TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#191

Post by addingnumbers » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

dodgepong wrote: post #143

addingnumbers wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are misunderstanding this and claiming it's not problematic because the tweet in the HN link is idiocy. They show one URL in one installer script with an obsproject.com domain and conclude, from the presence of that URL alone, that the entire project is a whole cloth copy of OBS. That URL is nothing but a 302 redirect to the directx runtime at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Download/confirmation.aspx?i... The…

Again, to be clear, we've decompiled the TikTok LIVE Studio binary and confirmed that it uses code derived from OBS Studio.

If the link took us to evidence of that it would be great. Instead the link takes us to misinformation from a rage-monger who clearly has no understanding of what they are looking at.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#192

Post by Xylakant » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

telesilla wrote: post #178

azeirah wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice if the contributors could get some money for it

The result would be hundreds of OBS closed source clones that do not contribute back to the project. It would be a disaster.

As long as they all pay a reasonable license fee, I don’t see a disaster. The OBS project could then pay developers to build open source features that benefit all. A lot of the forks would likely contain features that are not if interest to other users anyways.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#193

Post by Sebb767 » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

mysterydip wrote: post #132

addingnumbers wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are misunderstanding this and claiming it's not problematic because the tweet in the HN link is idiocy. They show one URL in one installer script with an obsproject.com domain and conclude, from the presence of that URL alone, that the entire project is a whole cloth copy of OBS. That URL is nothing but a 302 redirect to the directx runtime at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Download/confirmation.aspx?i... The…

Why would a company the size of tiktok want to depend on some open source project maintaining a URL? Would they be liable if it instead redirected to malware?

Possibly. But most likely there was a bug "crashing when DirectX is not installed" and some developer hacked a silent install for DirectX in without thinking too much.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#194

Post by gus_massa » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #187

oliwarner wrote: post #70

It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need to add attribution".

There are subtleties not captured by this quick overview which are not fully understood by (in my experience) the vast majority of programmers: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ If your project is going to be "real" (e.g., not some personal throwaway), you really need a lawyer if you are including anything other than MIT. Even Apache can be problematic when it comes to patenting.

What about BSD?

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#195

Post by oliwarner » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #108

oliwarner wrote: post #70

It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need to add attribution".

It might not be like this everywhere, but in the US all software engineers are self-labelled. It's not like medical doctor (MD) or professional engineer (PE) where the title actually implies some license to practice.

But you can be considered a software engineer by your peers, usually demonstrated through qualification and professional experience.

The differentiation I was trying to draw with those two words is: I don't know if they're actually working software developers or people who just hack on code in their free time. If they're professional devs, that's obviously much worse.

Honestly, not the part of that I was expecting to have to discuss.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#196

Post by fortuna86 » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

pphysch wrote: post #155

criddell wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ByteDance is partially controlled by the government so I don't think your Google analogy is a good one. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/beijing-t... https://qz.com/1788836/targeting-tiktoks-privacy-alone-misse...

Quoted post unavailable.

Yes.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#197

Post by Vinnl » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

kaetemi wrote: post #82

SergeAx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to buy oneself out of GPL license? I beleive there's not.

Yea. Pay someone to write it from scratch. Basically, it's practically (not ethically) fair game to use GPL in commercial software, until someone catches you. The only repercussion that the license provides is that your license is revoked until you resolve the violation (for the first violation). Meanwhile, you got to release your product, and by the time you got caught you've had enough time to implement it yourself…

The authors of the software can create an additional licence that they could buy. Of course, that gets more difficult if there are many different, hard-to-contact authors.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#198

Post by sp332 » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #175

andrew_ wrote: post #38

I'd like to see HN shy away from posting twitter threads as news. There's almost always a hard link to the source material, and twitter threads are filled with emotional, truncated, nuance-lacking, trite clips that more often than not do little to promote healthy discussion of a topic. The goal of quality here really is noble.

Hacker News has a "post the original source" rule. In this case, Twitter is the original source. One of my most recent grievances is with HN is the ranking penalty of Twitter submissions as that has been the primary source of news lately, for better or for worse.

Twitter is not the original source. The first image in the tweet is of an earlier post.

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#199

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

soheil wrote: post #189

How do we make sure people invoking China-stealing-intellectual-property-yet-again don’t pile on this thread? If this is a case of a company wrongfully using IP we need to very much have a discussion about that topic alone.

[deleted]

Re: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

#200

Post by dognotdog » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #168

mmcgaha wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been many years since After The Gold Rush was published and we are no closer today than we were then. At some point software engineering will be a real profession but I doubt anyone will take action before some huge catastrophe pushes the issue.

I think you are right and it's too bad. There are some fields that should have it. For example, the software for self-driving cars should be signed off by a licensed engineer before it is allowed to go live. Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?

One can verify and sign off on computations that approximate the physics or chemistry that will occur in a structure or machine, as a well established chain of procedures exist to go from crude formulaic approximations to micro or, if necessary, nano-scale simulations of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes, and we know what to look for.

I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems that all possible forms of process can be subverted and cargo-culted, from agile methods down to code checking. Certainly there is room to remedy some shortcomings, but SWE definitely is the engineering discipline least based in physical fact.

The physics behind simulating the buckling of a structure is always the same, we can just choose more or less crude approximations of it, but SWE in general seems a lot more diverse. I can implement that simulation in assembly or some scripting language, and attach various bits and pieces to it to manage users and data; deploy it across the cloud if need be. But, there isn't a singular, time-invariant optimal path to achieving that, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. One can work off basic principles, like the Agile Manifesto, but how can you quantify or even certify this shifting landscape?