Discord Tried To END This Reverse Engineered Server

Key Takeaways

how many times do I have to say it if you don't want to have Angry messages from teams of lawyers stop messing with the intellectual property of massive companies whether it's better Discord the braver browser WhatsApp for Linux with the exception of being in a country that does not care about IP law whatsoever it is only a matter of time until someone comes knocking on your door or more likely sending you a threatening email telling you to stop doing that and this recently happened with another Foss project boss chord which is kind of the exact opposite of every other application that has chord in its name this is not a Discord client this is a new Discord server essentially we provide all the functions and services that Discord does which allow software built for Discord such as clients and Bots and other applications to work seamlessly with fosscord we also Implement custom server features to enhance the experience and provide additional functionality what this means for you is that you can continue to use the programs you're already familiar with all while using a safe privacy focused platform to chat with friends which you control it does not mean that users of fosscord can interact with the users of Discord we are entirely separate platforms and your first Squad account cannot be used to interact with Discord in the future we hope to develop our own clients and tools to allow you to use multiple accounts at the same time but this has not yet being worked on this is supposed to be a one-to-one compatible implementation of the back end Discord server software with extra additional features like end-to-end encryption server plugins and things like that basically it's trying to do what Matrix is doing but basing it on the Discord protocol honestly I think it sounds like a really lofty project but a really cool project one of the things that makes Discord great is all of the tooling surrounding Discord the worst part about Discord is Discord so if you can remove that from the equation I wish them the best of luck and hope this project goes well it's only been around for a couple of years but in that time it has gained quite a bit of attention right now it's closing in on 4 500 Stars GitHub likes to round the number up it is at 44.59 assuming that number isn't outdated with the API we're just going to assume it's basically correct the problem with that though is when you start gaining a bit of attention the company you're doing things involving their software with might start to notice and typically when you include a chord or Discord in your name even though they don't have a trademark to the word chord they certainly act like they do on the 1st of March the first chord maintainers received an email from Morrison Rothman LLP Discord lawyers notifying us about how they believe fosscord to be an infringement of their intellectual property as such they're requested that we immediately stop development and remove or take down all available code services and social media this includes our website our GitHub repositories Etc which is a very long way of saying they sent us a cease and desist and want us to go away but the proof project didn't think they were doing anything wrong so shutting down wasn't exactly their plan so what they did instead is on the 3rd of March we detailed the actions that we had taken in a response email which include removed all usage and code implementing the test client and Discord client proxy removed all documentation related to the test client now I'm not a lawyer but I am pretty sure the test client is a big part of what annoyed Discord as a company so the test client uh wasn't a test client what it actually was is modifying the official discord.com client to work with their server Instead This is you know getting into the territory of having a custom Discord client which you know Discord in the part has definitely not been a big fan of and they explicitly showed how to set it up had scripts to do it and all that fun stuff since the goal is to be one to one compatible with Discord this seems like the most logical way to do it you use the official Discord client and use your server if your server interacts with the client and the client behaves like it normally would and all of the tooling you have like the Bots and things like that behave like they normally would clearly you've achieved your goal of one-to-one compatibility which I totally support them doing the issue is a lot of companies aren't you know a massive fan of this happening this isn't working with Matrix for example where everything is publicly documented this is Discord Discord is Discord and nothing else is allowed to make use of that but they are fully aware that reverse engineering and building off the API probably is fine uh they even reference things like the Google versus Oracle case inside of the FAQ I'm not getting into it today but that was when Google was doing some stuff with Java that Oracle wasn't exactly a big fan of though trying to do their own thing instead of split away but obviously their server needs to be tested on something so what is going to be done Instead at least what is going to be done publicly is they have a false cord client this is sort of a mostly re-implementation of the Discord client it's still very much in a uh work in progress State and it's not anywhere near done but it is going to do a lot of the work the official client did and as it gets better obviously it's going to get more and more in line with what discord.com does but there are probably devs internally who are still using the uh discord.com test client uh they're just not making it as obvious that they're doing it publicly anymore they also say we reworded our website to include the owners of the Discord branding Discord Inc and that makes sense but I've scoured over the entire website I've looked at pretty much everything that I could find and I don't know what they've actually changed and uh looking at the GitHub for the website I don't think they changed anything unless they changed it locally on the website and didn't push it to the repo so I'm not really sure what they are seeing there also we removed all Discord IP from our official servers which has not been clear what exactly this means now to my surprise Discord actually understands these twizen effect even though they could very easily crush this project and just you know stifle them with legal fees they're not trying to they are mostly happy with these changes with the exception of the name which makes sense why they still take issue with but most developers out there and these developers self-admittedly aren't great at naming things so what they did is ask the community for name suggestions they were very simple rules don't include generic words like chat connect things like this as it's kind of a boring name and definitely don't include the word chord so what do you think happens when you ask the community with very simple rules for answers do they follow the rules or don't they well if you guessed the second option you were right we have great names like open chord grass open chat Fox cord first chord boss RTC there was even someone who just suggested false because they didn't know that Foss means free and open source software they thought it was just a random assortment of letters that was in the Foss chord name there were some good suggestions like let's have the opposite of Discord Harmony which is one of the higher voted options and is probably going to win but a lot of the suggestions in there are just memes or straight up ignoring the rules at the time of recording March 14th 2023 a new name has not been selected at this stage it's going to run until the 19th and then to the devs like any of the names then they'll do a proper vote on the ones they actually like I presume something like Harmony is going to win but we'll have to wait and see the moral of the story is once again don't mess with the big companies it's one thing to go and make things that might like you know interact with their tooling and maybe kind of circumvent the TOs in one way or another but don't use a name that's gonna get their attention don't use a logo that's gonna get their attention be a little bit sneaky about it and maybe you'll last a little bit longer but let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below uh that yeah um I lost my train of thought that's gonna be it for me if you like the video go and like the video If you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here who are probably going to buy me a new mug at some point uh patreon scribes that Libera pay link down below that's gonna be it for me and lawyers are scary [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music]