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OpenCut: The open-source CapCut alternative

2025-07-1321:08447151github.com

The open-source CapCut alternative. Contribute to OpenCut-app/OpenCut development by creating an account on GitHub.

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nateb2022

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  • By cddotdotslash 2025-07-140:0311 reply

    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.

    • By oefrha 2025-07-143:514 reply

      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.

      • By recursive 2025-07-1415:58

        I had to add a COC in order to qualify for open source hosting tier on netlify.

      • By worthless-trash 2025-07-145:17

        Because the code of conduct is ONLY ever intended to be used as a sword, not as a shield.

      • By jchw 2025-07-1413:59

        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.

      • By mrln 2025-07-148:28

        Probably because it is AI slop and no one ever read that...

    • By lucideer 2025-07-140:231 reply

      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?

    • By l0gicpath 2025-07-148:521 reply

      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.

    • By no_time 2025-07-145:232 reply

      Telling someone to fuck off for coming at a for fun OSS project with a trademark claim is completely reasonable.

      • By Uehreka 2025-07-1411:38

        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.

      • By gruez 2025-07-1412:322 reply

        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.

        • By no_time 2025-07-1414:073 reply

          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.

          • By jeroenhd 2025-07-1416:301 reply

            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.

            • By no_time 2025-07-155:57

              >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.

          • By nemothekid 2025-07-1416:26

            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.

          • By monkeywork 2025-07-1414:141 reply

            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.

            • By Forgeties79 2025-07-1414:531 reply

              If the trademark claim is nonsense - which idk this looks pretty flimsy - i can understand the reaction

              • By monkeywork 2025-07-1415:171 reply

                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.

                • By Forgeties79 2025-07-1415:462 reply

                  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.

                  • By gruez 2025-07-1416:511 reply

                    >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?

                    • By Forgeties79 2025-07-1417:51

                      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.

                  • By monkeywork 2025-07-1714:01

                    comparing me saying "nah" and describing something as "childish" to the types of things that Zaid-maker was saying in that comment thread is kind of a stretch isn't it?

                    The person I was referring to as childish:

                    >No one gives a shit, get out of here!

                    >BLAH BLAH BLAH

                    (and then when someone points out he is in fact NOT the maintainer and is a contributor)

                    >I am the maintainer of this project who says I am not. I only made changes to CI by my choice. Ask maze before making false exceptions to me otherwise you will be hearing from my lawyers next time for harassment.

        • By quickthrowman 2025-07-1416:31

          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?

    • By edoceo 2025-07-140:131 reply

      That thread is trash.

      If anyone is looking for tips on what to NOT do, it's a gold mine.

    • By dqv 2025-07-143:042 reply

      > 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.

      • By jszymborski 2025-07-145:562 reply

        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...

        • By Gormo 2025-07-1414:03

          That's been an element of internet culture at least since the early '90s. I'm surprised that it's surprising anyone.

        • By dqv 2025-07-148:211 reply

          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.

          • By Lutger 2025-07-1416:31

            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.

      • By gorbachev 2025-07-146:001 reply

        Flamewars were a thing long, long ago. They somewhat stopped being a thing when BBSes and Usenet died.

        • By KingMob 2025-07-149:26

          Well, the nomenclature may have changed, but raging arguments on the internet are still here.

    • By yellow_lead 2025-07-1410:541 reply

      It's a small time contributor making those comments, not the maintainer.

      • By prmoustache 2025-07-1417:06

        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.

    • By arp242 2025-07-140:182 reply

      Cluely seems sort of AI tool? How does that relate to that thread?

    • By zipping1549 2025-07-142:292 reply

      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...

    • By gregjw 2025-07-146:05

      yeah, people have attitude problems recently

    • By AlienRobot 2025-07-140:59

      Wow.

  • By greatgib 2025-07-1322:044 reply

    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.

    • By bsenftner 2025-07-143:571 reply

      I tried to install, and their build instructions do not work. Waste of time, why is this here on HN at all?

      • By aquariusDue 2025-07-1410:02

        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?

    • By acheong08 2025-07-1322:301 reply

      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.

      • By eddythompson80 2025-07-1322:411 reply

        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.

        • By muratsu 2025-07-1323:523 reply

          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.

    • By dawnerd 2025-07-142:20

      Smells vibe coded too

  • By Imustaskforhelp 2025-07-147:221 reply

    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.

    • By darajava 2025-07-148:34

      You need to go to opencut.app/projects

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