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Some shady stuff. They seem to have "re-created" the main branch, and force pushed an "Initial Commit" with GPLv3.... https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commits/main/

Maybe they don't know that the history is still there? https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/activity?ref=main

https://web.archive.org/web/20250704222510/https://github.co...

"Fair enough. Since this was our first OSS project, we didn’t realize at first. We’ve now revised it. Thanks for your contribution."

We didn't notice that we copied your codebase, changed the name then pretended to have built it in four days?

Good grief.

Sorry for your story. In those days open source is REALLY HARD. Put your github link here and we will support your project by starring you and spreading your project. You definitely need to fight back.

Even if this was Apache in the first place, you're not supposed to remove Copyright lines in source code.

Is there a way to file lawsuits for such cases? These incidents lead to death of open-source and crush hearts of open-source developers.

We are in a crisis of morals.

There has always been trashy people but since 2020 it feels like a lack of morals is rewarded more than ever.

What a joke. Nearly as many upvotes as tmux-rs in half the time, ~50% more comments, and this is just shy of the front page / twice as far from #1.

Doesn’t seem to match the natural algorithm.

And it has the same fake excuse as usual "Since this was our first OSS project, we didn’t realize at first."

He sure discovered this new open source thing and it's very confusing. It's not like it's almost 40 years old at that point. I'll never understand people who lie like toddlers.

That’s not the only corrupt stuff that yc does. There’s dreamworld.

https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...

I’m sure there’s much more we don’t know about. They just didn’t get caught. Yc used to have this reputation of being one of the good guys but I guess nothing is really immune to corruption.

Isn't this the company/founders whose whole sales pitch is about cheating/deceiving others? I guess I am not that surprised then.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer project.

not the best project but yeah still something

There’s a reason they ask the question about describing a time you “hacked a system to your advantage” in the YC application. They have always selected for founders who are willing to take advantage of legal and ethical gray areas. Reddit created fake users and farmed content from Digg, Airbnb scraped listings from Craigslist.

As OC i would do that giant rewrite and add vulnerabilities - either they do a funny portation rodeo and get zero dayed all day every day, or they are at least cut off from free work.

The author could bring the company to court for license infringement, it's an easy case, they (the original author) could easily bring home some of those sweet sweet YC vc money.

YC should put integrity and ethics of founders as a key variable for funding.

This was of course a calculated move. The founders of Glass are not that stupid. They knew the original author would complain in the loudest way possible and cause a viral outrage, which would give them a ton of eyeballs and exposure.

Engagement hacks, outrage, eyeballs, distribution, attention at all cost. Welcome to tech in 2025.

Is it me, or "founders" are actually FREAKING dumb?

Why people continue to give them money, and praise their "work"?

Instead of making (indirect) ads for them we should publish their name and the company's name into shame publicly, and let their reputation die slowly...

I have no respect for them, and you should not too (if you care about justice).

Here you are OP, a little closer to idiocracy by your own actions and by HN zealots here, and all you SV tech bro wannabes who participate in this day by day ever more fake economy.

Propel and fund into the world the product with sole purpose to pretend, to cheat, to fraud everyone, then to make "open source" version on this, and then to complain that someone stole it from you, to fund and sell even more sophisticated product with sole purpose to pretend, to cheat, to fraud everyone.

This maliciously deliberate hustling behavior, fake it till you make it, feel good, superiority complex, reality distorted, this version of society, a bubble, a community, open source, call it, or wrap it too sell whatever you want it, this all post-post-modern obscenery will be ruin of you all.

Title should be updated to make it clear this is an interview cheating project. It’s quite ironic

If there's not some backstory that explains this, it's actually disgusting.

Not really on topic, but since service of startup is free and it has investment - what is monetization model here?

Is this from the same Soham that is doing the "job stacking" scam to many companies? These people make the tech HR a nightmare for all others and a big reason for the back to office drive

https://www.theverge.com/news/697846/soham-parekh-startups-m...

Maybe they "just vibe coded" it... /s

Is this the Soham?

This being on page 2 with 247 upvotes in the three hour time period this post has been up is surprising to me. I wouldn't be surprised if @dang is suppressing it (but I'd also be happy to hear that it's not being suppressed).

It's pretty spineless for the Pickle team to come out and pretend they mistakenly re-licensed GPL code. Hilarious.

> in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache

How can you write a sentence like that in good faith?

Hi everyone, this is Daniel from the Pickle team. Glass is a new open source project from us that we plan to build on and improve. We built several original features for it like live summaries, real-time STT Transcript and one-click "Ask" from summary that we're very excited about. However in initially building it we included code from a GPL-licensed project that we incorrectly attributed as Apache. This was incorrect and sloppy work on our end. We made a quick fix and are working right now to do a proper fix that addresses the issues fully and cleanly. We are sorry to the original author of the project, Soham (CheatingDaddy), and thank him for pointing this out. We are also sorry to the open source community for messing up here. Thanks everyone for caring about this.

looks like they fixed it: https://github.com/pickle-com/glass/commit/5c462179acface889...

let's not freak out - you can't "steal" open-source code, they used an incompatible license. that was accidentally too free.

people monetizing something you open-source isn't stealing.

The clone now has more stars on GitHub than the original work, CheatingDaddy. What's funny is that in a week, most likely nobody will remember that the code was stolen, thus Pickle will probably be fine with their new, shiny, popular project, which will be featured in GitHub Trends.

It's the same with another Soham, who was moonlighting for years. I would not be surprised if he starts a company soon, given the fame he has gained.

Marketing wins.

One starts to wonder whether the LLM vendors laissez-faire approach to the legality of ingesting copyrighted / licensed material will start to infect the industry in general?

This is the second time in less than a year something similar has happened.

Previously, a different YC company (Pear AI) copied Continue, changed the licenses, and "launched".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707495

I wonder if Pear AI is dead or pivoted, their open source repos have not been updated since May.

From my experience in 10+ tech companies, the biggest difference between bootstrapped and VC financed is, with money you can do illegal things and pay the lawyer.

Not directly related but still.

A couple weeks ago I:

1. forked repository of the Albumentations library (15k stars, 5 Million monthly downloads, MIT license) and called it AlbumentationsX

2. changed the license of the fork to the Dual (restrictive AGPL to be used for free and permissive commercial if you buy license) => it is unlikely that it is legal to use it in your project as noone wants AGPL project in the list of dependencies

3. Arhived albumentations repo ---

People use albumentationsx (I can see pypi download stats + telemetry), but zero licenses were bought.

----

Coming back to the original post - what surprises me that they forked, but did not try to rewrite with LLMs. LLMs may not be that good writing complex functionality, but in rewriting something they are quite good.

In this sense, all open-source licensing is not as useful anymore as rewriting the code so that there is no way to proof the plagiarism is the new reality.

---

Looks like the future is: - closed source code - open source developed by companies that want to use it for lead generation

An app which is build for cheating complains about cheating ...

This situation truly enrages me and is likely the reason (IMO) why talented programmers (today, in 2025 versus, 2008-2013 where small founder startups thrived at places like 500 + YC).

Quite ironic how YC touts technical founders > "non-tech" ones -- when acts such as this strip ones chances of wanting to become one, or even continue showcasing their talent publicly on platforms like GH.

Over the last decade or two, the builder/hacker ethos has seemed to shift towards this grifter, money-over-everything attitude. I’m sure there’s a lot at play (crypto culture, VC self-selection, the attraction of ‘easy’ high salaries), but I’m sure it’ll get markedly worse with ai tooling and the any-publicity-is-good fomo marketing that’s taken over the startup scene.

My take is both OP’s tool and the blatant plagiarism of it are examples.

We actually have a real enterprise application we developed ourselves. We are ramen profitable. Getting a boost from YC would be amazing to take us to the next level.

How does this trash get supported by YC so easily and real stuff doesn’t get a chance?

To a casual outside observer the quality of the companies YC invests in seems to have absolutely cratered. Have they just given up on vetting and switched to a throw money at everything approach?

The thing that disgusts me the most is this:

> Distribution isn’t the moat; velocity is.

Such an arrogant take. When you steal someone else's work it's nothing to brag about.

Guy who builds software to lie and cheat on everything gets his software stolen by a lying and cheating company?

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/oh-no-anyway-gif-19022587

Doesn't this happen all the time with Ultralytics yolo code? They use an AGPL license, which to my understand means that anything that links with this code also becomes AGPL.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is the license also viral if there's a network connection involved? i.e. I run the code in a container with a little network interface added ?

And yet Microsoft have release code with different licenses that make's use of Ultralytics code.

I potentially would be interested in using these wildlife detection models in a commercial (Not open source) context but simply don't trust the claim that it would be okay to do so, sounds like a big business risk to me.

What is the opinion of the community of the MIT licenses associated with PyTorch wildlife from Microsoft okay to use in a closed source commercial context? Microsoft have put an MIT license on this, but their code does imports of ultralytics libraries, which I thought were AGPL.

Note: The GPL 3 license from the official yolov9 differs in this, it must be possible to run the same code on the platform, but your usage may be closed source.

"Since this was our first tax reporting, we didn’t realize at first that we're supposed to declare our income. We’ve now revised it."

I don't know what's worse - the fact that the original project encourages cheating or that someone managed to wrangle funding to cheat the cheaters.

I've had similar happen to me by company out of Paris, France lol. They yoinked the backend out of my OSINTBuddy project which is AGPL licensed then tried to get me to work with them where they were going to sell access without also providing the source code

The classic playbook: copy an open-source project (or just vibe-code something similar), slap an open-source label on it, and toss in an unproven design system / framework (like Liquid Glass) to give it a shiny veneer.

Less about building something meaningful - more about manufacturing hype in hopes of catching a trend before it crashes!

Surely you can’t be too surprised. The market is pushing for move-fast high polish, speed over substance. You can just do things, move fast and break things, etc. Velocity is the moat, indeed.

This is the market YC is breeding. When these guys float to the surface, what did you think would happen?

YC, you’re one of the greatest generators of value ever. Do better.

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal <-- Steve Jobs

I know need to check on my Open source projects :)

Things like this are why I have become disillusioned with Open Source, and why latest projects have been closed source. The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce. If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.

In a general sense, open source theft is bad, obviously. I have trouble feeling bad for this specific case though, given that it is a tool for cheating in interviews and tests.

People begging YC to "do the right thing" don't understand that this is the exact behavior that VCs love and reward.

Hmm... a tool for cheating is stolen and relicensed by another company that specializes in cheating tools. Sort of on brand actually.

These two guys seem like they should get together.

Does YC audit and evaluate the source code of the projects they fund?

VCs invest in marketing resources and skills, not in code. Take Cluely, for example.

I really hope y-combinator does the right thing and kicks them out.

Real life Jian Yang?

Maybe I’m looking at the wrong repos but both appear to be GPL-3 (or maybe it was relicensed back to original GPL-3?)

https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy

https://github.com/pickle-com/glass

Hey I was having an interview the other day, and they had me show my task manager. Is your thing able to bypass that? (just curious)

What’s the context? Elon’s Twitter is really a pain, without using an account you only see the linked tweet, without the replies or anything else.

jeers busted, everyone wins