A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can.
This is a big change!
Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging
Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.
We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.
But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.
Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.
(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf
which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.
I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.
This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.
LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."
As in their post:
"The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward."
This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!
We are seeing this in the world of digital media, where frivolous DMCA and YouTube takedown reports are used indiscriminately and with seemingly little consequence to the bad actor. Corporations are prematurely complying with bad actors as a risk reduction measure. The de jure avenues to push back on this are weak, slow, expensive, and/or infeasible.
So if you ask me what's the bigger threat right now, stricter or less strict enforcement, I'd argue that it's still generally the latter. Though in the specific case of copyright I'd like to see a bunch of the law junked, and temporal scope greatly reduced (sorry not sorry, Disney and various literary estates), because the de facto effects of it on the digital (and analog!) commons are so insidious.
I once had small talk with Lawrence Lessig after a conference of his, and when I told him that he was visibly shocked, as if I had told him I was raised to be a criminal.
Now I'm not sure what to think anymore.
There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.
The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
* narrow looking roadway * speed limit signs * your car has self driving * what everybody else is doing * speed limiter on your car * curvy road * bad weather * male or female * risk appetite * driving experience * experience of that route * perceived risk of getting caught
If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.
"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.
But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.
A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.
Speed cameras are another excellent example.
Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
Well said.
I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws.
It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them.
It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.
In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.
(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).
> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.
Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).
On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
I agree with the author that we are not prepared for the consequences of such a change and that it can lead to abuse on many instances.
The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.
...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.)
Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies.
---
Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.
For example, I've been cheated out of at least $100k net worth by the founder of a crypto project because he decided to abandon tech which was working and switched to a competitor's platform for no reason. Now I was already worried about repercussions outside of the legal system... This is crypto sector after all... But also, legally, there's no way I can afford to sue a company which controls almost $100 million in liquid assets and probably has got government regulators on their payroll... Even though it is a simple case, it would be difficult to win even if I'm right and the risk of losing is that they could seek reimbursement of lawyers fees which they seek to maximize just to make things difficult for me.
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
Former lawyer here, who worked at a top end law firm. Throwaway account.
In my experience, the legal system and lawyers in general are deeply aware of this. It's the average Joe who fails to realize this, particularly a certain kind of Joe (older men with a strong sense that all rules are sacred, except those that affect them, those are all oppressive and corrupt and may possibly justify overthrowing the government).
Laws are social norms of varying strength. There's the law (stern face) and then there's the law (vague raising of hands). If you owe a bank $2m and you pay back $1m, then you're going to run into the law (stern face). If you have an obligation to use your best efforts to do something, and you don't do it, then we can all have a very long conversation about what exactly 'best efforts' means in this exact scenario, and we're more in the territory of law (vague raising of hands).
Administrative obligations are the vaguest of all, and that's where lawyers are genuinely most helpful. A good lawyer will know that Department so and so is shifting into harsher enforcement of this type of violation but is less concerned about that type of violation. They know that Justice so and so loves throwing the book in this kind of case, but rolls their eyes at that other kind of case. This is extremely helpful to you as a client.
> And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Enforcement of laws is a political decision, and there is no way to ever escape this fact. If society gets concerned about something, politicians are going to mobilize old laws to get at it. If society relaxes about something, enforcement wanes. Drugs are an obvious example. A lot of the time the things society are concerned about are deeply stupid (is D&D satanic?), but in a democracy politicians are very sensitive to public sentiment. If you don't like the way the public debate is going, get involved.
> Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
The courts are only ever concerned about de jure legality. (It's the literal meaning of de jure!) There are other outlets for de facto legality in the legal system - e.g. the police can choose not to investigate, prosecutors can choose not to lay charges, or opt for lower-level charges, or seek a lenient sentence.
What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid.
I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
> "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired)
> © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD].
> This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
I'm sure they've already received offers from investors who wish to build the next torment nexus.
EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious
It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify.
"Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!
Unbelievable. This is why we can’t have nice things.
I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity.
Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
I even recall Baseball Mogul relied on the Lahman DB for a period of time. It does make me wonder if we'll see more of that.
We all have access to SOTA LLMs. If I want a "clean room" implementation of some OSS library, and I can choose between paying a third party to run a script to have AI rebuild the whole library for me and just asking Claude to generate the bits of the library I need, why would I choose to pay?
I think this argument applies to most straightforward "AI generated product" business ideas. Any dev can access a SOTA coding model for $20p/m. The value-add isn't "we used AI to do the thing fast", it's the wrapping around it.
Maybe in this case the "wrapping" is that some other company is taking on the legal risk?
It's an inevitable outcome of automatic code generation that people will do this all the time without thinking about it.
Example: you want a feature in your project, and you know this github repo implements it, so you tell an AI agent to implement the feature and link to the github repo just for reference.
You didn't tell the agent to maliciously reimplement it, but the end result might be the same - you just did it earnestly.
You need the right kind of person, in the right life circumstances, to have this idea before it happens for real. By having publicity, it becomes vastly more likely that it finds someone who meets the former two criteria, like how it works with other crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime). So thanks, Malus :P
Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use today.
because LLMs can't program anything of non-trivial complexity despite the persistent delusions from its advocates, same reason the lovers of OSS haven't magically fixed every bug in open source software.
Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)
While such tactics would render certain OSS software licenses absurd, the tactic itself, as a means to get around them, is entirely sound. It just reveals the flawed presupposition of such licenses. And I'm not sure there is really any way to patch them up now.
That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
There will be many questions asked, like why buy some SaaS with way too many features when you can just reimplement the parts you need? Why buy some expensive software package when you can point the LLM into the binary with Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.
But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.
But that's not true!
According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!!
I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.
"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
Funny but true.
* Many of the people maintaining FOSS are paid to do so; and if we counted 'significance' of maintained FOSS, I would not be surprised if most FOSS of critical significance is maintained for-pay (although I'm not sure).
* Publishing software without a restrictive license is not 'generous', it's the trivial and obvious thing to do. It is the restriction of copying and of source access that is convoluted, anti-social, and if you will, "insane".
* Similarly, FOSS is not a "miracle" of human cooperation, and it what you get when it is difficult to sabotage human cooperation. The situation with physical objects - machines, consumables - is more of a nightmare than the FOSS situation is a miracle. (IIRC, an economist named Veblen wrote about the sabotaging role of pecuniary interests on collaborative industrial processes, about a century ago; but I'm not sure about the details.)
* Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
* It is not insane to use FOSS from a "fiduciary standpoint".
Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.
In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
it is an illusion because this is a satire site.
For example, the Anthropic Rust C compiler could hardly have copied GCC or any of the many C compilers it surely trained on, because then it wouldn't have spat out reasonably idiomatic and natural looking Rust in a differently organized codebase.
Good news for Rust and Lean, I guess, as it seems like everyone these days is looking for an excuse to rewrite everything into those for either speed or safety or both.
They do say this:
> Is this legal? / our clean room process is based on well-established legal precedent. The robots performing reconstruction have provably never accessed the original source code. We maintain detailed audit logs that definitely exist and are available upon request to courts in select jurisdictions.
Unless they're rejecting almost all of open source packages submitted by the customer, due to those packages being in the training set of the foundation model that they use, this is really the opposite of cleanroom.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.
But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction.
Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month.
EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.
I'd cheer for a company like this.
It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
Then I don't think you've thought it through.
This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.
If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.
You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")
https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...
Agree, I said this in another comment, AI-generated anything should be public domain. Public data in, public domain out.
This train wreck in slow motion of AI slowly eroding the open web is no good, let's rip the bandaid.
I publish under AGPL and if someone ever took my project and washed it to MIT I would probably just take all my code offline forever. Fuck that.
I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.
Axiom of Reality: “Intellectual Property” does not exist.
Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons.
Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects.
So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”.
How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?
https://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/solemnly-swear-no-good/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...
It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?
Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
But I love it! The perfect response to the "clean room" AI re-implementation and re-licensing of whatever that library is called.
Took me a minute to recognize the satyre, good one boys.
Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose.
Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”.
Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.
> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries
Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends
I think they should take some responsibility!
It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".
bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky;
It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version?
I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.
>*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright*
Heh, ok. So, the thinking is:
1. You contract them.
2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company.
3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary.
4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!"
...
5. Profit.
This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code.
The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established.
The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness...
This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating").
The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
> order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages )
> $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee.
Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed
2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?
Full legal indemnification* Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
...
The MalusCorp Guarantee™ If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
*This has never happened because it legally cannot happen. Trust us.
The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents"
It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad)
We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.
Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage.
(I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)
> Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions.
since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room.
Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?
ROFL
So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.
