Blog - David Helkowski
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Regarding Garry Tan, YCombinator, and Corruption

A few weeks ago I saw an article on Hacker News new with an entire 2 upvotes that piqued my interest. It was a link to this website. It's a detailed article about how Naive ( usenaive ) is just a commercialized copy of Paperclip ( GitHub - Paperclip ), and is fully breaking the MIT license of Paperclip and hiding that they are essentially just stealing Paperclip.

This article, by my eye, looks well written and undeniable. Yet... the Hacker News post just quietly died with no attention. I posted about it on my LinkedIn. I do not, though, have many followers. Till this moment, nearly a week later, my post got all of 160 impressions.

Durign that time, yet another fucking company has risen in news attention for basically the same shit. Delve. Like how Naive is Paperclip, Delve is SimStudio.

Here is a listing of articles about Delve:

Delve spun up a smoke machine and published this garbage in response. Zero acknowledgement of the license violations.

It got enough attention Garry Tan has been reported as saying "We have asked Delve to leave YC. YC is a community, not just an accelerator. The founders in our community have to trust each other, and we have to trust them. When that trust breaks down, there’s really only one thing to do."

Let's consider. Either Garry knows about Naive doing the same bs with Paperclip, or he doesn't.

If he doesn't know? That's embarassing and shameful.

If he does know? Even worse.

I suspect he does know and is hoping it doesn't reach the level of attention that Delve has gotten for doing it.

This is a major problem and says to me that investors and leaders of YCombinator are incompetant at best, and at worse encouraging this sort of illegal behavior somehow. I don't think it is coincidence that this sort of open source abuse keeps happening.

Let's take a step back from the licensing drama, hacks ( Delve says they were hacked ), denials, etc, and consider something deeper.

Is YCombinator encouraging startups going through their batches to monetize open source software? This is purely speculation on my part but would be VERY interesting if it is the case. YC could be telling startups that commercializing open source is a great strategy. There is nothing illegal about doing that if you meet the license terms.

Consider. What is YC is encouraging startups to do this, and advising them to just meet the license terms but to otherwise keep quiet about how their commercial offerings are actually just a thin veneer on top of free software. If that were so ( and keep in mind it is speculation ), then that would be an explanation for why there are multiple YC companies doing this sort of thing.

Even supposing YC isn't encouraging that sort of thing, I don't think they are going to discourage it either, because it is a common business practice.

NotOnKetamine mentioned these YC startups doing this:

That's four different YC startups doing this so far. All four in a non-compliant way ( at least initially )

So I will leave you with this: How many other YC companies are just thin wrappers around free open source?