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Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.



Unless that code is under the AGPL specifically and the software isn't cloud-based (and the vast majority of start-ups these days are doing SaaS) then there's no license violation there.


What are you talking about? There is not always code copy and pasted from GPL'd code. Giant amounts of open source software is not released under GPL, and automation is moving fast enough that there's a huge amount that's not released under GPL precisely because if it is then people don't use it.


Not every single startup.

It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability


Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir.

I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.


I'm not an engineer, so it's possible there are engineers in my company copying and pasting from stack overflow

Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit

But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial

I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package




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