TikTok is a hugely popular video-sharing service and has recently released a new desktop application, known as Live Studio. However, shortly after the launch the company was accused of using code from OBS Studio without adhering to the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 licence that OBS, an open source program for streaming, uses when making its code available to use.
Following TikTok’s launch of Live Studio, an incendiary tweet was posted on Twitter by @Naackers (see https://bit.ly/lxf286tweet). They claimed that the new program was “a fork of @OBSProject,” and accused TikTok of stealing from OBS, which is an open source project whose source code is available under the GPL V2 licence. While TikTok would have been free to use the code, it would also need to publish the source code of its own program to comply with the licence – something it hasn’t done.