OBS and Streamlabs Commit to Long-Term Collaboration | Hacker News Reader

OBS and Streamlabs Commit to Long-Term Collaboration

obsproject.com

258 pointshaunter50 comments

Somewhat tangential to this post but I'm happy that OBS is open source and it's established. It's up there with blender as quality open source tools that are rapidly reaching mainstream acceptance.

OBS isn't "rapidly reaching mainstream acceptance" like Blender is. It has been the industry standard for 10 years already.

It's even used in TikTok's streaming software, which is the highest usage platform on the internet.

Unfortunately it's been used against GPL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103

Agreed. In terms of streaming on Twitch, YouTube, or elsewhere, and even for things like budget live production and screen recording, it has become more or less the standard by which other tools are measured.

What does YouTube use for their go live feature from the browser?

As the project lead for another "significant" open source media app, Ardour, I want to note how incredibly impressed I am by OBS. The program itself and the extent of it being "the standard" for what it does are unmatched, even by Blender. Every time I use it (not daily but weekly-ish) it reminds me how impressive it really is. I'm not deep into the OBS community, but from the outside, it's also impressive how the application is not obviously surrounded by endless wasted rants about its appearance, which is very out of step with contemporary GUI design, yet remains highly functional.

OBS, Blender, Krita and Godot make for quite a powerhouse of a creative suite.

Inkscape.

Linux, too!

Also Ardour and LMMS for audio!

And VLC... and firefox.

Man, we actually have a ton of good software out there I'm now realizing.

Easy to take for granted.

Now if only we could get a solid photo editor. The Glimpse team is trying but they got a ways to go.

- Photopea

- Photoshop CS2 is abandonware, can't activate it anymore, Adobe doesn't care and runs perfectly with Wine. Heck I tried it with Bottles [0] and it's so simple. And much better than GIMP/Glimpse

0, https://usebottles.com/

I didn't know GIMP had been renamed till now, the repo is archived though, is that just because it's a mirror of some email-based-git approach?

https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse

It hasn't been renamed, looks like Glimpse was a fork that's no longer maintained (while GIMP goes on).

As far as I can tell, the only reason for the Glimpse fork to exist is to make the name less 'inoffensive'. All they did was search and replace 'gimp' across the codebase. It certainly is not the continuation of the GIMP project.

The Glimpse project started out as a less offensive fork but was planned to evolve into a rewrite project bringing GIMP level photo-editing to GTK3 but the devs got hit hard by the pandemic and it got put on hold indefinitely.

Hm, the glimpse website bills it mostly as a UI upgrade, though as far as I can tell the UI hasn't actually been updated. Didn't realize they did it due to being up in arms about the GIMP name which seems silly.

The OBS project has accused Streamlabs of copying their name and trademark https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249766

Oof. It's good that they've changed their tune for now, but I wouldn't trust that company as far as I could throw it to not get up to more shenanigans in the future.

I really hope Streamlabs paid a ton of money for this "cooperation", but from the wording, I doubt they did (since otherwise they'd be listed as a sponsor, etc, etc).

Which... I'm not sure why the OBS team would do this. Streamlabs has been acting in bad faith for years. They've done very little work that's applicable to OBS at all, unless OBS wants to rewrite their front end using Chromium. What good does this do the OBS project? Streamlabs gets to look "good", and OBS gets... absolutely nothing?

Streamlabs is owned by Logitech, and Logitech is now a Premier sponsor.

Nice that this issue, which started as a naming dispute IIRC, has been resolved amicably.

Nah, Streamlabs is stealing from other people too

They're villains

They've copied source code from other small indie alert developers I know a guy who showed me proof they copied their code line from line pre-acquisition, bugs included...

source? this isnt true.

"sOuRcE?"

don't call people liars without checking, especially when they're saying "this group did more of the same." it's trivially easy to find examples.

Here's lightstream getting super ripped off:

https://twitter.com/Lightstream/status/1460709404609757185?r...

Here's it happening to Elgato too

https://twitter.com/elgato/status/1460722403261046789

And warpworld

https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/qvzfu8/stre...

Here's where they sign you up to $6/mo subscriptions without your permission or consent

https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/pzgi4o/streamlabs_i...

They're buried in BBB complaints about fraudulent transactions

https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/marketing-so...

“Collaboration” might be from tech side as I do not see any financial “collaboration” https://opencollective.com/obsproject

Streamlab's parent company Logitech is OBS's largest Organization donor and has been donating since May 2019

> since May 2019

Well. Kinda. They gave a "yearly" contribution of $50,000 once in 2019, then never again. Also that was before Logitech bought Streamlabs.

They're a "premier sponsor" on the front page of OBS along with Twitch, Facebook, and Youtube. They're giving far more than $50k/year to earn that spot. The one-time donation in 2019 was likely their smallest.

Seems like they were hedging their bets pre-acquisition of Streamlabs to me.

Did not know that Logitech bought Streamlabs. My comment therefore invalidates.

Source?

That very page in the parent post. 50000$ from Logitech. I would have expected more.

Plus the development time they give internally to the open source project.

Straight on the list of top contributors on the open collective page the GP linked. The source is in the post claiming that there’s no contribution.

Genuine question - is OBS set up so that all contributions show up there? Or is this the equivalent of a Patreon or something, where a large corporation doing large corporate things would instead write a check (or do a wire transfer) completely unrelated to this website?

Not all financial contributions are shown there. There's a Patreon and also private contributions that exceed the Open Collective tiers, they appear in the Premier section on the OBS homepage.

Next stop: TikTok?

Context for those out of the loop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103

Although Streamlabs violated the trademark instead of the GPL, so somewhat different issues.

I only used OBS for the first time recently and was blown away by how stable and feature-rich I was. Truly a great OSS project.

Great news. Post is a bit light on details though. Anyone know what this might mean in practice?

I used both in the past. I wonder if anyone has a TL;DR of the story behind this, because I had never heard of any feud?

Streamlabs was using the name, "OBS" (Streamlabs OBS aka SLOBS) in their fork of OBS and it led a bunch of people to believe that Streamlabs == OBS.

On OBS github, contributors asked SLOBS to stop doing that, and Streamlabs declined.

Streamer community outrage ensued via Twitter. Large exodus of SLOBS users to OBS. Streamlabs publicly apologized a few days later, and renamed Streamlabs OBS to Streamlabs Studio.

There was a few other things that tied in to the anger. It turned out Streamlabs had released a series of products that each exactly mirrored the functionality of other popular projects, including in one case stealing the entire product page (including user reviews) and replacing the product name with the Streamlabs version. Just a long series of exceedingly blatant copying and theft.

wait seriously? I knew they copied OBS but not other products!

>renamed Streamlabs OBS to Streamlabs Studio

Ah that is a good outcome. I pessimistically thought this post was implying that OBS decided to "collaborate" by relenting to huge wads of money and giving up their name. Which would've been a huge shame to open source software. Glad stuff worked out.

They renamed it to Streamlabs Desktop. Streamlabs Studio is a separate (newer) product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249766

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