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There’s a reason they ask the question about describing a time you “hacked a system to your advantage” in the YC application. They have always selected for founders who are willing to take advantage of legal and ethical gray areas. Reddit created fake users and farmed content from Digg, Airbnb scraped listings from Craigslist.





There is no "grey area" here, and this isn't "hacking".

There's an argument to be made that, even if it's an open and shut violation, if enforcement is nontrivial and a vanishingly low risk, it still pattern matches as "grey area" in terms of risk.

Not at all in favor of the person stealing someone else's code and slapping a new name on it in violation of the license, just that I think I see why people might list that as matching the same intent as a question like that.


This isn't "hacking the system", though - this is an open-and-shut violation of a license with a strong legal pedigree.

Which could be only resolved by lawsuit that cost money. Startup can just fold and the original creator still needs to pay lawyers.

So with this in mind, that startup is kind of hacking the system.




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