According to news on the afternoon of March 3, Meituan’s Light Year Beyond (GN06) team recently announced that its new product Tabbit AI browser has entered public beta. After the product was released, some users posted on social networks that the Tabbit AI browser had plagiarized their own code and listed screenshots of the relevant code.
Regarding the above situation, Sina Technology noticed that the Meituan Lightyear team released the latest apology statement on Xiaohongshu and stated that we will remove the translation project code from the new version of Tabbit browser, and have fully open sourced the project https://github.com/Tabbit-Browser/read-frog for community review and use, giving back to the open source community with practical actions. We have communicated with the author of read frog about the official authorization of the project license. After authorization, we will update the code and restore this function. We will take this as a warning to comprehensively upgrade our internal code review and open source project usage processes. Make sure that the license and related information of the open source projects that will be used or modified are clearly identified in Tabbit products.
The official also mentioned that here, we would like to express special thanks to the original author of "Reading Frog". During the communication, the author showed the great tolerance and pattern of open source developers. He not only understood our unfamiliarity with the compliance process as a new team, but also gave us very professional suggestions. The healthy development of the open source community is inseparable from awareness of rules and respect for intellectual property rights. I also hope that Tabbit can cooperate with more open source projects in the future.
In this regard, the person involved said that recently, discussions surrounding the use of Read Frog project code in the development process of the translation function of the Tabbit browser have attracted attention. After the problem was pointed out, the Tabbit team contacted me immediately and explained the project usage and conducted an internal self-examination. Judging from the communication process, the other party has a positive attitude and handles it in a timely manner. It can be confirmed that this problem is not caused by subjective malice, but is caused by a lack of rigorous understanding of open source protocols and compliance processes. At present, the relevant code has been open sourced, and the two parties are also further communicating on follow-up matters.
The person involved also mentioned that the healthy development of the open source community is inseparable from awareness of rules and mutual respect. This communication also reminds once again that both individual developers and corporate teams should pay more attention to agreement terms and compliance boundaries when using open source projects. As a developer and as a Chinese, I am happy to see domestic AI browsers and technology products continue to progress and go further. On the premise of respecting open source rules and author rights, technical cooperation and healthy development are the more promising directions. Thank you to the community for your attention and rational discussion.