A former Coinbase employee has been accused of stealing code and using ChatGPT to illegally change the licensing of another open-source AI coding firm to create PearAI. Matthew Duke Pan, known as “Frying Pan,” claims to have made $270,000 a year working for the crypto exchange before quitting to make PearAI. Last Friday Pan announced the AI firm had secured $500,000 in funding from the startup accelerator program YCombinator (YC).
This caused major upset in the coding community for a few key reasons. Open source development relies on sharing and building upon each other’s work freely while respecting licenses. By taking the entire Continues codebase and only changing the name without meaningful additions, PearAI violated both the purpose of open source and legal aspects around software licensing.
PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.
Changing a license like this is a big deal in the open source world. Not only are there legalities involved in violating a software license, but it defeats the whole purpose of open source, which is about community building, sharing, and contributing. In an apology PearAI’s Pan posted on Monday, he said that the project has now been released under the same Apache open source license as the original project.
