This AI Startup "Copied" an Open-Source Project and Got Half a Million Dollar Funding by Y Combinator
AI startups, and open-source forks with VC funding. A bad match.
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This is how open source is supposed to work. Everything they're doing is now going to improve the open source codebase. This is good.
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How is it boot licking to get money from rich people to develop open source software?
Lemmy is FOSS that was funded by a grant from NLNet. Its the same outcome as this.
If anyone is licking boots, its the rich people licking the FOSS boots
Except this isn't money going to a FOSS project, it's money to some guys whose only keyboard is StackOverflow's The Key.
If its forked from a Foss project then its necessarily a Foss project. That's why we use Foss licenses.
Vscode is released under a MIT license and the Continue extension is released under Apache. Neither is copyleft, so the forked codebase doesn't need to be open source
Ah you're right. Blame Vscode for using MIT. Maybe now is a good time to tell them to change it to GPL, so this can't happen again.
Right, exactly, which is why they launched with a FOSS license. Oh, wait--
Imagine the money going to VSCode which actually is the one getting contributions
If you're upset, just ask them for the source. If they don't respond, sue.
In any case, we're all going to get the source and we'll all benefit from this.
The source is literally just VSCode with a different label. What benefit does that have?
Not at all, really. Forking is fine and building a business off of it is fine (I don't personally see the value in it but apparently Y Combinator saw fit to invest in this so what do I know). Where they fucked up was replacing the existing free software license with some "AI" generated mumbo jumbo, because they were "too busy building" to "bother with legal."
You didn't have to "bother" with creating a license, because there already was one. No one in free software should be rolling their own custom license (GPT generation aside) because there exist perfectly good ones already.
It doesn't matter what the license chatgpt spat out says. If they forked from a Foss base repo, then all of the code they make will be FOSS too. This is great.
No, they are just in violation of the original license. That doesn't mean they have to comply with it by properly open sourcing the project. Generally it's also OK to just delete everything.
There were plenty of cases where commercial software included open source stuff in a way that violated its license, and the accepted way to fix the license violation was for the software/hardware vendor to stop using the violated project going forward. Usually they don't even have to for example scrub old firmware downloads that improperly included FOSS bits.
The damages causes to the developers are equal to the profits made by the company that took their code and made improvements to it, without sharing it upstream as legally required
OK, cool. Just remember that the only entity who can sue in this situation is Microsoft (because when you contribute code to VS Code, you must sign a CLA that says you give Microsoft full perpetual rights to distribute your code under any license they wish - it is Microsoft who then "graciously" releases your code under a copy left license while also building their proprietary version of VS Code using it).
And Microsoft cannot use the code if it gets released under a copyleft license - that wouldn't allow them to build their proprietary build with it. So the only one who can do anything has less than zero (because it would improve only the FOSS forks, which are meant to be inferior) interest in making these guys publish the source code as proper FOSS.
OK, so it sounds like anger should he directed at Microsoft here, not the dude that forked it
It's not how open source works but how venture funding works which is boggling minds here