Douyin overseas version was reported for illegal use of OBS and other source codes

In mid-December, TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin, launched a new desktop streaming software called TikTok Live Studio for testing. This is a live broadcast software that allows users to broadcast real-time images from games and other desktop applications. This move seems to be intended to allow TikTok to break away from mobile devices and get a share of the PC game live broadcast market such as Twitch.

But not long after the software was launched, Twitter user @HunterAP23 broke the news that TikTok Live Studio was suspected of using OBS source code without following the GPL license. The GPLv2 open source license used by OBS is highly contagious: as long as a software product has used the GPL protocol, the software product must also use the GPL protocol and must also be open source. But obviously, TikTok did not open source its live streaming software "TikTok Live Studio".

From the decompiled code of TikTok Live Studio, its installer seems to be similar to the OBS installer by coincidence...

Ben Torel, the developer of OBS's commercial functions, also confirmed this in a post, saying:

A full decompilation of the TikTok streaming app shows that it uses several instances of OBS code in its actual build, such as game capture.

We promise to deal with GPL violations in good faith, and in the case of TikTok/Bytedance, we are happy to have a friendly working relationship with them as long as they comply with the license.

It is worth noting that Ben Torrell's subsequent remarks revealed quite a lot of information: screenshots are not the only functional instance of the TikTok application using OBS code, and there seem to be other functions that also refer to OBS code; in addition, TikTok Live Studio not only uses OBS as a GPL library, but also seems to use other GPL products...

In fact, as a simple, high-performance, and fully-featured streaming software, OBS's source code is used by many forums/applications, but they generally open source the source code of related functions as a branch of OBS on GitHub, and also provide high financial support to OBS. For example, the three major sponsors of OBS are YouTube, Twitch, and FaceBook:

TikTok has deleted the release/download page of TikTok Live Studio and has not responded to this matter. The OBS team is actively contacting TikTok personnel to negotiate matters related to OBS's GPL license.

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Douyin overseas version was reported for illegal use of OBS and other source codes

Article URL: https://www.oschina.net/news/174745/tiktok-streaming-software-plagiarize-obs-source-code