Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

In all honesty it's probably not worth pursuing. It's unethical and if they operate other parts of their business this way one can only hope they eventually implode.

I had a similar experience. I founded a company 3 years ago where we open source the majority of what we do. We entered into a discussion with a well funded (>$40M) "startup" about how they could use our service as a whitelabeled SaaS offering to their customers.

After a few promising exchanges including a Skype call with their Founder and VP of Engineering they stopped returning all of my attempts to see what the next steps should be. Turns out the reason was because they forked a private repository of the work we did - web, iOS and Android.

We found out they're using our code because they didn't even bother taking out our Crashalytics code and we started to get a bunch of pings. To this day their iOS app still uses our "yellow" color for toggle buttons.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dcpbbnbltm2bmq6/Photo%20Mar%2026%2...

They didn't violate any terms of our license (MIT) but I lost some faith in humanity because of what they did :).

--

My company is Trovebox - code @ https://github.com/photo

I don't get it, this isn't similar at all. Why did you lose faith in humanity because they did exactly what you told them they could do?

> our license (MIT)

Why did you MIT your code if you didn't want this to happen?

GPL exists for the exact reason you're bringing up here.

Sorry I don't mean this to be negative in anyway, I just don't get the thought pattern here.

Disclaimer: fan of bsd/mit/asl style licenses, feel gpl is better suited for things which need protection from the big players and enforce participation.

While I can understand your pain I feel it is a necessary pain for the greater good to have unrestrictive open source. (companies can always donate/contribute in other ways after the fact etc)

It is similar because of how it happened. There are lots of people using the code for various reasons and many of them participate in the community or contribute patches.

No one else that I know of has engaged in a conversation and then refused to reply to any further correspondence while at the same time asking questions to the community under pseudonyms.

Like the OP what the other company did was probably legal. That doesn't make something okay or right. Likewise (as I admitted) this other company didn't break any laws. But that wasn't the point.

You know what would have been okay? If they said, "look, we have some engineers that are going to have a go with the code - let's keep in touch" or "we are going to fork the code but will submit patches back". That is the spirit of the MIT license. Be civil.

Hope that doesn't come off as negative either :).

Yup. Consider it a cheap lesson in trust and that their reputations are blown. It's a small valley and word will get around.

Sorry to hear. Seems like they were fishing to see what else they could get from you that wasn't already open-sourced. When they found that the open source code was enough, they dumped you.

As this changed your mind about open sourcing the code or how you open source code now?

> As this changed your mind about open sourcing the code or how you open source code now?

That question deserves an entire blog post.

Ultimately, no. But along the way it's made me much more cautious. Their use of our code didn't impact our business at all. It's mainly principle - they used our code and didn't contribute back any work they did.

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