@markosaric how do you deal with them except for releasing feature first / having better support?
@markosaric interesting. Maybe we should make and popularise tineye service where you upload a bit of code and it finds where it likely originated from?.. I can probably write something like this reasonably quickly after I'm done with #doauth prototype.
It would also help to detect #shitcoins and *Cough-cough-*nese software forks (like ones that #erlyvideo suffered from). I may or may not have had an experience being contracted by a #shitcoin #copycat company which ended up with my team saying "it's a poor copy of an old Ethereum version, we can't do anything because it is unclear what is the project".
@jonn could be interesting if it scans the web and sends a notification when it finds something. i discover these copycats mostly as they try to promote themselves to people that talk about Plausible etc
@markosaric yeah, it's actually a pretty sweet way to #resellcloud right there. Subscribe to the scraper, get notifications, authors of code / deployers and maintainers of the system get some margin for maintenance.
@jonn @markosaric all business have competition. You open the first pizza place in town and soon there are 100 more. They just capture their customers with some flyers
Start a food shop, same. A one man business as a painter, same. Want to grow you pizza place? Start a chain by buying one of the others
In my opinion there's easily room in Europe for 100 analytic companies being alternatives to Google
A pizza place is not a copycat, they just sell the same thing
@JohanEmpa @markosaric in this case they *clearly* resell OSIP, likely poorly deployed, which--in your slightly fallacious analogy--would be an equivalent of reselling old pizza dough following exact same recipe, cooked in a cheap oven in a shed that was never visited by a food safety inspector.
But I would like to break the discourse free from "you wouldn't download a car" or "you would download a car" modality. We're dealing with completely different things here that don't quite translate well to "real" businesses.
@jonn @markosaric
I only saw the image, what's OSIP? If it's open source it's open source and if it's proprietary it might be stolen. In my example I assumed legal competition.
Take LinkedIn, immediately a competitor started Xing. Facebook had like 100 competitors doing the same thing before Facebook - but they marketed and PRd the shit out of it and became a monopoly. Lunarstorm was big in Sweden before Facebook killed it. Even now there's vkontakte and others.
@JohanEmpa @jonn this is not about competition. if they can do stuff better than us and get everyone to remove GA, then that's perfect and i welcome it. this is about them stealing our code, our product, our words... it happens very often and i assume it's because we're very transparent in what we do and what results we've achieved. not sure how much this copycat is an issue for proprietary companies
@markosaric @jonn yeah I don't like code and IP thieves😠
But one thing, are they really stealing your code? 🤔
Your code is agplv3 so they are allowed to use it? No? Yes, that would be allowed. Even commercially.
But text and images are copyright, so that's theft if they straight up copy it.
@JohanEmpa @jonn if they keep it agpl and open source what they do, i wouldn't mention them. again i'm not against competition or people using the licences the way they are intended. i'm against those that don't. but also i'm not too bothered to actually start some action against them. just having a bit of fun in social
"If it's open source it's open source", that's not how licenses and IP work, at least according to my lawyers.
I'm just yeeting everything under WTFPL to separate brand and code and also to make sure that it's a PITA for big corporate to use anything I make (in the most ironic fashion possible).
@jonn @markosaric
I meant if it's open source it's allowed to do exactly what the licence say. Proprietary protects against that
Plausible was MIT before if I remember correct and then companies could legally copy the code and do pretty much whatever. Now it's aGPLv3 and that allow commercial use of the code as long as they follow the rule of the licence
Unless I'm missing something in the particular case, Plausible's license allow competitors to use their code
@JohanEmpa @jonn as long as they also open source their own code with AGPL, not otherwise
@robby @jonn yes. It wasn't clear from the screenshot if this "copycat" was breaking the license. I since learned that they did.
Marko spoke about copycats, but the licence allow copying the code. A way to protect against that would of course be full old school proprietary.
A company that gives away open source code can't be whining when competitors use that code (according to the licence)
But there seems to be companies doing it intentionally wrong.
@jonn @markosaric so in my opinion there is no need to deal with competition. (assuming they won't steal your IP, code etc)
Just build the product, market and sell in your chosen way. Do your own thing and focus on building your business. Set your own strategy.
But of course some businesses strive for maximum growth to win the market and become a monopoly (see Big Tech) it's not necessarily good, but anyone can try it if they want.
@JohanEmpa @markosaric in this particular case, they clearly do. I'm pro-competition, of course, with all the fine print imposed by capitalism, such as degrading qos as a function of success.
@jonn there's nothing you can do really. perhaps if one becomes a serious competitor we can go after them with the AGPL but otherwise i just ignore them other than a bit of fun on social. there's more important stuff to do. and there's way too many copycats because we're transparent about our success/open source. doubt many of them will survive past the domain name expiration date. i just hope they don't trick too many people into signing up doing this stuff