dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
(PearAI co-founder after it was discovered they infringed upon Continue.dev's Apache license) [https://www.indiehackers.com/post/starting-up/the-ai-startup-drama-thats-damaging-y-combinator-s-reputation-GQKuTmpGV2uWOCoxtHBn] (accessed 2024-10-14)
Context of the Quote
To create software, you normally must write a text code called its source code. Because this code is text, it has protections that would traditionally be applied to literary works. In particular, the programmer owns the copyright of the code they have written. Like any other copyrighted work, other authors can't just take a copyrighted work and use it in their own works without permission, i.e. other programmers can't just copy and paste the code to use in their own programs.
To allow for this to be done legally, a license is necessary. In the audiovisual world, such license would be something like Creative Commons. In the programming world, because things are more complicated, there are several such licenses, such as GPL, LGPL, Apache, MIT, etc. The technical details of the differences between these license are literally legal technical details. Programmers aren't lawyers, so they can't read legalese just like a lawyer can't read source code. There is often confusion about the importance of licenses and their differences by programmers who want to make their source code available for use, redistribution, and modification (something called open source software).
Nevertheless, the license is IMPORTANT. This is a legal instrument. Mistakes can get you into legal trouble. It's a hassle, but it's a necessary hassle to have everyone on the same page as what's allowed and what's not regarding the work that you own. In particular, it's widely agreed that it's a TERRIBLE IDEA to write your own license. The "standard" licenses like CC or GPL are written by teams of lawyers aware of the legal technicalities that exist not only in the United States of America, but also in several countries and jurisdictions across the world. These lawyers are much better equipped to create a license than a random programmer would be. These licenses even have different versions, being updated as new legal issues are found. CC has 4 versions (so far). GPL has 3 (but some people don't like the tivoization clause in the 3rd version, so they use GPLv2 instead).
PearAI developed a product based on open source software. More specifically, it was a fork. This means they took all the code that was already written in a project called Continue.dev and copy-pasted it into their own project. By itself, this isn't illegal so long as the copied code is used in a way that the license allows for it to be used. That's the point of the license in the first place. However, in this case, PearAI's co-founder asked ChatGPT, an AI-based text-generation tool, to generate a license for their project, which means it generated some random text that looked like a valid legal license, and the source code of the Continue.dev project was included in their project, which means, effectively, that they had re-licensed the source code they didn't own under their own custom license.
I'm not a a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is illegal. Without abiding by the license, you're infringing upon people's copyright, which is illegal. Aside from that, this whole situation also made a lot of people very angry. Thankfully, the issue was resolved afterwards, and everyone lived happily ever after.
[...] the project has now been released under the same Apache open source license as the original project.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-criticized-after-it-backed-an-ai-startup-that-admits-it-basically-cloned-another-ai-startup/ (accessed 2024-12-09)
Observation: it seems PearAI's license was called "Pear Enterprise License." I'd include it here for reference, but I can't find it even after searching their GitHub repositories with git blame. It might have been permanently removed, which makes sense considering it was legal mistake.
For the record, you CAN relicense something that is open source, so long as you own the copyright of it. Since the code wasn't theirs, they didn't have the legal right to relicense it. Many projects have several contributors, which makes relicensing more complicated, but one-man projects can change license whenever the author of the code wants without issue. There is only one caveat: everyone who copied the code before you changed the license has already been granted a license to use the code they copied, so you can't "un-license" what you already licensed by changing the license. The same thing applies to Creative Commons. Future versions of your publications will have the new license, but past versions will remain licensed in the old version perpetually.