ByteDance Engineer Acknowledges New Open Source Project Contained Code From Alibaba’s Ant Design, Issues Apology

Media outlet Topitnews reported on Thursday that Chinese Internet giant ByteDance released a document announcing an open source application design system, Semi Design, which adopts an MIT license. However, it was discovered that Semi Design left some traces of Alibaba‘s Ant Design in its code. An engineer at ByteDance later issued an apology statement, admitting that they used some Ant Design’s code in the early days, but the current version is quite different.

The engineer from ByteDance wrote, “Ant Design is an excellent open source design system in the industry. Good practices in the open source community have helped us in realizing Semi Design. Due to the team’s negligence, the copywriting using Ant Design in the history code did not indicate the source, and we apologize for this. Semi Design has been continuously and stably maintained for more than two years, and adopts Foundation/Adapter architecture as a whole, which is quite different from Ant Design. We decide to open source Semi Design, expecting to receive more feedback from developers and thus help improve it. We will also follow the rules of the open source community more strictly and actively give back to the open source community.”

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According to the official document, Semi Design is a design system developed and maintained by Douyin’s front-end team and the MED product design team. As a comprehensive, easy-to-use and high-quality modern enterprise-level application UI solution, it is extracted from the complex scenarios of various businesses in ByteDance, supporting nearly 1,000 platform products and serving over 100,000 users inside and outside of the company.