> Edit: Although as yeldarb explains in a comment here[3],
> it's probably a bit more complicated than that.
Legally speaking I'm not sure anything wrong was really done here.
Morally speaking, it seems quite unethical. AlexeyAB has really been carrying the torch of the Darknet framework and the YOLO neural network for quite some time (with pjreddie effectively handing it over to him).
AlexeyAB has been providing support on pjreddie's abandoned repository (e.g. [1]) and actively working on improvements in a fork [2]. If you look at the contributors graphs, he really has been keeping the project alive [3] (vs Darknet by pjreddie [4]).
Probably the worse part in my opinion is that they have also seemingly bypassed the open source nature of the project. This is quite damning.
So, the question I have is whether AlexeyAB got some sort of endorsement from pjreddie, or if they just took over the name by nature of being the most active fork? If it's the latter, ultralytics' actions don't seem quite as bad (although they still feel kind of off-putting, especially with how some of the responses to calls for a name change were formulated).
I guess given the info I have now, to me it boils down to whether there's precedent for the next version of the name to be taken by whoever is doing work on it? If the original author never endorsed AlexeyAB (I don't know one way or another), then perhaps AlexeyAB should have changed the name but references or payed homage to YOLO in some way?
Eh, this is all starting to feel a bit too close to youtube drama for my liking.
> it's probably a bit more complicated than that.
Legally speaking I'm not sure anything wrong was really done here.
Morally speaking, it seems quite unethical. AlexeyAB has really been carrying the torch of the Darknet framework and the YOLO neural network for quite some time (with pjreddie effectively handing it over to him).
AlexeyAB has been providing support on pjreddie's abandoned repository (e.g. [1]) and actively working on improvements in a fork [2]. If you look at the contributors graphs, he really has been keeping the project alive [3] (vs Darknet by pjreddie [4]).
Probably the worse part in my opinion is that they have also seemingly bypassed the open source nature of the project. This is quite damning.
[1] https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet/issues/1900
[2] https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet
[3] https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/graphs/contributors
[4] https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet/graphs/contributors