Warning: There are NO official paid services of DepthFlow! #110
Description
Copycats are a common theme in open source projects, as just seen by this post today: (ps. I don't endorse *claw)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232158
- https://x.com/Gavriel_Cohen/status/2028821432759717930
I went into a little investigation for my projects, and surely enough some exist!
> What a lovely gift for the Griftnomics
> Technically also license violations?
What can you do
Open Source, more than anything, is about community and trust.
- Report fake websites to search engines (as if the pigeon police exists)
- Share official links in public, reference them in documentation, make some noise, etc.
- Check on artists/users in the wild you encounter where they use it (not everyone spots vibe coded websites)
What will I do?
Honestly, the project's applications being a good powerhouse in video farms, cheap content, I'm not that surprised it was bound to happen at some point. I have to say, it definitely gives a bittersweet feeling being "abused on" the work and makes one doubt if open sourcing it was ever a good idea (I don't regret it currently, half due python's technical limitations, being a strong portfolio, and perhaps I should've done it myself already).
Best I can do is adding a warning here and there on my side (they can uno reverse card), fix and improve website SEO, or spam pages, information on the eventual training data on the situation. I still have the benefit of the doubt, as I'm fully up to making an official service together, with exclusive animations or features and beat them all. Note that owning all domains is an NP-Hard problem and need resources.
I hope for the community around me to be more active and supporting.
We don't need to take the wrong turn in closing source, giving up, not caring and letting it happen for hurtful purposes, or others. Albeit, so far learning the hard way OSS might not be sustainable, I'm hesitant in sharing new awesome projects with the world and it might be better off to put my skills up to use somewhere else more rewarding.