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Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

matijacniacki.com

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Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#11

Post by duskdozer »

zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote: post #6
redfloatplane wrote: post #2

There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure… --- The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai: Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish. The ToS for Viktor.ai include the follow…

Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.

If LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#12

Post by yashasolutions »

Nice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down.

(Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API)

That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI.

Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#13

Post by dsjoerg »

redfloatplane wrote: post #2

There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure… --- The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai: Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish. The ToS for Viktor.ai include the follow…

it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#14

Post by redfloatplane »

dsjoerg wrote: post #13
redfloatplane wrote: post #2

There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure… --- The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai: Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish. The ToS for Viktor.ai include the follow…

it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com

Ah, you're right. Headquartered in Delaware. Oh well. Thanks for spotting!

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#15

Post by popcorncowboy »

Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#16

Post by zggf »

yashasolutions wrote: post #12

Nice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down. (Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API) That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced…

Thanks, I put some effort into the blog. The process might be even more useful and reusable than the code itself for many people.

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#17

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

popcorncowboy wrote: post #15

Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to t…

Doesn't Openclaw already support Slack? https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/slack

(I don't know anything about OpenClaw and on a deeper level, I don't wish to learn about it either considering all the security implications that it generally has)

Re: Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source

#18

Post by vrganj »

redfloatplane wrote: post #10
ralferoo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source. Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy…

It's not completely clear that this is the original source. According to the post it's a reimplementation based on documentation created from the original source, or perhaps from developer documentation and the SDK. Whether that's the same thing from a legal standpoint, I don't really know - I think from a personal morality standpoint it's clear that they are the same thing.

It feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm, technically.
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