What probably happened here is depressingly common in early-stage startups. Someone finds an open source tool that does 80% of what they need, forks it, strips the branding, and then ships it. Nobody thinks about the license because the company is in "move fast" mode and there's no process for it yet.

Sure, the Apache 2.0 allows this, but the mistake is that when someone asked "is this based on SimStudio?" the answer was "we built it ourselves" instead of "yes, it's a fork, here's what we added." It went from a fixable attribution oversight to a credibility problem. You can retroactively add a LICENSE file, but can't take the lie back.

I wonder how much of that is posturing (less charitably, lying to outsiders) and how much is the organization effectively lying to itself.

Both are indictment of today's ambient startup culture, and I'm not sure which is ultimately worse.