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Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/01/the-reputation-of-troubled-yc-startup-delve-has-gotten-even-worse/
76•nickvec•1h ago

Comments

giancarlostoro•49m ago
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.

The project in question is here:

https://github.com/simstudioai/sim

embedding-shape•45m ago
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•42m ago
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

embedding-shape•36m 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.
swingboy•27m ago
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.
giancarlostoro•15m ago
I don't disagree, but actively lying about it is still a violation of the license.
evanjrowley•11m ago
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.
embedding-shape•9m ago
I'm not sure "Person who answered a question didn't actually know the answer" is such a good defense, almost worse than "We didn't understand the license", because the implications of having such people in your company seems way wider then.
CodingJeebus•5m ago
I'd be more concerned about a shareholder lawsuit if Delve told their investors that they owned the IP of said platform.
wredcoll•45m ago
Sometimes people consider morality instead of legality.
voidfunc•41m ago
Good thing our legal system doesn't.
happytoexplain•40m 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•28m 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.

plant-ian•9m ago
Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.
withinboredom•5m ago
I would say it was a collapse of ethics, not morality. Most people have morals (their own belief system on what is fair), but their morals may not be ethical (rule-based morals to achieve fairness). I personally attribute it to cars and the internet.

The internet removed consequences. You can say the most vile thing imaginable to another human being and… nothing happens. No social cost, no awkward eye contact at the grocery store, no reputation hit in your actual community. Just a dopamine hit and a notification count.

Cars did something sneakier. We spend hours every week sealed in a metal box, alone or with the same people. No random encounters, no friction with people who think differently. Just you, your podcast, and whatever is important in your tiny echo chamber.

Put those two together and you get people with deeply held morals and zero framework for applying them to anyone outside their bubble. Ethics requires seeing strangers as real. We've engineered that out of daily life.

cwmoore•5m ago
Agreed, the ultimate state-monopoly on use of force, right to private property, legislated penalties and remedies, the time and expense of pursuing fairness, in the absence of full moral consideration, or common sense for lack of a better term, is a giveaway to entrenched authority, attorneys or deep-pockets, and not a sensible approach to dynamic real world right and wrong.
mvkel•44m 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.
malcolmgreaves•16m ago
> A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.
PhilipRoman•43m ago
This hilarious meme continues to prove itself correct again and again https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...
giancarlostoro•38m ago
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.

applfanboysbgon•7m ago
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.

Jiro•6m ago
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.
neutronicus•4m ago
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.

axus•36m ago
If you start a business relationship with people who rip-off and cover-up, you're going to have a bad time.
Steve16384•34m ago
But they didn't attribute it. Or does this not really matter?
giancarlostoro•13m ago
It does matter, that's one of the requirements.
dmitrygr•48m ago
The scrubbing of old posts says much
giancarlostoro•47m 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•37m ago
You do not get to “just” retroactively fix copyright infringement (which is what this was). Try it with Disney sometimes.
giancarlostoro•32m 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.
torginus•46m 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•29m 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.

mikert89•19m ago
Basically YC + MIT background is a license to raise infinite capital. So they just needed to check some revenue boxes etc.
chuckadams•26m ago
In the long list of Delve's misdeeds, this is probably the least of them.
charcircuit•24m 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.
SanjayMehta•19m ago
Old news.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609310

nickvec•9m ago
Sorry your thread didn’t gain traction, but this isn’t old news by any means. No need to be salty.

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