A major contributor submitted a big core change (fingerprint/patcher internals). Maintainers pushed back hard on design and maintainability. The contributor felt stonewalled, got personal, and eventually left. After leaving, they forked the project, copied large chunks of code, squashed commits, stripped contributor history, and allegedly violated GPLv3 rules by changing licensing and attribution. That’s the heart of the dispute.
From there, both sides started accusing each other of bad faith, harassment, threats, ego, gatekeeping, you name it. A small group rallied around the fork and started saying “ReVanced is dead” which… yeah, that’s the part that caused panic. – AI generated summary of a 40~ pg document that someone from ReVance uploaded
Basically the contributor proposed a major redesign to the patcher’s fingerprint system that worked short term but papered over deeper limitations. The maintainers saw it as a band-aid approach that would lock in technical debt and cause long term maintenance problems, so after extensive review they rejected it and pushed for a more fundamental solution instead. The contributor took that personally, issued merge-or-else ultimatums, then left. After leaving, they copied large parts of the code into a new repo, rewrote history to remove attribution, changed licensing in ways that likely violate GPLv3, and went public claiming ReVanced was “hostile” or “dead”. … For context, the fingerprint system is how ReVanced finds the right parts of YouTube’s code to modify even as YouTube updates and shuffles things around. Inefficient or overly abstract changes increase the chance of things breaking later. The contributor wanted a quick duct-tape style fix, the maintainers wanted a proper redesign, and it all spiraled from there.
Thank you for the summary. I don’t have a dog in the fight myself. (I use NewPipe) But I’m an FOSS advocate.
Stripping attribution…that’s a GPL violation and that itself is enough to terminate the license. The dates of repo creation and commit dates should be enough to prove causality.
It’s not like the fork couldn’t have stood on its own. Like…wtf was the contributor thinking removing the attribution would do?
Can someone tl;Dr this for me? I’ve gone almost two years without clicking a reddit link and I’m not about to start now.
Snapshot of comments in those posts. Mostly just governance drama.
From the new fork https://web.archive.org/web/20260107095954/https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q1we4e/the_revanced_situation_is_crazy_a_new_project/
From ReVanced side
Truly the FOSS project killer
Thank you for the summary. I don’t have a dog in the fight myself. (I use NewPipe) But I’m an FOSS advocate.
Stripping attribution…that’s a GPL violation and that itself is enough to terminate the license. The dates of repo creation and commit dates should be enough to prove causality.
It’s not like the fork couldn’t have stood on its own. Like…wtf was the contributor thinking removing the attribution would do?
The funny part is that there was no attribution to beging with.