[HN Gopher] Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
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Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
Author : zggf
Score : 148 points
Date : 2026-03-17 08:15 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matijacniacki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matijacniacki.com)
| redfloatplane wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| It feels more like clean room reverse engineering by llm,
| technically.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Well 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| This 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-...
|
| 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| They have to let it happen. There's no stopping the tide
| here.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| Terms 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what LLMs themselves do? They ingest other
| people's data and reproduce a slightly modified version of
| it. That allows AI companies to claim the work is
| transformative and thus fair use.
| skeledrew wrote:
| According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at
| all. It's automatically in public domain after the
| "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.
|
| https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-
| de...
| limagnolia wrote:
| Thats not at all what this ruling said. What the courts
| found was that an AI cannot hold copyright as the author.
| That copyright requires a human creative element. Not that
| anything that was generated by an LLM can't be subject to
| copyright.
|
| As an example, a photo taken from a digital camera can be
| subject to copyright because of the creative element
| involved in composing and taking the photo. Likewise,
| source code generated by an LLM under the guidance of a
| human author is likely to be subject to the human authors
| copyright.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > That copyright requires a human creative element.
|
| Sure, but the aim of that creative element would also be
| a consideration I'd think (and lawyers will argue). If
| someone sets up a camera on a 360deg rotating arm and
| leaves it to take pictures at random intervals, it's
| unlikely to be considered "creative" from a copyright
| perspective.
|
| Same for source code generated by an LLM, with the
| primary guidance of the human author being to "create a
| copy of this existing thing that I got", vs "create a
| thing that solves this problem in a way that I came up
| with". The former is recreating something that already
| exists, using detailed knowledge of that thing to shape
| the output. The latter is creating something that may or
| may not exist, using desire/need and imagination to shape
| the output. And I can't see reason for the former to be
| copyrightable.
|
| But also, in either case, an ultimate objective was
| achieved: liberating the thing from its "owners" and
| initial copyright.
| MartiCarmona wrote:
| Someone tell every startup in YC they are criminals
| dsjoerg wrote:
| it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com
| redfloatplane wrote:
| Ah, you're right. Headquartered in Delaware. Oh well. Thanks
| for spotting!
| yashasolutions wrote:
| Nice. 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 wrote:
| Thanks, I put some effort into the blog. The process might be
| even more useful and reusable than the code itself for many
| people.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| Every 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 wrote:
| Doesn't Openclaw already support 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 wrote:
| I don't get it, what OP actually reverse engineered? OpenClaw
| itself? Of did Viktor team created their own OpenClaw like
| agent?
| zggf wrote:
| Exactly, 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| From 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.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| I am not that old, but I interpreted that as working in
| pajamas in Dubai. I guess yours makes more sense.
| Infernal wrote:
| 40's as well but first line is basically, hey here's some MIT
| licensed code we can do whatever we want with it, surely we
| can use it to make some money to the point we can afford
| private jets in and out of Dubai.
|
| "TeamViktor's faces surely?" = imagine the looks on their
| faces "diamond handsing to the moon" = hanging onto a
| situation that looks bad now hoping it gets better, throwing
| good money after bad, the opposite of cutting your losses.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| thanks (and thanks gwking as well).
|
| more or less what i thought, but the "PJ outta Dubai"
| really made me question myself.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| don't let age phase you out of culture. that's not real.
|
| william shatner is near 100 and the man is locked in with the
| latest stuff.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Not an age thing, just how terminally online you are.
| cubefox wrote:
| Seems unethical.
| xnx wrote:
| I agree. There's so little value in Viktor, that it is
| unethical to charge for it.
| kklisura wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Thin wrappers over an LLM has been an extremely popular grift
| for the past few years.
| zggf wrote:
| Agree, and cost of creating those thin wrappers is rapidly
| approaching zero
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Wrapping 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Ignorering 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 wrote:
| Is the name Victor trademarkable?
| klustregrif wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| Sure it is:
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/78326416/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/74713937/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/74619284/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/87438245/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/77936273/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/86747705/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/78638776/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/73359604/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/98066821/
|
| https://uspto.report/TM/97979922/
|
| ...and many more.
| vixalien wrote:
| How did you make the image at https://github.com/zggf-
| zggf/openviktor/blob/main/docs/asset...?
| hmokiguess wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| Soon renamed OpenViktawer, then MoltVik.
| zggf wrote:
| and acquisition by MoltBook at the end haha
| mtrovo wrote:
| Behold VikTok, the new competitor to Moltbook, soon to be
| acquihired by Oracle.
| petterroea wrote:
| Is this reverse-engineering or "just" data exfiltration
| zggf wrote:
| Reverse 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Agree, 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| dirk94018 wrote:
| "Driven by curiosity and envy, I tested it out." Two days of work
| driven by envy. Not what open source should be about.
| zggf wrote:
| It was sarcasm ;)
| dirk94018 wrote:
| Came across as honest. Because why else.
| hexnuts wrote:
| @zggf I'm developing something of a similar concept. I wanted to
| know if I could chat with you for a few minutes.
| zggf wrote:
| Let's connect on LinkedIn, it's on "about" page in blog
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