Comment by bena
About 10-ish years ago, my then employer was talking to some other company about helping them get their software to release. They had what they believed to be a proprietary compression system that would compress and playback 4k video with no loss in quality.
They wouldn't let us look into the actual codecs or compression, they just wanted us to build a front-end for it.
I got to digging and realized they were just re-encoding the video through FFMpeg with a certain set of flags and options. I was able to replicate their results by just running FFMpeg.
They stopped talking to us.
One more taking part in a time-honoured tradition of taking someone else's thing, adding your own dipping mustard (if even that), and calling it your own.
A new chatbot? Another ChatGPT wrapper. A new Linux Distro. Another Arch with a preinstalled desktop environment. A new video downloader? It's yt-dlp with a GUI.
If they were just honest from the get-go, it'd be fine, but some people aren't.