disruptor, which was merged. I was initially excited because even if my PR was simple it’s still a big project that I contributed to. But after a few minutes it occurred to me that I just did free labor for a for-profit trading company. If they merged in my code then must have thought it had some value, and I decided to dedicate my time to saving this multi million dollar company some money.
My PR there was pretty simple and only took me like 30 minutes (if that), so I am not going to cry too hard over this, but it’s just something that made me realize that if a company is going to use my work, they should pay me. I don’t think it’s wrong or weird to want to be compensated for my labor.
I am still a hobbyist. Turns out you can still be a hobbyist without sharing everything you’ve ever done on GitHub.
nativeit
It only devalues labor if it's leveraged specifically to do so. You could make this argument about literally any volunteer activity, software related or otherwise. The real devaluation of labor comes from things like the "gig economy" where costs and compensation are abstracted such that companies can exploit the naivete of workers who, generally speaking, are not accustomed to things like amortization and accounting for external costs, thus significantly driving down their own labor, operational expenses, and risks by passing them directly to the workers. At least open source projects are up-front about what's to be expected, and tend not to engage in exploitative practices.
AnotherGoodName
There’s a million reasons to want to write open source. A lack of attribution in particular is a killer for motivation.
sohzm
i love open source because it feels like a kind of donation i can't make financially, so in a way, i'm trying to make up for that
but yeah someone claiming it all falsely isnt good for the motivation
qwertyuiop12
In general, I try to add a fingerprint into the output.
For example, in a project which generates images I usually set a specific set of pixels.
tombert
Sure, but if they have access to your code then a company could pay a junior engineer to look for any kinds of explicit fingerprints and remove it.
TheChaplain
> The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce.
Really? If you find a piece of proprietary software does basically the same thing as yours, and the binaries contains the same strings/artwork, then it's reasonable to make a legal case of it. You can even contact FSF and they'll take it further.
tombert
If you can directly prove a violation dead to rights (or have enough cause for a discovery request) and you have money for legal defense, sure.
A lot of open source stuff is libraries and utilities though that is pretty entrenched in the code. It is hard to even find out about a violation, let alone prove anything.
Imagine I came up with a new algorithm to do Fourier Transforms 10% faster than FFTW (or whatever the current market leader is) and make a library and I release it as GPL. A company could fairly easily just import it to whatever project they’re doing, and it would be extremely difficult for me to prove anything, especially if I don’t have any obvious things like strings in there.
That’s not even taking into account that it would be relatively easy for a corporation to just pay a junior engineer to do a direct “port” of the library to another language and pretending it’s their own independent work.
danielpkl
Hi everyone, this is Daniel from the Pickle team. Glass is a new open source project from us that we plan to build on and improve. We built several original features for it like live summaries, real-time STT Transcript and one-click "Ask" from summary that we're very excited about. However in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache. This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end. We made a quick fix and are working right now to do a proper fix that addresses the issues fully and cleanly. We are sorry to the original author of the project, Soham (CheatingDaddy), and thank him for pointing this out. We are also sorry to the open source community for messing up here. Thanks everyone for caring about this.
sebmellen
The correct approach is to license your code as GPL v3 with Soham as the author. It's a simple fix.
icar
Nice try
sebmellen
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?
nativeit
You might have better luck if you provide a link to your code, but I rather suspect you left that out because you would probably struggle to gain sympathy from alleging the theft of https://cheatingdaddy.com/.
Honestly, I looked through both repos and while I didn't find any direct evidence for/against your assertion, it's a very boilerplate approach to connecting with LLM APIs, I don't imagine it would look much different if you both simply had similar ideas, and then used an agent to help write the code.
zero-sharp
If you scroll down in the xcancel link (posted in the same thread), you'll find side-by-side picture comparisons of the code, comments, libraries.
nirui
There's actual good reason for that. the X Formally Known As Twitter company has a content weighting system that punishes external links, regardless where the link is pointed to. So apparently Mr. Soham did the smartest thing to give that post the best chance to spread.
BTW, the X Formally Known As Twitter company is not the only one who conduced the world to this, all big names do link restriction. Look what we've become, such nice world :)
fastball
He includes screenshots which (to me) do indicate a certain amount of lifting.
Also the project is open source and the website is at the end of the thread. The website has a GH link in the header.
What more do you want really?
sohzm
its not the best name tbh, i just made it as a meme but people take the name seriously and that hurts the case
ive posted the evidence in twitter thread link
nativeit
Yeah, once someone posted a link I could read, I saw that. Bummer, looks like they ripped it off and sounds like they're currently doing the usual backpedal. Sorry your project got the wrong kind of attention in this way, I also (eventually) read into your tone while reading through your repo, and I understand much of it is tongue-in-cheek. It softened my position a bit. Hope you enjoy better luck in your future endeavors.
sebmellen
The appropriate thing would be to revise your initial comment.
eddythompson80
> its not the best name tbh
lol, I'll bet you $10 that the name is exactly why they got themselves into this mess. Had the name been something like "meeting-agent" or some corporate friendly name like that, they probably wouldn't have tried to hide it so much.
alberth
Maybe I’m looking at the wrong repos but both appear to be GPL-3 (or maybe it was relicensed back to original GPL-3?)
slouch
11 minutes ago "licensed fixed" https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commit/5c462179acface889...
sohzm
yeah he changed it rn https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commit/5c462179acface889...
gnabgib
He=you? What's the game here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44460855
AnotherGoodName
That's the author of this post talking about the other person changing their licensing to match.
fastball
They committed the (presumably ripped off) repo yesterday, changed the license from GPL to Apache, and now have changed it back (presumably in response to this thread).
dgellow
What’s the context? Elon’s Twitter is really a pain, without using an account you only see the linked tweet, without the replies or anything else.
an0malous
There’s a reason they ask the question about describing a time you “hacked a system to your advantage” in the YC application. They have always selected for founders who are willing to take advantage of legal and ethical gray areas. Reddit created fake users and farmed content from Digg, Airbnb scraped listings from Craigslist.
mindcrime
There is no "grey area" here, and this isn't "hacking".
rincebrain
There's an argument to be made that, even if it's an open and shut violation, if enforcement is nontrivial and a vanishingly low risk, it still pattern matches as "grey area" in terms of risk.
Not at all in favor of the person stealing someone else's code and slapping a new name on it in violation of the license, just that I think I see why people might list that as matching the same intent as a question like that.
colonial
This isn't "hacking the system", though - this is an open-and-shut violation of a license with a strong legal pedigree.
null
https://xcancel.com/soham_btw/status/1940952786491027886