What probably happened here is depressingly common in early-stage startups. Someone finds an open source tool that does 80% of what they need, forks it, strips the branding, and then ships it. Nobody thinks about the license because the company is in "move fast" mode and there's no process for it yet.
Sure, the Apache 2.0 allows this, but the mistake is that when someone asked "is this based on SimStudio?" the answer was "we built it ourselves" instead of "yes, it's a fork, here's what we added." It went from a fixable attribution oversight to a credibility problem. You can retroactively add a LICENSE file, but can't take the lie back.
Help me out, I don’t understand the scorched earth perspective. You want to eliminate the playing field even for the people playing fairly, just because there are some bad actors? Would destroying all SaaS actually cause the cheaters to sell used cars & life insurance?
Until AI isn’t trained on all open source code ever written, regardless of license, which I doubt will ever happen, isn’t SaaS-writing AI in some sense building a larger scale & more concentrated version of what you’re hoping to destroy?
Personally, I hope and want everyone selling used cars and life insurance to be honest and upstanding. some of them are.
I hear what you're saying but I still think I'd prefer LLM-orchestrated software (using third-party dependencies) to closed source SaaS made by developers who can't even adhere to software licenses. It's a level of Junior Dev Energy that's unforgivable.
Good luck, you are now a site operator of a non-core business function. I prefer the SaaS but just do some vendor DD.
If you absolutely can't trust any SaaS it is equivalent to you cannot trust any vendor to do anything as they may fuck it up. You can solve that with DD.
The choice I was offering myself there was specifically between a bad developer abusing open source software and something vibed together to replace that specific function that uses the open source app within its licence. The assumption being those are the only two options.
Obviously a false dichotomy for most real life scenarios but the point being that I'd rather do it myself (any which way) than trust a bad developer, doubly so for customer-facing operations.
If there's another provider offering that function, sure, but let's talk rupees.
FYI, used car salesmen > new car salesmen because the affiliated dealers have a monopoly from the manufacturer and laws to prevent competition, whereas used car lots don't have these advantages and have to survive in a much more competitive environment. I know honest used car salesmen and have dealt with them. It's also more about the sales manager than the salesman working the floor, who actually has very little power with respect to pricing and mostly just follows a script and does logistics.
Also, the used car market is much more efficient than the new car market. You are a lot less likely to get ripped off, believe it or not, when you buy used. It is also three times as large as the new car market, with much lower barriers to entry and no manufacturers carving up sales regions and limiting dealer franchises in each region, and penalizing vendors that sell outside their region, e.g. creating little local monopolies. Every used car dealer has to compete with carmax and carvana and hundreds of other used car dealers that have access to the same pool of buyers and sellers. They have to fight for those buyers and sellers. That's a very different situation than the four Toyota dealers in your metro. In fact the reason why Toyota dealers are especially bad in terms of ripping people off is because the Toyota product is so good and you have to go to them to get a new Toyota. But if you want a used Toyota, suddenly have 10x the options, and not one of them has a monopoly from the manufacturer.
Not saying there aren't bad apples in used car sales, but it's a lot harder to survive long term on shady practices than if you are backed by a major manufacturer, have exclusive access to sell their cars, and also exclusive access to do recall and warranty repair. Those types of monopolies can prop up all sorts of bad practices.
I completely agree with all the points made. It is 100% less likely for one to get ripped off buying used cars - mostly because I think you can skip the dealers in this process. The problem is the dealers and their insane markups. Maybe bad salesmanship is just a consequence of that.
My fantasy: After the salesman says (for the 4th time), "Sorry, the manager won't approve that price, but if you could add X hundred dollars, I'm sure I can convince them!", I wait until they are through high-fiving each other and then tell the salesman "Sorry, my trust manager didn't approve that price. I'm sure I can convince him if you lower the price by X hundred dollars".
My reality: I use my bank's car-buying service and pay the bank's negotiated price.
Honestly, I think if anything, we need an app to replace the dealers. Every other problem might evaporate (albeit not completely) if this is addressed. Dealerships are the largest extortionist racket in the car market IMO.
It also reveals how shallow the vetting YC does. This is both on delve and YC initially accepting them. There has been an acceleration of YC companies getting funding and a general decline in quality.
Many companies do not want to deal with open source and want support and custom features. I personally think you’re underestimating the value these companies bring.
The project is Apache licensed, so even if they took it, outside of lacking attribution / retaining copyright, I don't see a problem? They would be require to add it to an "About" tab or something.
The thing that strikes me as odd is how is it that Delve becomes an unicorn superstar (by iself), and the company they steal stuff off of, is much much less of a success story.
It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
I had someone steal my MIT open source software (that I sell for $5) and they are selling it for $11 or more. My software is 8+ years old; they are lying to the customers that they have been developing theirs for years. Very frustrating.
Don' think SoC compliance is as automatable as much as investors hoped to. This mistrust and over trust in AI is based on a technology that Google invented and didn't pay much attention to themselves because they knew it isn't as reliable or that useful to the point where its output is so definitely reliable that it requires zero human input.
The coding agents succeeds because apart from wanna be SaaS indie vibe coders, other serious users of AI agents for coding are themselves pretty strong and competent software engineers that won't let slip things easily and have years of experience and a taste in what is architecturally correct and what is nonsense and when and how to steer in what direction.
Other fields - if they have to review every output of the LLM such as in finance running totals and such to verify the results of an LLM makes their usage not as much useful.
instead of calling this corporate malfeasance lets call it what it for what it really is:
its Bunch of inexperienced people (kids really) stealing stuff from each other. (Not a proper 'Compliance' company) -The CEO is like 22 years old!!! WTF guys you think this guy knows compliance??? lol
Ie in a fast high pressure environment called Y Combinator where the 'adults' are pressuring and hyping each other's products and stealing open source, AI generating and in general trying to productize every crappy idea they can think of to capture some VC or investor who is too dumb to do proper due diligence in the AI gold-rush and hype train
Is it a companies fault for extracting value where you didn't see it earlier or is this an argument about Companies taking permissive-licensed code (MIT/Apache), barely improving it, and selling it?
That's one thing I'm loving about AI adoption and everyone vibe coding, the importance of open-source. When I was learning how to code, it blew my mind when I realized proprietary companies were built on the shoulders of great open-source projects. These provide a nice UI/UX and the marketing, but AI coding is making that less and less of a moat.
Packaging up open source projects and selling them is done all the time is done all the time and is a good business model since you can outsource a lot of the work and bug fixing to people who will do it for free instead of having to pay someone.
176 comments
Sure, the Apache 2.0 allows this, but the mistake is that when someone asked "is this based on SimStudio?" the answer was "we built it ourselves" instead of "yes, it's a fork, here's what we added." It went from a fixable attribution oversight to a credibility problem. You can retroactively add a LICENSE file, but can't take the lie back.
Until AI isn’t trained on all open source code ever written, regardless of license, which I doubt will ever happen, isn’t SaaS-writing AI in some sense building a larger scale & more concentrated version of what you’re hoping to destroy?
Personally, I hope and want everyone selling used cars and life insurance to be honest and upstanding. some of them are.
If you absolutely can't trust any SaaS it is equivalent to you cannot trust any vendor to do anything as they may fuck it up. You can solve that with DD.
Obviously a false dichotomy for most real life scenarios but the point being that I'd rather do it myself (any which way) than trust a bad developer, doubly so for customer-facing operations.
If there's another provider offering that function, sure, but let's talk rupees.
Also, the used car market is much more efficient than the new car market. You are a lot less likely to get ripped off, believe it or not, when you buy used. It is also three times as large as the new car market, with much lower barriers to entry and no manufacturers carving up sales regions and limiting dealer franchises in each region, and penalizing vendors that sell outside their region, e.g. creating little local monopolies. Every used car dealer has to compete with carmax and carvana and hundreds of other used car dealers that have access to the same pool of buyers and sellers. They have to fight for those buyers and sellers. That's a very different situation than the four Toyota dealers in your metro. In fact the reason why Toyota dealers are especially bad in terms of ripping people off is because the Toyota product is so good and you have to go to them to get a new Toyota. But if you want a used Toyota, suddenly have 10x the options, and not one of them has a monopoly from the manufacturer.
Not saying there aren't bad apples in used car sales, but it's a lot harder to survive long term on shady practices than if you are backed by a major manufacturer, have exclusive access to sell their cars, and also exclusive access to do recall and warranty repair. Those types of monopolies can prop up all sorts of bad practices.
My reality: I use my bank's car-buying service and pay the bank's negotiated price.
Both are indictment of today's ambient startup culture, and I'm not sure which is ultimately worse.
The project in question is here:
https://github.com/simstudioai/sim
It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
mine: https://videohubapp.com/
my GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
grifter: https://videocliplibrary.com/
The coding agents succeeds because apart from wanna be SaaS indie vibe coders, other serious users of AI agents for coding are themselves pretty strong and competent software engineers that won't let slip things easily and have years of experience and a taste in what is architecturally correct and what is nonsense and when and how to steer in what direction.
Other fields - if they have to review every output of the LLM such as in finance running totals and such to verify the results of an LLM makes their usage not as much useful.
its Bunch of inexperienced people (kids really) stealing stuff from each other. (Not a proper 'Compliance' company) -The CEO is like 22 years old!!! WTF guys you think this guy knows compliance??? lol
Ie in a fast high pressure environment called Y Combinator where the 'adults' are pressuring and hyping each other's products and stealing open source, AI generating and in general trying to productize every crappy idea they can think of to capture some VC or investor who is too dumb to do proper due diligence in the AI gold-rush and hype train
On top of that engineering is so high pressured and awful these days e.g this video from the kids in silicon valley: https://youtu.be/0tLEszJs7hc?si=OXrJqPg-5PhVGnYT
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609310