I don't know if this style of... discussion is something the Cluely team made popular recently, or if it took off sooner, but I really hope it doesn't catch on further.
> We as members, contributors, and leaders pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone
And down in Enforcement (emphasis mine):
> Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported to the community leaders responsible for enforcement at [INSERT CONTACT METHOD]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated promptly and fairly.
What’s the point of this dance when you can’t bother to fill out the contact.
Honestly, how many projects with "Code of Conducts" actually use or follow them? Maybe if you're a big CNCF project or something like that, but the average GitHub project just adds one because GitHub told them to. If they were actually more about enforcing community standards and not about social signaling they'd probably just be called "contributing rules" or something boring and nondescript like how Internet rules always have been.
In other words, the point of this dance is to check a box. I mean literally, GitHub will check a box in Insights -> Community Standards when you add one.
Did anyone read that linked thread in full? There's no "style of discussion" there, there's a lot of people engaging in a very normal, constructive discussion, which is being interupted by a single disruptive commenter (Zaid).
Nothing there seems to reflect poorly on the project as far as I can tell?
"A single disruptive commenter (Zaid)"
And he is one of the top contributors. That doesn't quite fit the narrative that it was just some weirdo interfering.
According to github insights, he contributed 66 lines of code. I mean, it could be really valuable 66 lines, especially if he fixed bugs. Somehow I doubt it.
However, I'd get rid of this 'contributor' asap if I was a maintainer.
If it was a more legit trademark claim that would be one thing, a lot of OSS people think you can just name your project after something popular so you can coast off the reputation of the more popular product.
But since this is a BS claim, I think the following approach is totally appropriate:
- Have one person post the antagonistic garbage the OP deserves
- Have another person play the “rear guard” and follow up with the actual legal reasons they won’t comply.
Why? OSS projects aren't somehow exempt from trademark law, and at the very least can have its repo taken down. The trademark in this case might not be airtight, but that's a separate issue.
I have little respect for people petty enough to involve legalese against people doing something for free, just for the love of the game.
I would let them do a takedown, just so they expend billable lawyer hours, only for me to do a search+replace and reupload under a different name out of spite.
In various jurisdictions, a trademark that doesn't get defended makes it much more likely that you'll lose your trademark all together when trying to stop actual infringement. If the infringers can point at others and say "look, they let others infringe on their trademark for years and only now they're going after us" that can have an impact on the viability of your case.
That said, China regularly blocks or attacks Github users, so I don't think any open source project needs to be too wary unless they're trying to do business in China.
>In various jurisdictions, a trademark that doesn't get defended makes it much more likely that you'll lose your trademark all together when trying to stop actual infringement. If the infringers can point at others and say "look, they let others infringe on their trademark for years and only now they're going after us" that can have an impact on the viability of your case.
Oh, I didn't know that. At least now it makes some sense. Thanks.
The law is the only reason why a corporation can't take your open source project and rerelease it without any attribution. Laws for thee and not for me is juvenile.
Then frankly your being a child. The point isn't to shut down the project... It's asking them to change name due to trademark, and asking civilly without lawyers is nicer than most do up front.
Nah you still come off as childish when you reply like that no matter the validity of the claim. If the claim is nonsense then ignore or call it out as nonsense and move on ... but when you act like that you sour your image and if it is a legit claim you've now just made things worse.
Not saying it’s the adult thing to do but again, it’s understandable. Their takedown attempt seems to be disrespectful and wrong. I typically advocate for taking the high road but I certainly understand some situations where people don’t, even if I would have.
edit: thinking about it, we could look at your tone here as well to illustrate the point. Sure you weren't as uhh "passionate," but let's look at it more closely:
>Nah you still come off as childish when you reply like that
1) "Nah" is a very dismissive way of saying "I disagree." Then you follow it up 2) by calling someone "childish." There are certainly more respectful ways to make your point! Then again, I don't think it's that big of a deal. Someone else might though.
>Their takedown attempt seems to be disrespectful and wrong
How was the initial claim "disrespectful"? It might not be using maximally cuddly language, but "[...] your platform seriously infringes on our legitimate rights and interests, please rename to other one." seems pretty respectful to me. Was it only "disrespectful" because it was wrong?
Fair question - my use of "disrespectful" is a bit forced. It appears their claim is frivolous so I just considered the whole act "disrespectful." There are certainly better words though.
It is the late teens/young twenties online communication style. Generally pretty aggressive, but easy to ignore because they are usually not really saying anything of substance. They are "ragebaiting" you.
When I see people commenting "shut your bitch ass up" (now deleted), "triggered", "keep dreaming my guy", it is distinctly generational (young gen z) to me. It is a style of communication.
Torvalds may have "invented" OSS toxicity, but, as far as I can tell, he was not popping in saying SYBAU like he was commenting on a tiktok brainrot compilation.
Who knows, maybe he is just the childish persona of the maintainer. It is rare to use more than one in a specific project but a lot of people maintain more than one persona online.
Let me introduce you to OpenCart, an open source eCommerce platform in use on hundreds of thousands of websites handling customer payments, recently struck a multi-million dollar deal with PayPal, and whose founder and practically sole developer responds to bug reports and CVEs with careful, well-thought-out replies like "JUST FUCK OFF!":
Hard to tell who’s who, but the Zaid person who claims to be a maintainer is apparently not a maintainer. He contributed some small changes and started claiming to be a maintainer.
I like the idea but looks fishy at this point even if I did not look at the code or try it yet.
So many GitHub stars and not a single screenshot of it anywhere, not on GitHub, not on Google, not on the official webpage that just have a wait-list and their twitter Bash capcut with screenshots of capcut but none of opencutapp.
And I mean I wish something like that to succeed, but it doesn't look like that they have much to show for at the moment.
Probably because it's been trending on GitHub, at least that's how I found it yesterday before it was submitted to HN. After looking at the star chart in the project README and checking out their website it was pretty clear this was another mix of vibecoded half working product masquerading as open-source for promotional reasons.
I'm almost sure that the GitHub stars are manipulated or even bought but it's a baseless accusation on my part. These days Codeberg seems to be closer to what GitHub once aspired to be or more aptly was for a while.
I'd like to rant more about how GitHub is inching closer year by year to LinkedIn for devs with a hint of Product Hunt but eh, what's the point?
The project is 3 weeks old with mainly 1 guy. I’m curious how you get (legit/organic) 17k start and 3k twitter followers for a 3 week old project presumably while I’m busy with it.
I know buying stars and followers is pretty straight forward.
The timing of the project was pretty good and things were just aligned: AI video is booming, capcut is popular but changed pricing, there’s regulatory risk, and the dev is building publicly.
Like when you have nothing to show off, after the first day, already gaining thousands of stars per day. And the last 5 days, with 2 or more thousands per day consistently, linearly...
And let's say that we believe in the stars, just look at the number of forks, why so many persons would fork the project so fast, to still do nothing, no contribution or personal commits. Accounts of new users, or almost empty, or shaddy like the following one:
https://github.com/1234567891o12?tab=repositories
The overlap between CapCut enthusiasts and GitHub users is not that big. Non-technical TikTok/Instagram influencers aren’t flocking to GitHub to star the project, not to mention it’s useless to them at this stage. This kind of project, if very successful, may amass 10k to 20k organic stars in a few years. (I say this as someone who has both served on the maintainer team of a huge, household-name-in-tech kind of project with ~50k stars, and had personal projects in the 1-10k star range.)
Compare this to openai/whisper, which was a huge release at the time by the hottest AI unicorn (1.7k points on HN for the release), immediately useful and with much better user alignment: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi... The star growth was no comparison to this one person early stage project.
So I agree with others, there’s basically no chance this is organic.
To add another point of comparison, at the moment this is almost matching the velocity of DeepSeek R1 from Jan 20 to Jan 29, which, if you recall, was such a hot topic it triggered a huge market crash: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi.... Unbelievable.
So I actually pulled the docker compose and now when I try to run it, it opens up at localhost:3100 and when I go there, its just what the website https://opencut.app/ does, and it asks me for wishlist.
I just want to use your application and recommend it to my friend who uses capcut but this seems so AI generated, so ragebait induced with Zaid and the code of conduct is not followed, the stars feels like they are frauded and even though I starred your project, I feel like unstarring it, since I am not even sure if this project has a simple prototype we can use at this point and I am clearly frustrated.
> You probably use CapCut and think your video editing is special. You think your fucking TikTok with 47 transitions and 12 different fonts is going to get you some viral fame. You think loading up every goddamn effect in their library makes your content better. Wrong, motherfucker.
I know this edgy style appeals to some people, but it’s a quick way to alienate most users. Nothing screams “this project is not for you” like copy that feels like it was targeted at impressing someone’s friends in an edgy Discord, not actual potential users.
Although I don’t think this project is trying to appeal to a general audience with the level of technical expertise required to even begin to use it.
While nobody is required to like the copy, or "brand" of any project, commercial or otherwise, I do feel like the rhetoric of your comment is largely grounded in a kind of "maximum appeasement" strategy that belongs in for-profit corporate marketing & isn't really appropriate in the open source community.
For example: there's very reasonable arguments that COCs are needed to protect against actual material harm/bullying/abuse targeting individual contributors on projects but this copy specifically does none of that.
In that context, it's just a matter of taste - there's no real reason to police tone that isn't harmful (to anything other than a bottom line).
> I do feel like the rhetoric of your comment is largely grounded in a kind of "maximum appeasement" strategy that belongs in for-profit corporate marketing & isn't really appropriate in the open source community.
I’m not asking for corporate speak. I’m suggesting simple communication that explains the information without insulting the reader and calling them a “motherfucker” every other sentence would be less alienating
> In that context, it's just a matter of taste - there's no real reason to police tone that isn't harmful (to anything other than a bottom line)
I’m not here to police anything or anyone. They’re free to write as they please. I’m just pointing out that writing this way is a big red flag to a lot of people this project’s target audience is the edgelord crowd. If that’s what they’re aiming for then there’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think they realize how making strong appeals to that narrow target audience is a fast track to pigeon holing your project as an edgelord thing. Just taking one look at the low brow insults and trash talking in the GitHub issues confirms it.
This style is a way to fight back against the inevitable entitlement that people get when they use an open source software and then demand the creators do this and that.
By dropping any pretense of being polite or approachable, you basically encourage people to shut the f*ck up and either be happy with what they got or else submit a PR.
> By dropping any pretense of being polite or approachable
Linus Torvalds does this without feeling the need to articulate himself like a Scarface character. It's not a coincidence that he was the primary author of the biggest open source project in the world.
It's a parody of the https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and personally, I love it. I'm not a 15 year old, and swear words in software don't fill me with angst and offence.
I kinda wonder why ByteDance charges for anything in CapCut at all, considering it would make sense to make it as easy and cheap as possible to get more slop on TikTok?
It’s the back door way to collect money from content creators and businesses. Most of the people I know who were using CapCut either had their employers pay for it or had some way to tax deduct it as part of their creator activities.
Paying $20/month on top of an actual business is usually trivial, especially if it saves someone time or improves quality of the content.
The TikTok slop posts aren’t spending any time perfecting their edits. They’re mass producing content as rapidly as they can from phone camera to TikTok
I really like the idea of an open source alternative to CapCut, but the project is currently very far from the ease-of-use that makess CapCut one of my favorite editors on Windows.
Very few casual desktop CapCut users are going to get past the prerequisits of instal "Bun, Docker and Docker Compose, and Node.js"
Blender, Shotcut, OpenShot, or Kdenlive are probably the better open source video editor options right now.
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.
Three counts as "a small number of reposts", particularly when it's from different users, and the fact that it eventually attracted upvotes and a good discussion indicates the reposts were warranted, as randomness plays a big role in whether or not a submission gets traction.
Also, we don't like to see public "callouts" like this, and the guidelines ask us to avoid accusations of astroturfing, shilling, etc, because a false public accusation is more harmful than a valid one is beneficial. Please contact us at hn@ycombinator.com if you see anything suspicious.
Considering the previous posts never got more than 2 points, I didn't think reposting it would be an issue.
I am not a fraudulent actor (not sure what basis there is for that accusation) and generally post things I come across. OpenCut was in my GitHub feed today, seemed like it could be useful to others, ergo I shared it.
> A simple but powerful video editor that gets the job done. Works on any platform.
> Enter your email. Join waitlist
> 59284 people already joined
I would have expected a bit more from the main page, would be helpful to have a link to the /projects URL that someone else mentioned, or a screenshot demonstrating the software!
For the FOSS video editing software out there, I tried out Shotcut (https://www.shotcut.org/) and OpenShot (https://www.openshot.org/), though both of them were either a bit unpolished or unstable, with the occasional crash along the way.
I had a way better experience with kdenlive, which was my main video editor for a bit, has the basic features I'd expect, as well as decent codec support: https://kdenlive.org/
As for other options, DaVinci Resolve still feels like the more professional software suite that you'd go for, sans the cost, albeit the UI can be a bit awkward in places to someone used to the likes of kdenlive/Sony Vegas: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
There’s been such a massive increase in LLM generated apps being shared especially on the self hosted subreddit. They get mad when you call them out. It’s incredibly obvious.
I've tried this tool a few times over the years. It's quite far from being intuitive. Maybe it makes sense to professionals to work in the field full-time, but for a regular mortal who just wants to edit a video, it's impossible to grasp.
Even something as basic as opening a video file is a huge challenge. I can't just open a video file. Instead, I need to "create a new project", which requires that I specify the exact resolution and FPS of the video file beforehand (why!?). After I use a completely separate tool to extract these attributes from the video that I'm editing, I have a blank canvas onto which I can drag the actual video.
You are doing something wrong. What you need to do is launch kdenlive, then select Project → Add Clip or Folder and select the video. Then drag it into the timeline (I just did some googling the first time).
The UI is somewhat clumsy but I think it is pretty good that we have an open source video editor.
Been using Kdenlive for everything for years now and it's really feeling great now. There are a few quirks you need to learn but generally it's quite simple and intuitive with a huge community and most big LLMs can guide you through the processes!
I recently ( a few months ago ) finally caved an bought Davinci Resolve for linux and despite that I almost exclusively use Kdenlive instead every time I quickly want to make a video.
This of course is most likely a skill issue at my part but it really feels to me like kdenlive is getting in the way of my flow much less than davinci
I really tried to onboard on Davinci Resolve but it's just too complex for the basic editing I need. It does have brilliant color grading options that are not available in Kdenlive but I'm using premade LUTs for 99% of my edits and Kdenlive supports LUTs really well these days!
Used it instead on Davinci Resolve on a few computer because Davinci Resolve require GPU and doesn't always recognize it - so it doesn't even start. Kdenlive doesn't have this issue.
I've made a couple photo/music montages with both tools. Not an advanced user, but I found Kdenlive was more stable on Ubuntu and the UX is similar between the two.
Most people in this thread seem to be talking about how it's a fake project with fake stars but there is actually a live version linked in this comment[0]. It's pretty good too! I wish the authors would put more time into polishing the README and pointing to the online version but it's missing so many basic features now that it probably only makes sense for developers to currently use.
CapCut is one of several low-barrier video editing apps generally geared towards content creators/ people targeting Instagram reels, TikTok, and short video platforms.
I’m really excited about the concept of an open-source alternative to CapCut. However, the current state of the project is far from being as user-friendly as CapCut, which is one of my favorite video editors on Windows. The requirement to install Bun, Docker, Docker Compose, and Node.js as prerequisites will likely deter most casual desktop CapCut users from even trying it out.
I’m hopeful that with continued development and community support, this new project can evolve into a truly accessible and powerful alternative to CapCut. There’s a lot of potential here, and I’m excited to see where it goes!
I played with it for a few seconds. As someone mentioned here, you have to go to opencut.app/projects to actually see the actual application.
Most features are still just TODO, but you can at least overlay text onto video. The interface seems reasonable so far, basically works like any other NLE I've ever used. If this continued to evolve, I can only imagine many would consider it to be a very useful tool to have available.
You often end up doing this to please the linting deities.
They want to make sure you call out dependencies. It annoys me alot when you know they won't change. And if they do (some reference change on render)... well that's just a footgun of React and I argue this doesnt help.
All technology had blind spots. I think Rust might be async IO DX but that's based on what I read.
I'd probably rather build some things (most things) in JS than Rust. It has GC and let's me focus more on the business problem. But id even more prefer Go Java or C#. But I'm a microservice monkey so ymmv.
I'm seeing a lot of posts from people discussing everything and anything other than whether or not the application is fit for purpose and does what it's claiming it does.
>Hey, have you tried TwitterCut yet? It’s this cool tool I found that turns your tweets into awesome videos in just one click. Super easy to use—just @cutcutai in a Twitter thread, and it creates the videos directly for you.
Are those tools affiliated or are you affiliated with either?
https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/issues/192
I don't know if this style of... discussion is something the Cluely team made popular recently, or if it took off sooner, but I really hope it doesn't catch on further.
Assholes online were not “made popular recently”.
Gotta love seeing a code of conduct:
> We as members, contributors, and leaders pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone
And down in Enforcement (emphasis mine):
> Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported to the community leaders responsible for enforcement at [INSERT CONTACT METHOD]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated promptly and fairly.
What’s the point of this dance when you can’t bother to fill out the contact.
I had to add a COC in order to qualify for open source hosting tier on netlify.
Honestly, how many projects with "Code of Conducts" actually use or follow them? Maybe if you're a big CNCF project or something like that, but the average GitHub project just adds one because GitHub told them to. If they were actually more about enforcing community standards and not about social signaling they'd probably just be called "contributing rules" or something boring and nondescript like how Internet rules always have been.
In other words, the point of this dance is to check a box. I mean literally, GitHub will check a box in Insights -> Community Standards when you add one.
Because the code of conduct is ONLY ever intended to be used as a sword, not as a shield.
Probably because it is AI slop and no one ever read that...
Did anyone read that linked thread in full? There's no "style of discussion" there, there's a lot of people engaging in a very normal, constructive discussion, which is being interupted by a single disruptive commenter (Zaid).
Nothing there seems to reflect poorly on the project as far as I can tell?
"A single disruptive commenter (Zaid)" And he is one of the top contributors. That doesn't quite fit the narrative that it was just some weirdo interfering.
“Top contributor” is being rather generous there. He just committed several really tiny changes to the CI
https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/graphs/contributors
https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/commits?author=Zaid-m...
According to github insights, he contributed 66 lines of code. I mean, it could be really valuable 66 lines, especially if he fixed bugs. Somehow I doubt it.
However, I'd get rid of this 'contributor' asap if I was a maintainer.
What’s Cluely? While I can google and find out I just wanted to reflect how irrelevant that name actually is for a large portion of the internet.
Flamewars, internet jerks and online bullying has been around since irc. If not longer.
imo looking at the thread, I see a bunch of people throwing a few strongly worded comments at each other in a typical heated discussion online.
We used to call this flamewars.
Just another grifter
Telling someone to fuck off for coming at a for fun OSS project with a trademark claim is completely reasonable.
If it was a more legit trademark claim that would be one thing, a lot of OSS people think you can just name your project after something popular so you can coast off the reputation of the more popular product.
But since this is a BS claim, I think the following approach is totally appropriate:
- Have one person post the antagonistic garbage the OP deserves
- Have another person play the “rear guard” and follow up with the actual legal reasons they won’t comply.
Why? OSS projects aren't somehow exempt from trademark law, and at the very least can have its repo taken down. The trademark in this case might not be airtight, but that's a separate issue.
I have little respect for people petty enough to involve legalese against people doing something for free, just for the love of the game.
I would let them do a takedown, just so they expend billable lawyer hours, only for me to do a search+replace and reupload under a different name out of spite.
In various jurisdictions, a trademark that doesn't get defended makes it much more likely that you'll lose your trademark all together when trying to stop actual infringement. If the infringers can point at others and say "look, they let others infringe on their trademark for years and only now they're going after us" that can have an impact on the viability of your case.
That said, China regularly blocks or attacks Github users, so I don't think any open source project needs to be too wary unless they're trying to do business in China.
>In various jurisdictions, a trademark that doesn't get defended makes it much more likely that you'll lose your trademark all together when trying to stop actual infringement. If the infringers can point at others and say "look, they let others infringe on their trademark for years and only now they're going after us" that can have an impact on the viability of your case.
Oh, I didn't know that. At least now it makes some sense. Thanks.
The law is the only reason why a corporation can't take your open source project and rerelease it without any attribution. Laws for thee and not for me is juvenile.
Then frankly your being a child. The point isn't to shut down the project... It's asking them to change name due to trademark, and asking civilly without lawyers is nicer than most do up front.
If the trademark claim is nonsense - which idk this looks pretty flimsy - i can understand the reaction
Nah you still come off as childish when you reply like that no matter the validity of the claim. If the claim is nonsense then ignore or call it out as nonsense and move on ... but when you act like that you sour your image and if it is a legit claim you've now just made things worse.
Not saying it’s the adult thing to do but again, it’s understandable. Their takedown attempt seems to be disrespectful and wrong. I typically advocate for taking the high road but I certainly understand some situations where people don’t, even if I would have.
edit: thinking about it, we could look at your tone here as well to illustrate the point. Sure you weren't as uhh "passionate," but let's look at it more closely:
>Nah you still come off as childish when you reply like that
1) "Nah" is a very dismissive way of saying "I disagree." Then you follow it up 2) by calling someone "childish." There are certainly more respectful ways to make your point! Then again, I don't think it's that big of a deal. Someone else might though.
>Their takedown attempt seems to be disrespectful and wrong
How was the initial claim "disrespectful"? It might not be using maximally cuddly language, but "[...] your platform seriously infringes on our legitimate rights and interests, please rename to other one." seems pretty respectful to me. Was it only "disrespectful" because it was wrong?
Fair question - my use of "disrespectful" is a bit forced. It appears their claim is frivolous so I just considered the whole act "disrespectful." There are certainly better words though.
It’s a Chinese trademark, China does not enforce US IP law. Why should we pay any heed to a Chinese trademark in the US?
That thread is trash.
If anyone is looking for tips on what to NOT do, it's a gold mine.
You are mentioning as to what Zaid did, right?
Yes
> I really hope it doesn't catch on further
It already has.
It is the late teens/young twenties online communication style. Generally pretty aggressive, but easy to ignore because they are usually not really saying anything of substance. They are "ragebaiting" you.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to blame toxic culture in OSS development when it was pioneered by the greats like Torvalds https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab...
That's been an element of internet culture at least since the early '90s. I'm surprised that it's surprising anyone.
When I see people commenting "shut your bitch ass up" (now deleted), "triggered", "keep dreaming my guy", it is distinctly generational (young gen z) to me. It is a style of communication.
Torvalds may have "invented" OSS toxicity, but, as far as I can tell, he was not popping in saying SYBAU like he was commenting on a tiktok brainrot compilation.
Not legitimizing his rants - he is a genuine asshole - but his raging is actually entertaining and more often than not, you'd learn a thing or two.
Flamewars were a thing long, long ago. They somewhat stopped being a thing when BBSes and Usenet died.
Well, the nomenclature may have changed, but raging arguments on the internet are still here.
It's a small time contributor making those comments, not the maintainer.
Who knows, maybe he is just the childish persona of the maintainer. It is rare to use more than one in a specific project but a lot of people maintain more than one persona online.
Cluely seems sort of AI tool? How does that relate to that thread?
I guess their team posts stuff in a style like that sometimes. E.g.
https://x.com/cluely/status/1932966330904506501
Not a cluely
Huge red flag. I doubt actual good product is coming out from a person with that much attitude on anywhere, let alone their project's issues...
Let me introduce you to OpenCart, an open source eCommerce platform in use on hundreds of thousands of websites handling customer payments, recently struck a multi-million dollar deal with PayPal, and whose founder and practically sole developer responds to bug reports and CVEs with careful, well-thought-out replies like "JUST FUCK OFF!":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526498 https://archive.is/9bHTi (archived version of github issue linked in above thread) https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/opencart_vulnerabilit... https://github.com/opencart/opencart/issues/12947#issuecomme...
Hard to tell who’s who, but the Zaid person who claims to be a maintainer is apparently not a maintainer. He contributed some small changes and started claiming to be a maintainer.
Whoever else is the one with authority isn't doing anything about it either. So.
yeah, people have attitude problems recently
Wow.
I like the idea but looks fishy at this point even if I did not look at the code or try it yet.
So many GitHub stars and not a single screenshot of it anywhere, not on GitHub, not on Google, not on the official webpage that just have a wait-list and their twitter Bash capcut with screenshots of capcut but none of opencutapp.
And I mean I wish something like that to succeed, but it doesn't look like that they have much to show for at the moment.
I tried to install, and their build instructions do not work. Waste of time, why is this here on HN at all?
Probably because it's been trending on GitHub, at least that's how I found it yesterday before it was submitted to HN. After looking at the star chart in the project README and checking out their website it was pretty clear this was another mix of vibecoded half working product masquerading as open-source for promotional reasons.
I'm almost sure that the GitHub stars are manipulated or even bought but it's a baseless accusation on my part. These days Codeberg seems to be closer to what GitHub once aspired to be or more aptly was for a while.
I'd like to rant more about how GitHub is inching closer year by year to LinkedIn for devs with a hint of Product Hunt but eh, what's the point?
https://xcancel.com/OpenCutApp
Follower count and activity looks about right. There's some screenshots there. I assume the star count is due to some amount of marketing.
The project is 3 weeks old with mainly 1 guy. I’m curious how you get (legit/organic) 17k start and 3k twitter followers for a 3 week old project presumably while I’m busy with it.
I know buying stars and followers is pretty straight forward.
The timing of the project was pretty good and things were just aligned: AI video is booming, capcut is popular but changed pricing, there’s regulatory risk, and the dev is building publicly.
They can get a small celebrity, nothing legit can explain such a growth in term of stars or forks in just a couple of days in my opinion ...
https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&Date
Like when you have nothing to show off, after the first day, already gaining thousands of stars per day. And the last 5 days, with 2 or more thousands per day consistently, linearly...
And let's say that we believe in the stars, just look at the number of forks, why so many persons would fork the project so fast, to still do nothing, no contribution or personal commits. Accounts of new users, or almost empty, or shaddy like the following one: https://github.com/1234567891o12?tab=repositories
https://github.com/kietsyu?tab=overview&from=2025-02-01&to=2...
https://github.com/jakele86?tab=overview&from=2025-03-01&to=...
https://github.com/Lukriss98?tab=overview&from=2024-06-01&to...
Or the following one that is quite fun:
https://github.com/laga5074
In this one, the only other project is a AI generated SEO optimized recipe blog with all the boilerplate still there.
did you forget the 442 points on HN
The overlap between CapCut enthusiasts and GitHub users is not that big. Non-technical TikTok/Instagram influencers aren’t flocking to GitHub to star the project, not to mention it’s useless to them at this stage. This kind of project, if very successful, may amass 10k to 20k organic stars in a few years. (I say this as someone who has both served on the maintainer team of a huge, household-name-in-tech kind of project with ~50k stars, and had personal projects in the 1-10k star range.)
Compare this to openai/whisper, which was a huge release at the time by the hottest AI unicorn (1.7k points on HN for the release), immediately useful and with much better user alignment: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi... The star growth was no comparison to this one person early stage project.
So I agree with others, there’s basically no chance this is organic.
To add another point of comparison, at the moment this is almost matching the velocity of DeepSeek R1 from Jan 20 to Jan 29, which, if you recall, was such a hot topic it triggered a huge market crash: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi.... Unbelievable.
Highly doubt it.
Smells vibe coded too
So I actually pulled the docker compose and now when I try to run it, it opens up at localhost:3100 and when I go there, its just what the website https://opencut.app/ does, and it asks me for wishlist.
I just want to use your application and recommend it to my friend who uses capcut but this seems so AI generated, so ragebait induced with Zaid and the code of conduct is not followed, the stars feels like they are frauded and even though I starred your project, I feel like unstarring it, since I am not even sure if this project has a simple prototype we can use at this point and I am clearly frustrated.
You need to go to opencut.app/projects
https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr...
Well then.
> You probably use CapCut and think your video editing is special. You think your fucking TikTok with 47 transitions and 12 different fonts is going to get you some viral fame. You think loading up every goddamn effect in their library makes your content better. Wrong, motherfucker.
I know this edgy style appeals to some people, but it’s a quick way to alienate most users. Nothing screams “this project is not for you” like copy that feels like it was targeted at impressing someone’s friends in an edgy Discord, not actual potential users.
Although I don’t think this project is trying to appeal to a general audience with the level of technical expertise required to even begin to use it.
While nobody is required to like the copy, or "brand" of any project, commercial or otherwise, I do feel like the rhetoric of your comment is largely grounded in a kind of "maximum appeasement" strategy that belongs in for-profit corporate marketing & isn't really appropriate in the open source community.
For example: there's very reasonable arguments that COCs are needed to protect against actual material harm/bullying/abuse targeting individual contributors on projects but this copy specifically does none of that.
In that context, it's just a matter of taste - there's no real reason to police tone that isn't harmful (to anything other than a bottom line).
> I do feel like the rhetoric of your comment is largely grounded in a kind of "maximum appeasement" strategy that belongs in for-profit corporate marketing & isn't really appropriate in the open source community.
I’m not asking for corporate speak. I’m suggesting simple communication that explains the information without insulting the reader and calling them a “motherfucker” every other sentence would be less alienating
> In that context, it's just a matter of taste - there's no real reason to police tone that isn't harmful (to anything other than a bottom line)
I’m not here to police anything or anyone. They’re free to write as they please. I’m just pointing out that writing this way is a big red flag to a lot of people this project’s target audience is the edgelord crowd. If that’s what they’re aiming for then there’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think they realize how making strong appeals to that narrow target audience is a fast track to pigeon holing your project as an edgelord thing. Just taking one look at the low brow insults and trash talking in the GitHub issues confirms it.
No need to police! But may make you despise. Or at least doubt.
Emotions going way overboard are usually not good for engineering, or for open-source project governance. Aggressive negative emotions, doubly so.
This style is a way to fight back against the inevitable entitlement that people get when they use an open source software and then demand the creators do this and that.
By dropping any pretense of being polite or approachable, you basically encourage people to shut the f*ck up and either be happy with what they got or else submit a PR.
The style is just standard insecure angry dude, it's not a way to fight back against anything.
A good deal of the site is just them complaining they don't get access to free stuff from CapCut anymore.
It's not "take it or leave it", it's "waah how dare you not give it to me."
If it’s open source you’re welcome to make a fork that removes all the foul language. Will it help?
> By dropping any pretense of being polite or approachable
Linus Torvalds does this without feeling the need to articulate himself like a Scarface character. It's not a coincidence that he was the primary author of the biggest open source project in the world.
It does the opposite.
It selects for people who are drawn to harsh language and think calling people “motherfucker” is both normal and cool.
Guess how those people are going to communicate right back to you when they want something?
Definitely AI generated
Definitely reads like your run-of-the-mill edgy LLM text.
> "More "Get Pro" dialogs than a Windows 95 error message"
That screams LLM. Makes absolutely zero sense if you actually grew up in the Win 9x era.
Looks like a parody of this website: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
It's a parody of the https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and personally, I love it. I'm not a 15 year old, and swear words in software don't fill me with angst and offence.
Oh wow, you’re such a grown up. How did you manage that?
I have no issues with https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr... nor with the aforementioned website either.
In any case, is your question rhetorical? :D
Many grownups take offense at both sites.
I kinda wonder why ByteDance charges for anything in CapCut at all, considering it would make sense to make it as easy and cheap as possible to get more slop on TikTok?
Simple: They charge because people pay for it.
It’s the back door way to collect money from content creators and businesses. Most of the people I know who were using CapCut either had their employers pay for it or had some way to tax deduct it as part of their creator activities.
Paying $20/month on top of an actual business is usually trivial, especially if it saves someone time or improves quality of the content.
The TikTok slop posts aren’t spending any time perfecting their edits. They’re mass producing content as rapidly as they can from phone camera to TikTok
I really like the idea of an open source alternative to CapCut, but the project is currently very far from the ease-of-use that makess CapCut one of my favorite editors on Windows.
Very few casual desktop CapCut users are going to get past the prerequisits of instal "Bun, Docker and Docker Compose, and Node.js"
Blender, Shotcut, OpenShot, or Kdenlive are probably the better open source video editor options right now.
> Very few casual desktop CapCut users are going to get past the prerequisits of instal "Bun, Docker and Docker Compose, and Node.js"
They just need to pack it as an single AppImage or Electron app. Bun and Docker are made for developers, not users.
Again?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44355853
edit: I am genuinely curious about spam prevention on HN. What systems we got working against fraudulent actors?
This is covered in the FAQ:
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.
Three counts as "a small number of reposts", particularly when it's from different users, and the fact that it eventually attracted upvotes and a good discussion indicates the reposts were warranted, as randomness plays a big role in whether or not a submission gets traction.
Also, we don't like to see public "callouts" like this, and the guidelines ask us to avoid accusations of astroturfing, shilling, etc, because a false public accusation is more harmful than a valid one is beneficial. Please contact us at hn@ycombinator.com if you see anything suspicious.
FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Considering the previous posts never got more than 2 points, I didn't think reposting it would be an issue.
I am not a fraudulent actor (not sure what basis there is for that accusation) and generally post things I come across. OpenCut was in my GitHub feed today, seemed like it could be useful to others, ergo I shared it.
TIL: there's a GitHub feed https://github.com/explore
Reposts aren't really moderated unless the previous posts were highly updated/commented and recent.
Beside the spam issue...Does the repo legit, though?
> A simple but powerful video editor that gets the job done. Works on any platform.
> Enter your email. Join waitlist
> 59284 people already joined
I would have expected a bit more from the main page, would be helpful to have a link to the /projects URL that someone else mentioned, or a screenshot demonstrating the software!
For the FOSS video editing software out there, I tried out Shotcut (https://www.shotcut.org/) and OpenShot (https://www.openshot.org/), though both of them were either a bit unpolished or unstable, with the occasional crash along the way.
I had a way better experience with kdenlive, which was my main video editor for a bit, has the basic features I'd expect, as well as decent codec support: https://kdenlive.org/
As for other options, DaVinci Resolve still feels like the more professional software suite that you'd go for, sans the cost, albeit the UI can be a bit awkward in places to someone used to the likes of kdenlive/Sony Vegas: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Luma Fusion is amazing as well, wonder your thoughts on it
Promotion without a single screenshot. Not interested in projects with READMEs like this. If it's actually good, it'll spread on its own.
Honestly the 'Project Structure' section which is just a directory listing, feels like it was generated by an LLM.
There’s been such a massive increase in LLM generated apps being shared especially on the self hosted subreddit. They get mad when you call them out. It’s incredibly obvious.
>If it's actually good, it'll spread on its own.
That's not how it works, but I agree it's weird there is no screenshot.
"If you build it, they will come" is one of the oldest myths tech founders seem to still believe, even though it's been disproven time and again.
You can test it out at https://opencut.app/projects. I added some screenshots to the README here (https://github.com/alexkreidler/OpenCut/tree/main?tab=readme...) and opened a PR to merge the update upstream.
Kdenlive
https://kdenlive.org/
I've tried this tool a few times over the years. It's quite far from being intuitive. Maybe it makes sense to professionals to work in the field full-time, but for a regular mortal who just wants to edit a video, it's impossible to grasp.
Even something as basic as opening a video file is a huge challenge. I can't just open a video file. Instead, I need to "create a new project", which requires that I specify the exact resolution and FPS of the video file beforehand (why!?). After I use a completely separate tool to extract these attributes from the video that I'm editing, I have a blank canvas onto which I can drag the actual video.
You are doing something wrong. What you need to do is launch kdenlive, then select Project → Add Clip or Folder and select the video. Then drag it into the timeline (I just did some googling the first time).
The UI is somewhat clumsy but I think it is pretty good that we have an open source video editor.
Been using Kdenlive for everything for years now and it's really feeling great now. There are a few quirks you need to learn but generally it's quite simple and intuitive with a huge community and most big LLMs can guide you through the processes!
I recently ( a few months ago ) finally caved an bought Davinci Resolve for linux and despite that I almost exclusively use Kdenlive instead every time I quickly want to make a video.
This of course is most likely a skill issue at my part but it really feels to me like kdenlive is getting in the way of my flow much less than davinci
I really tried to onboard on Davinci Resolve but it's just too complex for the basic editing I need. It does have brilliant color grading options that are not available in Kdenlive but I'm using premade LUTs for 99% of my edits and Kdenlive supports LUTs really well these days!
I started using resolve last year and while I get it now and my hands know the shortcuts I don't feel it's a very intuitive editor.
Very nice color options though, that part is hard to beat
Nice! I've never heard of Kdenlive. Do you know how it compares to Davinci Resolve's free version?
Used it instead on Davinci Resolve on a few computer because Davinci Resolve require GPU and doesn't always recognize it - so it doesn't even start. Kdenlive doesn't have this issue.
I've made a couple photo/music montages with both tools. Not an advanced user, but I found Kdenlive was more stable on Ubuntu and the UX is similar between the two.
It runs on Linux.
Davinci Resolve also runs natively on Linux (with some codec licensing restrictions)
So does DaVinci
Most people in this thread seem to be talking about how it's a fake project with fake stars but there is actually a live version linked in this comment[0]. It's pretty good too! I wish the authors would put more time into polishing the README and pointing to the online version but it's missing so many basic features now that it probably only makes sense for developers to currently use.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554541
Openshot, Shotcut, Opencut ... It's getting confusing.
Prefixing your project name with "open" is pretty reasonable, and yet I feel these project names might be worth reconsidering.
Maybe the next version can be called OpenWound or ShotCutStabbed
Sorry I'm a bit out of the loop, but what's CapCut?
CapCut is one of several low-barrier video editing apps generally geared towards content creators/ people targeting Instagram reels, TikTok, and short video platforms.
Video editor owned by TikTok, very very popular.
This is great, there are too few open-source video editing projects!
However, why do you have a waitlist for an open-source project? And why do you brag of having Databuddy analytics built-in?
Are you just a startup that's building in public and using open-source as a marketing trick before monetizing it?
I’m really excited about the concept of an open-source alternative to CapCut. However, the current state of the project is far from being as user-friendly as CapCut, which is one of my favorite video editors on Windows. The requirement to install Bun, Docker, Docker Compose, and Node.js as prerequisites will likely deter most casual desktop CapCut users from even trying it out. I’m hopeful that with continued development and community support, this new project can evolve into a truly accessible and powerful alternative to CapCut. There’s a lot of potential here, and I’m excited to see where it goes!
I played with it for a few seconds. As someone mentioned here, you have to go to opencut.app/projects to actually see the actual application.
Most features are still just TODO, but you can at least overlay text onto video. The interface seems reasonable so far, basically works like any other NLE I've ever used. If this continued to evolve, I can only imagine many would consider it to be a very useful tool to have available.
>> useEffect(() => { initializeApp(); }, [initializeApp]);
Thats a weird bit of code. If the function changes execute it ?
Ref: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr...
You often end up doing this to please the linting deities.
They want to make sure you call out dependencies. It annoys me alot when you know they won't change. And if they do (some reference change on render)... well that's just a footgun of React and I argue this doesnt help.
I think this is the one which detects dependencies of closure. react-hooks/exhaustive-deps is the rule I think.
Makes sense. A few years back, a stale closure bug consumed two full working days and one full night for me.
so its a dumb technology or noo???
Its a great lint rule imo, I would have appreciated having this one on back even I first used React
All technology is dumb. The trick is recognising in which ways its dumb.
"All technology is dumb"
implying that javascript and rust in the same tier is mistake
All technology had blind spots. I think Rust might be async IO DX but that's based on what I read.
I'd probably rather build some things (most things) in JS than Rust. It has GC and let's me focus more on the business problem. But id even more prefer Go Java or C#. But I'm a microservice monkey so ymmv.
This isn't just javascript. This is react on javascript.
Does a waitlist mean it will be monetized?
Next Photopea?
Also if you love the F word read this file: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr...
https://opencut.app/why-not-capcut
There are many video editors (arch example[0]).
What are the pros and cons of this one?
0. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Multim...
Does it actually do anything?
I'm seeing a lot of posts from people discussing everything and anything other than whether or not the application is fit for purpose and does what it's claiming it does.
Tried it before and it was barely functional - how is it getting starred?
I like how open-source software is gate-kept behind complex processes.
What do you mean? The deployment? It seems pretty straightforward to me. I can't actually see how it could be simpler.
Would have enjoyed some screenshots or a quick tour in video form.
This looks super interesting – how close is the current feature set compared to CapCut? Any plans to support mobile export/editing down the road?
This stuff sounds enterprising
Cool dude. I’ll give it a spinach. Nice to see a docker-compose. Should make this easy.
Someone tell CJ Fly he doesn't have to use the free trial any more.
I like this!
You previously posted this:
>Hey, have you tried TwitterCut yet? It’s this cool tool I found that turns your tweets into awesome videos in just one click. Super easy to use—just @cutcutai in a Twitter thread, and it creates the videos directly for you.
Are those tools affiliated or are you affiliated with either?
I see that ShadCn has been used here. Good choice !
Uh, if it's open source, why is there a waitlist?
What is there to wait on and what do they need your email for?
Pretty fishy. (Or phishy?)