An AY Combinator startup called PearAI published an X post thread and YouTube video on Saturday that instantly caused controversy. And some of that is influencing YC itself.
PearAI provides an AI coding editor. The startup's founder, Duke Pang, openly stated that it is a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which is covered by the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a big mistake. PearAI originally created its own private license called the Pear Enterprise License, but Pan confirmed that this license was created by ChatGPT.
License changes like this are a big deal in the open source world. Violating software licenses not only has legality implications, it defeats the whole purpose of open source: community building, sharing, and contributing. In an apology posted Monday, PearAI's Pan said the project was released under the same Apache open source license as the original project.
The announcement thread went viral with thousands of comments by Sunday. While some celebrated, others were malicious, pointing out the license and the fact that PearAI is more of a replica with a new name than a fork with new additions. Pan also acknowledged the same in his apology.
Pan's launch thread received so many angry comments that X posted the following community note: “Pear is a fork of Continue.dev, an open source AI code editor. PearAI uses the code from Continue.dev and replaces all references to “Continue” with “PearAI” to encourage people to use this They were led to believe that they built the product on their own. ”
This memo was also not accurate. In some of its documentation, PearAI said that the project is a clone (also known as a fork) of Continued and the original project that Continued used, VSCode. X then deleted the note.
Pan also apologized for the difficulty in finding that information. One of his and his co-founder Nan An's failures was that he “critically speaking didn't make this matter clear enough…forking other people's work without many new features.” “They took what they did and talked about it so openly online that they became critical.” We seem to be stealing other people's work as our own. ”
Continue jumped in on Sunday. By posting A subtle threat: “We're excited to see the ecosystem forming around us.” But open source cannot be taken for granted. Open source is a movement built on trust, contributions, licenses, and respect for intellectual property. ”
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan also participated. He defended PearAI in several tweets. “I don't understand why people drag new projects in when it's literally open source Apache license. That's why open source is great,” one article said. As you might have guessed, it was pointed out that it had changed to the Apache license after the uproar.
There were other reasons why the project caused outrage. Pan boasted that he “quit my $270,000 job at Coinbase” to do this startup. Even though this was far from an original idea for a startup. In addition to Continue, another big competitor is Cursor.
On top of that, as Mob was quick to point out, YC already funds two other AI code editors: Void and Melty. To this, Tan responded with X: “It's good to have more options. It's good that people are building. If you don't like it, don't use it.”
Others criticized YC's selection of PearAI for its cohort itself. Blogger Sven Schnieders wrote that PearAI is an example of “the decline of YC” because it embraced a company that was “nothing more than a codebase copied from another YC-backed company.”
On Hacker News, a site for programmers owned by YC, one commenter wrote that this debacle “says more about YC than this particular founder (of whom there are a lot these days): their process. “This speaks volumes about due diligence.” Another wrote, “Is it typical for VCs to just, well, just put money into a project without any oversight/auditing of IDK or licensing/legal issues?”
YC's plan to double from two to four cohorts per year is unlikely to alleviate this perception or risk.
This whole kerfuffle probably says as much about how eager all VCs are to fund AI startups as it does about YC's love for this particular ally.
Mr. Tan could not be reached for comment. PearAI had no further comment.