...some latent passive aggressiveness and YC's founder ethics code not YC's own ethics code. You need an anchor for the chain of trust. That must be the VC's (YC in this case) integrity and ethics code first.

You stopped reading after the first few words, misunderstood even those, and rushed to answer didn't you?

I addressed exactly how to evaluate ethics and integrity prefunding, and ensure it post with 2 very simple concepts that would have worked perfectly at least for this easy to catch incident:

1) Do your due diligence. In this case "15 seconds of search" would have turned up the original code and the license mismatch.

2) Have clauses to ensure breaches of law or ethics have severe consequences to the founders.

The founders indisputably breached YC's founder ethics code, in particular "Being honest in the YC application and interview process" and "Generally operating in good faith and behaving in a professional and upstanding way". Or maybe the founders were honest and YC accepted this but then we circle back YC's own ethics code.

YC had means to check for this prefunding, and has means to deal with the problem now. If there's no transparency that any of this happened, it didn't happen. So the point of "checking integrity and ethics" becomes moot.