 Are you a video content creator? Do you stream to platforms like YouTube and Twitch? If you do, then chances are you might be using some products made by Streamlabs. Streamlabs is a company that maintains their own fork of OBS, the open broadcaster software. Streamlabs also has a lot of cool widgets that you can add to your live stream such as chat alerts, subscriber notifications, little animations on the screen, you know, cool stuff like that. And a lot of people really like these products that Streamlabs creates. The problem is not their products though. The problem is Streamlabs, the company is shady as hell and some of the stuff they're doing may or may not be legal. If it's not illegal, that probably should be illegal. And right now Streamlabs, I will say is not a friend at all to free and open source software. And if you care about free and open source software, you really shouldn't be using Streamlabs because right now they're attacking one of the biggest pieces of open source software on the planet. And that is OBS, the open broadcaster software. So let me switch over to my browser and show you a little bit of what I'm talking about for those of you not familiar with Streamlabs or with OBS. This is the streamlabs.com homepage. And there's a button here to download their fork of OBS, Streamlabs OBS. It's Windows only. Of course, the open broadcaster software mainline OBS is for Windows Mac and Linux, but the Streamlabs guys, their fork is Windows only. That's fine. It's their project. They can do whatever they want with it. That's not really the problem. The problem is Streamlabs OBS has been around for a few years now, and it's always been a point of contention with the Streamlabs guys and the OBS guys about the name. If I go to Twitter here yesterday or maybe earlier today, just a few hours ago, the OBS team put out this tweet here. Let me read it. Near the launch of SLOBS, Streamlabs OBS, Streamlabs reached out to us about using the OBS name. We kindly asked them not to. They did so anyway and followed up by filing a trademark. We've tried to sort this out in private and they have been uncooperative at every term. So this is what I was talking about earlier, shady as hell, right? So you fork one of the most popular pieces of open source software on the planet, OBS. And then you use their name in your fork because really when you fork a piece of software, you're supposed to rename it. I mean, that's just standard practice. That's what everybody does. You don't fork a popular program and then call it by that same name because it's confusing as hell and it's just unfair because people are going to think that you actually represent the mainline fork of that project. And again, that's just not fair to the originator of that piece of software. So the OBS guys said, no, please don't use our names. Don't call your fork Streamlabs OBS, right? Just call it Streamlabs, whatever, or just Streamlabs by itself, Streamlabs Studio, Streamlabs Streaming, whatever, don't put OBS in the name. And they did it anyway. And now what they've done is they decided to file for a trademark on the OBS name. They want to take the OBS name from the open broadcaster software. Now I would like to tell you that this is just an isolated incident. I'd like to tell you that, but Streamlabs, the company, apparently they've done stuff like this a lot over the years. A matter of fact, after OBS tweeted this, I mean, we've got other people that decided to chime in other big companies actually. So OBS said, yes, Streamlabs is just dirty. And then Lightstream Lightstream is a streaming service for the Xbox. I've never actually used a Lightstream, but anyway, they have this streaming service for the Xbox. And what happened is Streamlabs decided to create their own similar service for the Xbox. So basically, they wanted to copy the same service that Lightstream was already doing. And then they wanted to put up a website. So what did they do? They went and did a one for one copy of the Lightstream website, basically, including many of the same. Yeah, the wording is exactly the same. User reviews down here exactly the same. If I blew up this image, I mean, if you look side by side, they just ripped off the Lightstream. They not only copied their software, they copied their website and it just looks and that's a bad look, right? And then Elgato, you guys know Elgato. Elgato makes popular products like the Elgato Cam Link, which is the capture card I actually used to record all my videos. The Elgato key lights are very popular. The Elgato Stream Deck is one of their most popular products. The Stream Deck is a little console. It's got some buttons. Kind of like a macro keyboard that you can use to switch scenes. For example, in OBS, a lot of streamers use the Elgato Stream Deck. So what did Streamlabs do? Well, control your live stream from your phone with Streamlabs Stream Deck. So your phone is going to have the same kind of Stream Deck like buttons, you know, like having the Elgato Stream Deck on your phone, they're going to call it Streamlabs Stream Deck. So it's apparent that Streamlabs really doesn't care about trademark, right? They'll use anybody's name including the Stream Deck, including OBS. And the fact that they're doing this to the open source project because I mean, they take the OBS code, this freely available for anyone to use and you can fork it and create your own project and you can even sell your fork of that word. No problem with all of that. You're allowed to do a lot with free and open source software. You're given a lot of freedom with it. So why do you want to push it to the extreme where you're essentially want to take that project's name? And essentially what they want to do is become OBS and then get rid of the open source OBS. I mean, this is really what is behind their thinking here is, hey, we would like the main line OBS to go away and the only OBS to be Streamlabs OBS, which we can then charge you for. And there is some history with Streamlabs actually taking over open source projects and then killing them. If you go to their Wikipedia page, you can see that Streamlabs actually Streamlabs was acquired by Logitech in 2019. So for the past couple of years, Logitech has actually been the owner of Streamlabs. Streamlabs was initially founded in 2014 as a service called Twitch Alerts. And that service allowed streamers to add visual alerts to the screen. So you get little animations and things when you get new subscribers, new followers or somebody donates to you, things like that. Over the years, Streamlabs acquired additional services. And when I say acquired many times, like they're doing with Streamlabs OBS, where they just take an open source project and fork it, similar things they've done in the past. And sometimes they just buy the small open source project that they need. And then they kill off the open source project, right? And they just have their proprietary paid for service. And one of the biggest criticisms of Streamlabs over the years has been that they've made it extremely difficult for subscribers to their services to actually cancel their subscriptions. And they do this purposely, they admit that they do this purposely. And one of the shadiest things I've ever heard of is that you sign up for a service, you make a one-time payment or in some cases, you make a one-time donation to your favorite streamer that's using some of the Streamlabs services. And then Streamlabs automatically subscribes you to some kind of subscription service of Streamlabs. So that you're paying Streamlabs a few bucks every month. And then they make it almost impossible for you to cancel that subscription, make it very hard for you to jump through the hoops needed to actually get that subscription canceled. And that's kind of shady, right? That's beyond shady. That's almost criminal. And really, at this point, some of the actions that Streamlabs has done, they remind me of a con artist. If you know any kind of hardcore criminal, somebody that has a criminal mentality, these are not nice people. I don't know who owns Streamlabs, but whoever owns Streamlabs, some of the shady things they've done over the years. I mean, this guy, he must have balls the size of cantaloupes to do some of this stuff. And again, I'm really hoping that you guys that are using Streamlabs products, I'm not one of these people that call for a boycott, but you shouldn't be giving criminals money, right? And there's no reason to give these people money for a product like Streamlabs OBS when the free and open source OBS exists. And it's just a better product made by better people. And we're starting to see some of the big streamers of some of the big Twitch streamers speak out here in the last few hours. Once all of this drama has broken out on Twitter, if I go back to the Streamlabs homepage, I know one of the big Twitch streamers is this chick here. I don't know who she is. Pokimane. I'm not familiar with her work, but I'm sure she's awesome. But she sent out a tweet. Some other streamers sent out a tweet basically saying that they're going to threaten a boycott of Streamlabs products if changes are not made. And that's pretty much all they sent out. Her and one or two other big Twitch streamers. Changes need to be made. I don't know what they mean by that. That's kind of weird. Changes need to be made. Like what changes? Like don't be crooked anymore. It's at some point, I think you could have bypassed that tweet and just boycotted them. I don't know what they want because I don't think Streamlabs, Streamlabs is not going to change completely their direction because of what some Twitch streamers say. They want OBS, right? And they want, they want to rip off all of these other products and some of them open source. Some of them proprietary. They want to rip off Lightstream. They want to rip off the Elgato Stream Deck. And they don't even want to build their own websites anymore. Now, whoever their web dev is, he's just doing a straight copy and paste from somebody else's website into Streamlabs. So my call to action is just to get rid of Streamlabs if you're using it and just start using the open broadcaster studio. If you're not familiar with OBS, the main product, it's a fantastic product. Again, there's no reason to pay the crooks over at Streamlabs. A single dollar for this excellent piece of free and open source software. But I do want you guys to actually pay for OBS. I would like for you guys to donate to OBS. If you go to the OBSproject.com website and there is a contributing page here, how to contribute. You can become a patron for the OBS project and it looks like they're doing okay there. They've got 445 patrons, but you know, just, you know, three grand a month, that is not a lot of money, especially to develop the kind of software that is OBS, which is a massive project. So I really would love if some of you guys go and sign up, become patrons and give them, you know, a few bucks a month to help them out in their work. If you prefer to do a one time donation, they do have a PayPal link as well. Because at the end of the day, we need to stand with our free and open source software projects, right? We need to stand with them. We need to contribute. We need to give them money. We need to do whatever it is we can do to help them succeed. And we need to stand against those companies that would destroy free and open source software. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode, Devin Gabe James, Met, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes, Akami Allen, Lenox Ninja Chuck, Commander, Angry Kurt, Diokai, David Dillon, Gregory, Heiko, Kaska, Lee Maxim, Mike, Nitrous, Erion, Alexander, Pete's, Archon, Fedor, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Stephen and Willie, these guys, they're awesome. They're the producers of this episode. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. And I want to thank each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to help me out, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Subscribe to OBS on Patreon as well. All right. Peace, guys.