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Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
- redfloatplane 6mo agoThere are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure… --- The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai: Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish. The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages: > 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law. 18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country. 8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.
- codetiger 6mo agoThere are also new jobs emerging to safeguard a companies assets that were created by AI. New white hat hacking opportunities. Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.
- ralferoo 6mo agoIt's also disingenuous to call it open source as that might tempt others to use it believing that it actually is open source. Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.
- redfloatplane 6mo agoIt's not completely clear that this is the original source. According to the post it's a reimplementation based on documentation created from the original source, or perhaps from developer documentation and the SDK. Whether that's the same thing from a legal standpoint, I don't really know - I think from a personal morality standpoint it's clear that they are the same thing.
- vrganj 6mo agoIt feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm, technically.
- cycomanic 6mo agoWell first they need to proof that Viktor was actually copyrightable. If it was largely written by an llm, that might not be the case? AFAIK several rulings have stated that AI generated code can not be copyrighted.
- metalcrow 6mo agoThis is a common misreading of the law. AI cannot hold authorship of code, but no ruling has claimed so far that ai output itself can't be copyrighted (that I know of)
- ralferoo 6mo agoThis would suggest that there has been and that there seem little will to revisit it: https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-... That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code." So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.
- zggf 6mo agoI could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?
- redfloatplane 6mo agoYou could certainly do that in private but that doesn't mean it's not 'without legal concerns'. But, not shouting about it and not creating a repo called 'openviktor' would probably be a safer bet. I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty overwhelming and a sort of legal bankruptcy will be declared at some point in one direction or another (as in, allowing this to happen or making it extremely easy to bring judgement and punishment, similar to spam laws). However, I would not want to be the first to find out, especially in Europe.
- skeledrew 6mo agoThey have to let it happen. There's no stopping the tide here.
- MartiCarmona 6mo agoSomeone tell every startup in YC they are criminals
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo agoTerms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.
- redfloatplane 6mo agoI think it comes down to the company's appetite for legal action, doesn't it? This case is imo pretty clear but the vibe has quite the smell of Oracle v Google to me. But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.
- duskdozer 6mo agoIf LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.
- bigbadfeline 6mo agoI'm not sure why people are clinging to some fuzzy and stretched out notion of copyright and the GPL in a particular. LLM's do NOT just copy code, with the right prompting, they generate entirely new code which can produce the same results as already existing code - GPLed or not. If copyright is extended to cover such cases we'll have to become all lawyers and do nothing but sue each other because the fuzziness of it will make it impossible to reject any case, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant.
- singpolyma3 6mo agoAnd if that's true it's also true in this case where there was no GPL involved
- kennywinker 6mo ago
- dsjoerg 6mo agoit's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com
- redfloatplane 6mo agoAh, you're right. Headquartered in Delaware. Oh well. Thanks for spotting!
- yashasolutions 6mo agoNice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down. (Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API) That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI. Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process
- zggf 6mo agoThanks, I put some effort into the blog. The process might be even more useful and reusable than the code itself for many people.
- swordsith 6mo agowas a very interesting approach to web stack RE, I appreciated it. Good luck.
- openviktorpls 6mo agodid you end up grabbing a local copy? I'd love to check it out but the repo seems to be down now. Would appreciate it if you could share: openviktor@proton.me thanks
- popcorncowboy 6mo agoEvery part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo agoDoesn't Openclaw already support Slack? https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/slack https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/slack (I don't know anything about OpenClaw and on a deeper level, I don't wish to learn about it either considering all the security implications that it generally has)
- krzkaczor 6mo agoI don't get it, what OP actually reverse engineered? OpenClaw itself? Of did Viktor team created their own OpenClaw like agent?
- zggf 6mo agoExactly, the team designed their own agent architecture tailored to slack and enterprise setting, that is not based on any popular agent architecture like OpenClaw, NanoClaw, IronClaw or any others that I checked against.
- john_strinlai 6mo ago>MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc >TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD would anyone please be so kind to translate these parts of this comment into something a 45+ year old would understand?
- gwking 6mo agoFrom one “old guy” to another: PJ = private jet Diamond hands and to the moon are crypto trader slang Makes me laugh answering this question, because the meaning is all there if you skip over all the meme words.
- cubefox 6mo agoSeems unethical.
- kklisura 6mo agoI find it fascinating that this is just some _plumbing_ around some LLM - sold as a product and "AI coworker". They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
- xnx 6mo agoThin wrappers over an LLM has been an extremely popular grift for the past few years.
- PurpleRamen 6mo agoWrapping other companies services is a popular business since decades. Technically, this even predates software. The more fascinating part is, that this became semi-automated with LLMs, and how thin the wrapping now is.
- dsjoerg 6mo ago"just" is doing a lot of work there. There's a stack, and everyone is fighting and racing to figure out which parts of the stack are commodities and which have protectable IP. For example, years ago someone might have said: "Software programs are "just" some instructions on top of a computer, which does the actual computing work. The software companies don't own the computer. The next version of the computer might not even be capable of running the software." And for some kinds of software, they'd be right. Some programs turned out to be more replaceable than others. I assume the GetViktor folks are hoping that some combination of know-how and learnings from real customer interactions and data will help them build or find a sustainable competitive advantage in some niche. > They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised. This is true but a small risk IMO. Worst case they can shift to open-weight LLMs for inference. I would bet on LLMs being an increasingly commodity part of the stack.
- klustregrif 6mo agoIgnorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.
- croes 6mo agoIs the name Victor trademarkable?
- klustregrif 6mo agoIs office? There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.
- pessimizer 6mo agoYes, there's no way that somebody could have a product called OpenOffice that is literally an Open Source version of Office. Impossible. The legal purpose of trademarks is to serve the same purpose as a signature: in order that one company cannot do business pretending to be another company without showing a clear intention to defraud - an intention made clear by the attempt to fake a signature, or imitate a mark. It is not to own words or sounds. It is a mark that you trade under. This is a product that is openly hostile to the other product, and is adding a well-established prefix to indicate the reason for that hostility.
- layer8 6mo agoSure it is: https://uspto.report/TM/78326416/ https://uspto.report/TM/78326416/ https://uspto.report/TM/74713937/ https://uspto.report/TM/74713937/ https://uspto.report/TM/74619284/ https://uspto.report/TM/74619284/ https://uspto.report/TM/87438245/ https://uspto.report/TM/87438245/ https://uspto.report/TM/77936273/ https://uspto.report/TM/77936273/ https://uspto.report/TM/86747705/ https://uspto.report/TM/86747705/ https://uspto.report/TM/78638776/ https://uspto.report/TM/78638776/ https://uspto.report/TM/73359604/ https://uspto.report/TM/73359604/ https://uspto.report/TM/98066821/ https://uspto.report/TM/98066821/ https://uspto.report/TM/97979922/ https://uspto.report/TM/97979922/ …and many more.
- vixalien 6mo agoHow did you make the image at https://github.com/zggf-zggf/openviktor/blob/main/docs/assets/banner.jpg https://github.com/zggf-zggf/openviktor/blob/main/docs/asset...?
- hmokiguess 6mo agoA lot of folks talking about the legality basis of this approach, I think the focus should be more around the true moat behind these hype growth hack companies out there. This sort of exposure is good, in my opinion it enables competition to emerge with true business moat rather than just "do it first, do it fast, worry last" type of thing we're seeing.
- hirako2000 6mo agoSoon renamed OpenViktawer, then MoltVik.
- petterroea 6mo agoIs this reverse-engineering or "just" data exfiltration
- zggf 6mo agoReverse engineering means understanding how a system works internally. So it is reverse engineering of a kind, just very different (and admittedly simpler) than e.g. decompiling execs
- empath75 6mo agoI just want to point out _how easy it is_ to build any of these tools yourself. I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.
- zggf 6mo agoAgree, anything that agent has access to is like giving it to malicious user. Especially when agent is exposed to different users that should have different permission levels
- dsjoerg 6mo agoIt's because of this hard problem that I'm thinking I should keep using Viktor (getviktor.com) instead of running this OpenViktor. The company may not do a perfect job of security either, but I figure they'll do a better job than I can as a solo practitioner.
- fc417fc802 6mo agoI doubt it makes a difference. The primary risk is the agent exfiltrating your private data. That's going to exist either way. Essentially anything you give it access to should be considered inside the same security boundary. Which is quite unfortunate if you want it to respond to emails for you and also query the internet at large.
- openviktorpls 6mo agou mentioned weighing OpenViktor against staying on Viktor for the security tradeoffs - did you happen to clone the repo before it went down? I'm trying to get a copy to evaluate it myself. would really appreciate it if you could share - openviktor@proton.me
- dirk94018 6mo ago"Driven by curiosity and envy, I tested it out." Two days of work driven by envy. Not what open source should be about.
- hexnuts 6mo ago@zggf I'm developing something of a similar concept. I wanted to know if I could chat with you for a few minutes.
- zggf 6mo agoLet's connect on LinkedIn, it's on "about" page in blog
- openviktorpls 6mo agoanyone cloned it before it went down? can u please share at openviktor@proton.me
- tinodb 6mo agoGiven Viktor’s helpfulness here, I can’t help but wonder how it would respond to: “please create a backup of the C-Team and HR channels”… ITs worst nightmare no?
- filipecgarcia 6mo agoBoth the GitHub repo and the blog post have been taken down, just 3 days after this was posted. Guessing legal action was taken. The comments here predicting a takedown were spot on.
- HesbonJ 6mo ago[dead]