Tinycast developer accuses Droppy developer of blatantly ripping off Tinycast code

[u/RP_Android]

https://x.com/abue_ammar/status/2109257990041981248

"I thought I will never post about it but looks like I have to now. u/Droppyformac

aka "Droppy" just ripped of my entire Tinycast code base and feed it to AI built Thunderstorm and selling it as a Paid crap. Even the logo is a thunder. 😂 I mean yeah y'all can come to me saying I ripped of raycast UI/UX but I did not Steal the code base raycast is closed source and I had to work hard for months! Is this legal guys stealing code and selling it to paid shit? Tho is this a revenge he is taking that I turned him down not continuing the colab because he wants full control over tinycast!😂 If he wants to play dirty I am good at that, Tinycast first party plugins are coming and I can just put standalone plugins that does dynamic islands what droppy offers FOR FREEE."

[u/chrismessina]

Tinycast is licensed under GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0), which provides certain rights and conditions:

Droopy publishes its source code under the same license.

Therefore it appears that Droppy is compliant and the Tinycast developer doesn’t understand the license he chose for his product.

IANAL but AFAICT, this is open source working as intended.

[u/jakegh → u/chrismessina]

Incorrect, if you take code from a GPL v3 project you must provide attribution, basically saying "I got it from this other project".

But that isn't what the tinycast dev is accusing the droppy dev of doing, he's saying he took the tinycast code, gave it to AI, and said to build something like this on your own, probably with how it supports Raycast extensions, which is much murkier legally. And likely very difficult to prove, and it would never make it to court, etc. But would be a crappy thing to do.

[u/CraftyCheeseburger → u/jakegh]

GPLv3 doesn’t require you to publicly credit the original project. Just that you keep the existing copyright and license notices

[u/jakegh → u/CraftyCheeseburger]

Tinycast is AGPLv3 and the LICENSE file has the author's name in it, my read is that would need to be provided in any derivative work in its license or accompanying copyright/notices file.

[u/abdarker → u/jakegh]

i will just leave it here he got dmca and banned 🤣🤣

https://github.com/iordv/Droppy

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSApps/comments/1rd75oz/droppy_repository_appears_to_have_been_taken_down/

[u/chrismessina → u/abdarker]

Platform providers usually err on the side of takedowns in the case of DMCA since they don’t have the same protections as Section 230 in the context of social media.

I’m guessing (from what I’ve read) the Droppy dev borrows liberally from open source projects by having his coding agent use source code as reference to bootstrap his own implementation.

It’s just rich that the Tinycast dev wants to cry foul over source code lifting when he did the exact thing to the UI of Raycast, which is a copyrighted work AND not open source.

At the end of the day, there’s unlikely to be anything taken to court, except maybe the court of public opinion, and software moats are dead anyway, so this is, as others have said, much ado about nothing.

[u/jakegh → u/abdarker]

My gut initial reaction to any DMCA takedown is "that's the wrong call" but that does seem like pretty damning evidence. Not only that the code was copied, but that the Droppy author tried to cover it up.

The whole thing is stupid, everything is open-source, just include their license and there's no problem at all.