Just out of curiosity: if the original project was open source, why did you decide to restart from scratch?

I actually tried really hard not to

sent 15 emails over 9 months to the new owner, offering to help or even take over the repo but i had no replies.

Issues and PRs were ignored(you juste have to see the issues section of the report). Rebuilding from scratch was the only way to fix the licensing & continue the project i guess

So why didn't you fork it?

And what specifically were the licensing issues? workout.lol is MIT from what I can see.

the code was indeed MIT.

The licensing issue I referred to was about the videos: many of them came from paid/licensed sources

I think the missing context here is what is meant by “fix the licensing”. Both the original project and this new one are MIT, so naively there doesn’t seem to be an issue.

just fork it?

the original project was built in javascript with a NoSQL backend (mongo).

I wanted to move to a more "new", (robust?) and maintainable stack with TypeScript and a SQL-based backend (PostgreSQL)

This makes a lot more sense and sounds like a good move for the overall health of the project.

Open source just means the source code is available. It doesn't mean you can legally use it. That is, in fact, the whole point behind the most famous open source license, GPLv3: code is open source, but there are still restrictions on how you can use the code. I don't know about now (most projects I work on are MIT-licensed, these days), but there was rancor around the move from v2 to v3 because v3 was more restrictive.

'source available' means the source code is available. Open source comes with a whole set of guarantees [1] about free redistribution and derived works.

Copyleft licenses like the GPL come with extra guarantees that do not violate the core guarantees of open source software. Instead, they make them stronger. The 'restrictions' GPL imposes essentially boil down to this: "if you use (parts of) GPL software, you must give your users the same freedoms the GPL guarantees." GPLv3 and AGPL closed up loopholes that allowed people to bypass those clauses.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

Your link is to a politicized advocacy group, the OSI. Are you above, say, forty years old? You should remember, then, the arguments over introducing "libre" as a term because "open source" didn't describe those free redistribution rights.

Even if it was licensed under GPL, which it isn't, forking the project to create another open source project is allowed, as long as the fork is also GPL licensed.

But in this case the original project used the MIT license, so the only requirement is that it the form includes attribution to the original project.

It looks promising.

I retrieve error response when fetching exercise:

0:{"a":"$@1","f":"","b":"eETmgndxtv4Ar0i8Wync1"} 1:{"serverError":"An unexpected error occurred."}

My request: curl 'https://workout.cool/' \ -H 'accept: text/x-component' \ -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,pl-PL;q=0.8,pl;q=0.7' \ -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \ -H 'content-type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8' \ -b 'Next-Locale=en; _fbp=fb.1.1750253718188.954698194752805529' \ -H 'next-action: 7f80b017f78704b00d2411aebde5ba8318b475de6d' \ -H 'next-router-state-tree: %5B%22%22%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%5B%22locale%22%2C%22en%22%2C%22d%22%5D%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%22__PAGE__%22%2C%7B%7D%2C%22%2F%22%2C%22refresh%22%5D%7D%2Cnull%2Cnull%2Ctrue%5D%7D%5D' \ -H 'origin: https://workout.cool' \ -H 'pragma: no-cache' \ -H 'priority: u=1, i' \ -H 'referer: https://workout.cool/' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Google Chrome";v="137", "Chromium";v="137", "Not/A)Brand";v="24"' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"' \ -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \ -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \ -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \ -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36' \ --data-raw '[{"equipment":["PULLUP_BAR","BANDS","BODY_ONLY"],"muscles":["TRAPS","BACK","SHOULDERS","TRICEPS","FOREARMS","GLUTES","HAMSTRINGS","CALVES"],"limit":3}]'

Thanks a lot for reporting! The traffic from HN hit hard (which I didn’t expect tbh).

I’m working on stabilizing it and will have a fix in the next minutes / hour

Appreciate you testing it out! thanks again.

HN Kiss of death or love :-). You are #1 on the front page now, so that was expected. Can I say the HN audience is very health-conscious? :-)

Selected a few workouts and got this error - *Error loading exercises*. I'll try again after a few hours. Congratulations on the launch!!

Haha thank you! Wasn’t expecting this kind of attention so quickly tbh

The issue should be fixed RN !

Definitely feeling the HN kiss of traffic right now lol, Ii’m scaling things up and fixing the bottlenecks

Really appreciate you trying it out.

And yes seems like the HN crowd is more health-conscious than I thought. Loooove it !

Thanks again for the kind words and support!

Cool problems to have, enjoy the ride!

Thanks for doing this! I recently was looking at enhancing workout.lol and noticed that but was wondering what happened. I have some enhancements and think still an open PR on the original repo I will port over.

That would be amazing

I’d love to see your ideas make it into Workout.cool!!

Let me know if you need help porting the PRs îll support and merge contributions quickly.

Love it! Would be cool to be able to optionally select muscle groups first, i.e. before selecting equipment. Also, seeing all available exercises for a muscle group rather than the pre-defined 3 would help tailor the experience more.

Mhh yes that was a question.

Bcs a lot of beginners don’t know what to do with certain equipment, but they do know what they want to train.

That said, I’ll maybe make both paths easier and let users toggle between them!

PR ares welcome

Why muscles first?

You generally want to make sure you're working out specific muscles or muscle groups a certain of times each week and with a certain number of working sets, rather than "I have used $MACHINE recently so I need to do that today."

I only have dumbbells, so selecting the equipment first is actually ideal for me

Ah yes that makes sense! I would think of that as more of a pre-workout filter? Where you select the equipment you have available and it automatically filters out everything that requires equipment you don't have access to.

Yeah, that's what the feature is for, not "what equipment do I want to use".

Because the purpose of exercising is usually not to use a certain machine but to train a certain muscle (group).

The feature is definitely not meant to serve as option for what you want to use, but what you can use. You could use it that way, of course, but that's not what it's there for.

I was just poking around, but how/why aren't there issues with the videos now. Sure you're just embedding youtube videos, but what's to stop them from taking that down?

Are there really no open licensed workout-movement animations out there? That sounds like a fun beginner animation project honestly.

The videos currently embedded are "watermarked" and come from a partner app that granted permission to use them for this open-source project.

I wanted to make sure everything is legally safe and not just scraped or reused without rights.

Producing proper 3D exercise videos is actually VERY expensive we’re talking €10–20 per animation, or thousands of euros per month if you go through a good/high quality API provider. That’s why it's such a tough space for open-source tools to compete in.

Long-term, I'd love to help build a community-driven, open-licensed library of movement animations but until then, this partnership was the best balance between cost, legality, and quality.

Thanks for raising it

wow, its great tool

has muscle selection is so much more help full than 80+% apps on app store right now

Does that mean that i got to do a mobile app? Do you think its worth it ?

It could potentially help with discoverability. As it stands, I’d imagine it takes a very particular sort of search query (either “open source fitness” in Google or “fitness” on GitHub) to have a chance at finding this. Unless your target audience is only the intersection of FOSS-advocates and fitness folks, you might be limiting adoption.

With that said, the website works just fine on my phone.

Wow! You're a legend! Thank you!

Thanks for your comment !

Do we have any assurance that you won't sell it again?

To be clear: I never owned workout.lol, I was just the main contributor.

For the sell process, like with any open-source project whether it's an NPM package or anything else, there are no absolute guarantees... that's just the nature of open ecosystems...

But I've built Workout.cool with transparency in mind, no hidden business model, and self-hostable.

Just what I can tell you is this :

I've been passionate about fitness my whole life let's say. I started sports at 3 years old, and I've been into strength training for over 15 years.

I didn't build this to make money. I built it because I genuinely care and because I see more and more people missing out on the benefits of training, often overwhelmed by complexity, closed ecosystems, or paywalled apps, including people close to me, like my sister.

Hope that my reply counts for something...