alt Hacker NewsHonestly I think this is a really bad look and sour grapes from the OP. Sapling is GPL. You open sourced it. What does “rip off” mean here?
If you think the license was breached and code was copied, that’s one thing.
But claiming ownership over an abstract idea in a project you open sourced seems epistemically confused to me. You don’t get to do that, there is no obligation from anyone to credit what OSS projects they drew inspiration from, as long as they comply with the license.
Having said that it’s nice to give credit to your inspirations, and Anthropic very clearly did:
> Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind
This is just needless drama, nobody at Anthropic did anything wrong here.
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> Sapling is GPL. You open sourced it. What does “rip off” mean here?
Exactly. This is the same type of nonsense nerd drama that happens sometimes between various Linux distro fans.
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There is a distinction between legal obligation and following basic norms. Save for extreme circumstances, there are not laws against being a jerk or being careless. Still people reasonably call on others not to exhibit jerk behavior or carelessness.
"With hard-won lessons of [an encompassing system]" does not give the impression that the underlying data model for changes was directly adopted. Neither does your language of "abstract idea" and "inspiration" adequately reflect the extent of borrowing.
Bonsai appears to have been, well... grafted; and it wouldn't surprise me if "Scion" was suggested by Claude specifically owing to its connotation of grafting. In any event, I imagine Claude was quite pleased with the name. To reiterate grafting in itself is no problem, but it warrants proportionate attribution, certainly so in public communication when relevant to what has been accomplished.
Attribution is a reflection of one's values. Dismissing the requests of others for attribution as "needless drama" is also a reflection of one's values, independent of agreement on facts.