And that is how you handle things like this. He ponied up and took the hit. More importantly, he gave the back story. After years of reading so many circular psuedo-responsibility posts (by others) trying to squirm out of awkward situations, it's refreshing to see his thoroughness.
> In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier’s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher’s that routed people to “random fields in Mexico”.
Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move. Launching it with the same name as the original repo is just flagrant.
This guy thought he was going to ride this controversy to some free publicity for himself, using other people’s work. He flew too close to the sun and got caught out on every level.
Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy. Profit-driven entities love when smart people publish MIT code that they can feed off of without giving anything back.
Nor is the copycat project prevented from using the name without a trademark. For instance one couldn't repackage Mozilla or Blender under those names:
MIT license does not mean you can copy everything around the software, like the name of the product, and strip the license. There are still requirements in the license for the copyright notice to accompany the software.
> Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy.
How is it a fallacy? The ability to pull in MIT/BSD code into a commercial product without providing the source is an extra freedom over (say) the GPL. The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?
Some folks may not like that extra bit of freedom, and want to put the restriction that you have to (re-)share the code — and that's fine — but it is less free.
Can confirm. I used to hate when people published their code under MIT instead of GPL. But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
> But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
I hope that eventually you gain from society exactly what you’ve given.
I see this sort of opinion on every AI thread and it's funny to me because that's exactly what AI is, and people don't seem to get mad about the general use case of it generating code but when it's asked to post a specific project over to license-wash it, suddenly people get mad, like, that's what AI was doing all along. And to get this out of the way first, maybe you don't use AI, but I'm speaking of general trends on HN.
The LLM is more likely to fix any bugs it finds rather than explicitly reproducing it line by line, which it's actually quite bad at doing anyway, except for small, well-known pieces of code in its training set.
I find that synopsis very hard to believe, seems he's shifting blame onto an LLM instead of taking responsibility for his actions. He said he'd significantly alter the feature set, so why didn't that happen? That's a single prompt to Claude. He more than likely just told the LLM to clone the repo and ship it as is, not actually working on it in any capacity. In that case it wasn't the AI "reproducing" a bug as there was no reproduction in the first place.
The author had fixed the bug. Had he cloned the repo, that bug would have not existed in the ripoff version, which points to the simplest explanation being that it was Claude, as the ripoff author said.
Whether he stole it directly, by doing the 'work', or indirectly via an LLM, stealing it is wrong. If you generate something using an LLM, you have a responsibility to ensure you're not infringing on someone else's work.
This is the right way to handle the situation like that, and kudos to the author for writing the second post.
This is also a reminder that people lie or just hide some part of the story all the time, and we as readers should question every story if it only presents an opinion of one side, and not the other's.
That being said, hearing Apple's own opinion is probably not what we could reasonably expect.
When it comes to Google and Apple's mobile app stores, I generally assume the worst.
I have only published for Android before, and maybe Apple is running its store somewhat better.
Google is shameless. They extort a 15%/30% revenue cut from developers, and they do not hire competent staff.
Pay them $10k, and in case your app is rejected, get an automated email with a link to the TOS.
The appeal process? "Computer says No".
Admittedly I have not encountered this personally, but all reports I have seen paint this picture.
What I did face is when trying to close my Google Play Developer account: they will just not let me do it.
You'd think this would be trivial, but all I received from support were requests I update and bring into compliance a free app removed nearly a decade ago. In order to transfer it to a new account.
Only then will they graciously permit me to close my Google Play Developer account.
I have not that many things in life that I try to live by.
One is that when presented with contradictory evidence, evaluate it honestly and, if you evaluate it to be correct, in full or in part, change your belief freely and without apology.
The other is when you decide you have made a mistake, say so plainly and openly.
They often go together, but not always. I can’t speak to the author’s belief, but I will file this article under Epistles from Gruber to the internet because it is an inspiration to me.
> Note: the original version of this post had a section here about an astronomy app I am working on that began as an astrology app and was rejected after having the astrology content removed. App store [sic] review reached out to me and let me know that they had apparently never been given the updated build and that the app should be fine to submit now.
So did the submitter submit the updated build, but it somehow never made it through Apple's process and thus was never looked at by the app store reviewer? Because that's also a bad look for Apple of "we rejected your app by mistake because we looked at the wrong version, not the new one you submitted".
> Whether Godier ever submitted a build of “Asterly” to the App Store that contained no occult horseshit and only the hard-science astronomy features that were present in his “Dark Hours” website that was available for the last week, I don’t know. But I have no reason to believe that he did.
His original submission was an astrology app. He then stole someone else’s open source repo, reskinned it, and tried to pass it off as his own app.
He is not a trustworthy person. He was trying to manipulate and deceive. I see no reason to point fingers at Apple for this.
He was trying to leverage anti-Apple sentiment for free publicity for himself and he thought nobody would notice that he stole the app and, brazenly, the name “Dark Hours” from someone’s open source project.
His word is worthless. Especially given that Gruber gave him a draft of the publication and he didn't feel the need to correct any details.
Perhaps Claude did just find the repo and reproduce it without any prompt, but also the name? Yea hmm, like 99% sure Claude would've mentioned where the majority of the project came from.
> like 99% sure Claude would've mentioned where the majority of the project came from.
I doubt that. I’ve seen it produce thousands of lines of code or text with like a 2% string distance from something available online and not attribute it. Multiple times.
I suspected this was the case from the very beginning. Some years ago, there was another developer who cried foul and the tech press picked up and ran the story that he was unfairly kicked off the App Store. His entire developer account kicked and banned.
Developers and the press were equally outraged. Yet another reason that App Store was bad. Or so we all thought.
Turns out, after all the bad press for Apple, and with multiple instances where Apple helped to resolve his issue, he quietly admitted online (after weeks of controversy) that he shared his developer account with a relative who was making scam apps and doing bad stuff.
It escalated all the way to the top and Phil Schiller at Apple personally looked at the matter and confirmed that his account was indeed committing scams and bad stuff.
Bogdan Popescu.
For this fake and manufactured controversy, turns out that Terry Godier is a liar and a thief.
Popescu said, "3-4 years ago I helped a relative get started by paying for her Apple’s Developer Program Membership using my credit card. I also handed her test hardware that I no longer needed. From then on those accounts were linked in the eyes of Apple. Once that account was involved with review manipulation, my account was closed."
Popescu also published a recording of a phone call with Apple (which by the way completely destroys your narrative of "quietly admitted online") that proved, among other things, that Apple did not consider Popescu himself to be a scammer. Moreover, Apple later allowed the removed app to return to the App Store: https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-for-ios-back-on-the-app-store
Gruber himself said in a footnote, "If, as Popescu claims the two accounts were run by two different developers, it would explain the extreme discrepancy in quality. The account that committed review fraud was publishing dozens of, well, rather junky looking apps of dubious utility. The other account only published two apps: Dash for Mac and Dash iOS, both of which are of outstanding quality and utility."
As far as I'm aware, Popescu never lied, whereas Godier clearly did.
I doubt it. Did you read until the end where it was discovered that the new web app this person put up was plagiarized from an open source repo? He even used the same name “Dark Hours” as the open source project. The original author called him out on it and identified a unique bug that came from his code.
Why is astrology banned on the app store? If people want to believe in BS let them. Weird to police this but not say, any of the apps related to creationism.
Wait, are we all treating "astrology is banned on app store" as an obvious fact of life? Did I miss some culture war? Are religion-focused apps also banned?
EDIT Thank you all, I'll now go search for something else to be triggered by.
>Regardless of one’s opinion regarding pseudoscience and occultist horseshit — pro, con, or indifferent — one might reasonably think it wrong for Apple to disallow or discourage such apps from the App Store. In fact, there exist plenty of such apps in the App Store, and Apple has even run “Best Astrology Apps” editorial features. Apple’s stance is basically that the App Store has enough of these apps (and I suspect they’re a common source of scams, given that by their very nature they target the gullible). Guideline 4.3(b) states (emphasis added):
>> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
And that is how you handle things like this. He ponied up and took the hit. More importantly, he gave the back story. After years of reading so many circular psuedo-responsibility posts (by others) trying to squirm out of awkward situations, it's refreshing to see his thoroughness.
> In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier’s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher’s that routed people to “random fields in Mexico”.
Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move. Launching it with the same name as the original repo is just flagrant.
This guy thought he was going to ride this controversy to some free publicity for himself, using other people’s work. He flew too close to the sun and got caught out on every level.
> Stealing an open source repo
It's in poor taste for sure but let's not pretend that the chosen license is doing him any favors: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours/blob/813cf85/LICENSE
Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy. Profit-driven entities love when smart people publish MIT code that they can feed off of without giving anything back.
Nor is the copycat project prevented from using the name without a trademark. For instance one couldn't repackage Mozilla or Blender under those names:
- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75558938&caseSearchType=U...
- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85852073&caseSearchType=U...
MIT license does not mean you can copy everything around the software, like the name of the product, and strip the license. There are still requirements in the license for the copyright notice to accompany the software.
> Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy.
How is it a fallacy? The ability to pull in MIT/BSD code into a commercial product without providing the source is an extra freedom over (say) the GPL. The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?
Some folks may not like that extra bit of freedom, and want to put the restriction that you have to (re-)share the code — and that's fine — but it is less free.
Can confirm. I used to hate when people published their code under MIT instead of GPL. But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
> But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.
I hope that eventually you gain from society exactly what you’ve given.
I see this sort of opinion on every AI thread and it's funny to me because that's exactly what AI is, and people don't seem to get mad about the general use case of it generating code but when it's asked to post a specific project over to license-wash it, suddenly people get mad, like, that's what AI was doing all along. And to get this out of the way first, maybe you don't use AI, but I'm speaking of general trends on HN.
They still need to keep the conditions the mit sets though and keep the copyright notice.
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software
Isn’t it MIT-licensed?
That’s not theft. The author explicitly told people he wants them to do this; the company is just taking him up on the offer.
"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
It appears that this essential part of the MIT license was violated.
The MIT license does not allow you to claim that you invented the software when you did not in fact invent the software.
> Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move
Do you think he stole it directly, or an LLM reproduced it complete with existing bugs?
The LLM is more likely to fix any bugs it finds rather than explicitly reproducing it line by line, which it's actually quite bad at doing anyway, except for small, well-known pieces of code in its training set.
I refer you to his mea culpa: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...
I find that synopsis very hard to believe, seems he's shifting blame onto an LLM instead of taking responsibility for his actions. He said he'd significantly alter the feature set, so why didn't that happen? That's a single prompt to Claude. He more than likely just told the LLM to clone the repo and ship it as is, not actually working on it in any capacity. In that case it wasn't the AI "reproducing" a bug as there was no reproduction in the first place.
The author had fixed the bug. Had he cloned the repo, that bug would have not existed in the ripoff version, which points to the simplest explanation being that it was Claude, as the ripoff author said.
Depends when it was cloned, as the article does say the author later fixed the bug, so we are unsure when it was fixed.
I very much doubt an LLM is going to do that without explicitly being prompted to do so.
It is what he claims happened: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...
Curious. My money is on that guy lying again.
If anyone ever had AI copy an entire open source project accidentally, I would be interested to hear it.
Even the widely shared reports about specific snippets being reproduced relied on the user intentionally prompting for it.
Honestly, after being caught lying already, it's hard to believe him.
Whether he stole it directly, by doing the 'work', or indirectly via an LLM, stealing it is wrong. If you generate something using an LLM, you have a responsibility to ensure you're not infringing on someone else's work.
I don’t disagree, and in this case a simple google search would have sufficed, it in the more general case, how?
This is the right way to handle the situation like that, and kudos to the author for writing the second post.
This is also a reminder that people lie or just hide some part of the story all the time, and we as readers should question every story if it only presents an opinion of one side, and not the other's.
That being said, hearing Apple's own opinion is probably not what we could reasonably expect.
When it comes to Google and Apple's mobile app stores, I generally assume the worst.
I have only published for Android before, and maybe Apple is running its store somewhat better.
Google is shameless. They extort a 15%/30% revenue cut from developers, and they do not hire competent staff.
Pay them $10k, and in case your app is rejected, get an automated email with a link to the TOS.
The appeal process? "Computer says No".
Admittedly I have not encountered this personally, but all reports I have seen paint this picture.
What I did face is when trying to close my Google Play Developer account: they will just not let me do it.
You'd think this would be trivial, but all I received from support were requests I update and bring into compliance a free app removed nearly a decade ago. In order to transfer it to a new account.
Only then will they graciously permit me to close my Google Play Developer account.
I have not that many things in life that I try to live by.
One is that when presented with contradictory evidence, evaluate it honestly and, if you evaluate it to be correct, in full or in part, change your belief freely and without apology.
The other is when you decide you have made a mistake, say so plainly and openly.
They often go together, but not always. I can’t speak to the author’s belief, but I will file this article under Epistles from Gruber to the internet because it is an inspiration to me.
Good retraction. The plagiarism part further down in the article shouldn't be missed. The developer has significant character issues.
Discussion of the original blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863
One interesting thing:
> Note: the original version of this post had a section here about an astronomy app I am working on that began as an astrology app and was rejected after having the astrology content removed. App store [sic] review reached out to me and let me know that they had apparently never been given the updated build and that the app should be fine to submit now.
So did the submitter submit the updated build, but it somehow never made it through Apple's process and thus was never looked at by the app store reviewer? Because that's also a bad look for Apple of "we rejected your app by mistake because we looked at the wrong version, not the new one you submitted".
Daring Fireball is doubtful:
> Whether Godier ever submitted a build of “Asterly” to the App Store that contained no occult horseshit and only the hard-science astronomy features that were present in his “Dark Hours” website that was available for the last week, I don’t know. But I have no reason to believe that he did.
His original submission was an astrology app. He then stole someone else’s open source repo, reskinned it, and tried to pass it off as his own app.
He is not a trustworthy person. He was trying to manipulate and deceive. I see no reason to point fingers at Apple for this.
He was trying to leverage anti-Apple sentiment for free publicity for himself and he thought nobody would notice that he stole the app and, brazenly, the name “Dark Hours” from someone’s open source project.
Terry Godier has just published a so-called "Mea Culpa" blaming Claude for cloning the open source app and denying foreknowledge.
There's no mention of or apology for how Godier deceived Gruber and the world about the astronomy/astrology App Store submission/rejection.
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...
His word is worthless. Especially given that Gruber gave him a draft of the publication and he didn't feel the need to correct any details.
Perhaps Claude did just find the repo and reproduce it without any prompt, but also the name? Yea hmm, like 99% sure Claude would've mentioned where the majority of the project came from.
> like 99% sure Claude would've mentioned where the majority of the project came from.
I doubt that. I’ve seen it produce thousands of lines of code or text with like a 2% string distance from something available online and not attribute it. Multiple times.
I suspected this was the case from the very beginning. Some years ago, there was another developer who cried foul and the tech press picked up and ran the story that he was unfairly kicked off the App Store. His entire developer account kicked and banned.
Developers and the press were equally outraged. Yet another reason that App Store was bad. Or so we all thought.
Turns out, after all the bad press for Apple, and with multiple instances where Apple helped to resolve his issue, he quietly admitted online (after weeks of controversy) that he shared his developer account with a relative who was making scam apps and doing bad stuff.
It escalated all the way to the top and Phil Schiller at Apple personally looked at the matter and confirmed that his account was indeed committing scams and bad stuff.
Bogdan Popescu.
For this fake and manufactured controversy, turns out that Terry Godier is a liar and a thief.
> he quietly admitted online
How does one "quietly" admit online?
> he shared his developer account with a relative who was making scam apps and doing bad stuff.
> his account was indeed committing scams and bad stuff.
This is incorrect.
The story was actually covered by Daring Fireball https://daringfireball.net/2016/10/apple_dash_controversy and well as by Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/10/10/apple-and-kapeli-respond/ and others.
Popescu said, "3-4 years ago I helped a relative get started by paying for her Apple’s Developer Program Membership using my credit card. I also handed her test hardware that I no longer needed. From then on those accounts were linked in the eyes of Apple. Once that account was involved with review manipulation, my account was closed."
Popescu also published a recording of a phone call with Apple (which by the way completely destroys your narrative of "quietly admitted online") that proved, among other things, that Apple did not consider Popescu himself to be a scammer. Moreover, Apple later allowed the removed app to return to the App Store: https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-for-ios-back-on-the-app-store
Gruber himself said in a footnote, "If, as Popescu claims the two accounts were run by two different developers, it would explain the extreme discrepancy in quality. The account that committed review fraud was publishing dozens of, well, rather junky looking apps of dubious utility. The other account only published two apps: Dash for Mac and Dash iOS, both of which are of outstanding quality and utility."
As far as I'm aware, Popescu never lied, whereas Godier clearly did.
Anyone who trusts Terry Godier after this is a fool.
This is basically the Bill Clinton move ('is there a relationship' can be parsed differently from 'was there a relationship')...
Is there astrology in this app? No. Was there..? Yes. And the person complaining skipped mentioning that detail about their app
As Wiggy Rockstone, teenage cavegirl and astrology enthusiast, would exclaim in her melifluously operatic voice: "Oh, my stars! Starrific!"
https://flintstones.fandom.com/wiki/Wiggy_Rockstone
I worry there will be another retraction on this post since it seems like a miscommunication occurred rather than having someone outright lie.
I doubt it. Did you read until the end where it was discovered that the new web app this person put up was plagiarized from an open source repo? He even used the same name “Dark Hours” as the open source project. The original author called him out on it and identified a unique bug that came from his code.
This guy appears to be a serial liar.
Be careful — you’re a mark.
Why is astrology banned on the app store? If people want to believe in BS let them. Weird to police this but not say, any of the apps related to creationism.
It’s because the category is saturated, not because of the content.
So I guess browsers category is also satured and we just get to accept?
There are way more astrology apps than browsers. Like the numbers aren’t even close. I would love to live in a world with that much browser choice!!
Wait, are we all treating "astrology is banned on app store" as an obvious fact of life? Did I miss some culture war? Are religion-focused apps also banned?
EDIT Thank you all, I'll now go search for something else to be triggered by.
Footnote in TFA:
>Regardless of one’s opinion regarding pseudoscience and occultist horseshit — pro, con, or indifferent — one might reasonably think it wrong for Apple to disallow or discourage such apps from the App Store. In fact, there exist plenty of such apps in the App Store, and Apple has even run “Best Astrology Apps” editorial features. Apple’s stance is basically that the App Store has enough of these apps (and I suspect they’re a common source of scams, given that by their very nature they target the gullible). Guideline 4.3(b) states (emphasis added):
>> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
The footnote in the article explains why astrology type apps are effectively "banned"
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
See the footnote in TFA