Why Douyin’s Semi Design Admitted Copying Ant Design Text
Douyin’s Semi Design, an open‑source React UI design system for enterprise apps, faced criticism after undisclosed Ant Design text was found in its documentation, prompting a public apology, license updates, and detailed attribution of the borrowed components.
Douyin’s frontend team recently open‑sourced its enterprise UI design system, Semi Design, which provides a design language, React components, and theming for building modern admin applications.
Shortly after release, it was discovered that some documentation in the repository duplicated text from Ant Design without attribution.
On October 27, the team issued a public statement acknowledging the oversight, apologizing, and explaining that Semi Design has been maintained for over two years with a Foundation/Adapter architecture that differs significantly from Ant Design.
The project’s lead admitted that early versions heavily borrowed from Ant Design and other libraries, and that some APIs were inspired by existing implementations without proper citations.
Since then, the team has updated the license, added proper attribution, and highlighted the specific components that referenced Ant Design, such as Grid, Tree, and Typography, as well as design inspirations from libraries like informed, Formik, and Material Component Web.
The commit fixing the attribution can be viewed at https://github.com/DouyinFE/semi-design/commit/eca375566a0451d9990a36e3b9a97547a20bb875 .
Signed-in readers can open the original source through BestHub's protected redirect.
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