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Based on DeepDelve's recent follow-up article, I would assume the former. https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a...

Every layer of the organization tells a more rosy version of the truth up the chain of command. The programmer might tell the PM that they're running Apache software with the serials filed off, but by the time that filters up the chain to the CEO / Board, the product is "fully proprietary and 100% built in-house"

That's fair, and a bit ridiculous considering the license allows them to do what they are doing, minus lacking the attribution. 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.

https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/blob/main/LICENSE

It's possible their spokesperson was not informed about SimStudio being the basis for Delve. Lots of people in sales and marketing do not know little about how open source software works.

I'd be more concerned about a shareholder lawsuit if Delve told their investors that they owned the IP of said platform.

Good thing our legal system doesn't.

It does matter, that's one of the requirements.

Exactly the article brushes over this too, painting it as not abbig deal. But IMO it is a huge deal. Open source licensees have very few terms usually, making the terms that do exist extremely important to satisfy so that a user is in good standing.

This phrase in the article in particular is frustrating:

DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source tools are freely available to be used, if they are properly credited.

Oh because my license terms are more liberal, it doesn't matter as much when you break them?? Really? Bonkers that they would publish that.

Does that blog post have a glowing smiley face with "A BUNCH OF N***ERS" written in on it in pixelated text?

Would think twice about linking that one in polite company.

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.

In reality, GPL is also a cuck license. There is absolutely nothing stopping somebody in India forking your open source game, throwing ads in it, and uploading it to an app store. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing, "outcompeting" your non-product and providing a strictly worse experience to people who don't know they could get it for free / without ads.

It doesn't even really need to be India, it could just as well be stolen by someone in your country. The vast majority of open source developers don't have the time to invest into copyright protection. Trying to actually enforce your license is signing up for a years-long nightmare of wasting your time, energy, and money dealing with the legal system for, in the end, no real value to yourself. If you release something as open source, you pretty much need to be ready to accept that your license is meaningless when it meets contact with reality.

This is all the more true with LLMs existing now, which are freely used to launder copyright licenses. Maybe in the past GPL would've made Microsoft or Google, at least, think twice about using your code, but now their developers will prompt GPT to reimplement your code.

Using the GPL like this doesn't help unless you are willing to sue people. If you can't or won't sue people, all that happens is that the software with the GPL license is avoided by people who want to use it in GPL-incompatible ways but have a conscience, while bad people still take it and use it anyway, and since you're not going to sue them, they don't care that they're violating the license.

How is there no legal problem with violating the license terms, which explicitly require attribution?

You clearly did not read the article. Why post something so confidently when you're not even informed on the topic?

> A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.

The U.S. has always idolized charismatic grifters. Tech revolutionized charisma, by showing that interpersonal charisma isn’t the correct filter: asociability, or perhaps the more familiar amorality, is. The ability of someone to extract and upstream value without engaging in ethics is correctly labeled as more important than being warm and friendly.

The words for this is "regulatory capture" and "deregulation". And yes, its been happening for a long time.

And now that right-wing groups are buying up all the media, we wont be hearing about it for much longer.

You do not get to “just” retroactively fix copyright infringement (which is what this was). Try it with Disney sometimes.

Yeah, I felt like the TechCrunch title was a bit clickbaity ("The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse"), so I opted to write my own title, which I feel helped get this thread on the front page.