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.
I think the problem is more that they weren't honest about the origins, even if we disregard the point where they themselves break the license terms.
> DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.
If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.
giancarlostoro 19 minutes ago [-]
That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing. People are too illiterate on software licenses. If you're going to use open source software, learn the licenses you're using! I'm pretty sure GitHub literally shows you what you can and cannot do with specific licenses.
Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.
They assume if people knew it was just a fork of an open source tool then they would use the free, open source version instead of paying for the fork.
embedding-shape 14 minutes ago [-]
I barely finished high school and I can understand them, not sure why some find it so hard to, even the license texts themselves are relatively easy to read, understand and reason about, and there is tons of further reading material all over the web, some from actual law-firms that can help you understand how it applies in your country too.
Steve16384 11 minutes ago [-]
But they didn't attribute it. Or does this not really matter?
wredcoll 22 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.
voidfunc 18 minutes ago [-]
Good thing our legal system doesn't.
happytoexplain 17 minutes ago [-]
There is no implication in the parent comment that it should.
The fact that we can't comprehend even talking about anything beyond legality sometimes is just mind-boggling. We are sick.
ozgrakkurt 5 minutes ago [-]
Really feels like there is a moral collapse all around.
Seeing some people’s post about prediction (gambling) markets is another eye opener on this topic.
Also the latest elected government of US is another one.
Not sure if it was always like this or I grew up. But it for sure seems like there is a collapse.
mvkel 21 minutes ago [-]
Yep. While maybe it's "not cool," (I guess, depending on how much work Delve did in their fork, in which case it could be "totally cool"), there is no legal problem with doing this and if someone is "blowing the whistle" about this, they don't really understand open source.
axus 13 minutes ago [-]
If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and cover-up, you're going to have a bad time.
Personally I like GPL for core systems type of software, like an OS. I don't care what license you put desktop applications under, could be MIT, could be proprietary. I make software for a living, open source has a cost. If you want to profit off your open source software and have a competitive advantage against people forking it, you should 100% license it accordingly. I put a lot of thought into my projects before licensing them, I would hope others do as well.
My default is almost always MIT though.
chuckadams 4 minutes ago [-]
In the long list of Delve's misdeeds, this is probably the least of them.
charcircuit 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
torginus 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 6 minutes ago [-]
I think in real life, cheaters win.
Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.
At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.
Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.
dmitrygr 25 minutes ago [-]
The scrubbing of old posts says much
giancarlostoro 24 minutes ago [-]
If they really did, they just need to attribute to the original project, its Apache 2 licensed, not AGPL or something that requires sharing code. I swear Software License Literacy needs to be a require course for all CS students.
dmitrygr 15 minutes ago [-]
You do not get to “just” retroactively fix copyright infringement (which is what this was). Try it with Disney sometimes.
giancarlostoro 10 minutes ago [-]
I'm not a legal expert to be fair, but it would definitely be the bare legal requirement, though them lying about it is probably what will get them in bigger trouble.
Rendered at 16:07:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The project in question is here:
https://github.com/simstudioai/sim
> DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.
If they were upfront about that it was a fork, and attributed it, sounds like there wouldn't have been any issues here at all.
Edit: Yeah they do. There's no excuse for goofing this up.
https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE
The fact that we can't comprehend even talking about anything beyond legality sometimes is just mind-boggling. We are sick.
Seeing some people’s post about prediction (gambling) markets is another eye opener on this topic.
Also the latest elected government of US is another one.
Not sure if it was always like this or I grew up. But it for sure seems like there is a collapse.
My default is almost always MIT though.
It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.
Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.
At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.
Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.