So you vibe ported manim to rust, kept it closed source, and you’re selling access to it with a monthly subscription? This isn’t satire?
For the use case we have, we needed a fast animation engine. The engine didn’t begin as a port or rewrite of Manim. We originally built it under a different name as a standalone Rust/WebGPU 3D animation engine for real-time AI tutoring. I spent roughly two months building the renderer and animation system from scratch.
Our original engine had a different interface, different defaults and produced different visual results. Only after the engine was already working did we decide to make part of its Python interface compatible with ManimCE. We did that because many users already know the Manim API, and coding models are already familiar with its classes and common animation patterns. We spent substantial time matching ManimCE’s visual behavior as closely as possible. We believe this compatibility layer makes adoption easier; yet the underlying renderer, scene system, and implementation are our own.
So describing this as vibe coding Manim in Rust and then closing the source is inaccurate. The browser editor, rendering, and video downloads are free. You are free to write code, render and download videos as much as you want. The paid features are the AI-powered functionality, which are priced to cover their cost to us.
We respect that some people would prefer it to be open-source, but choosing not to open-source an independently developed engine is different from taking an open-source project and repackaging it as proprietary software.
We never intended to use 3Blue1Brown's name in a negative or misleading way. We simply wanted to communicate that we have made the Manim API created by 3Blue1Brown accessible in the browser with WebGPU, without requiring any installation.
You submitted this with the title “Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU”
Being misleading is exactly what you intended to do.
Your team submitted this with the title “Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU”
If anyone is being misleading, it’s your team.
We already know they took the open-source code, re-implemented it and closed-sourced it into a product and that is permitted under the MIT license:
>> So you vibe ported manim to rust, kept it closed source, and you’re selling access to it with a monthly subscription? This isn’t satire?
This isn't the same as what you would get from something like Markdown [0], which explicitly says:
"Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."
What he must do is to attribute credit of the library to the original author (3Blue1Brown) for the derived use. But other than that, this is permitted.
I'm talking about the submission title, which makes the claim that Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) is running in the browser via WebGPU.
The product at the link is not 3Blue1Brown's animation engine. It is not Manim. They created something different and used Manim's API as a guide.
The submission title claimed it was Manim and 3Blue1Brown's engine. It is not.