[HN Gopher] Malus - Clean Room as a Service
___________________________________________________________________
Malus - Clean Room as a Service
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
https://malus.sh/blog.html
Author : microflash
Score : 941 points
Date : 2026-03-12 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (malus.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (malus.sh)
| noemit wrote:
| is the motto, "Don't be good?"
| psychoslave wrote:
| "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" and their seal is
| [?].
|
| 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...
| mushufasa wrote:
| "Change all your core software library dependencies to be
| unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds
| wise.....!!
| roughly wrote:
| Sounds like my CTO. Overuse of LLMs in c-suites is like overuse
| of weed by teenagers - it may not cause delusions, but it sure
| seems to make them worse.
| jakeydus wrote:
| Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out
| from realizing just how damaging both were/are.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I just hope we realize it before it's too late.
| fabioborellini wrote:
| Actually I have been told that replacements to (restricted
| subsets of) open source libraries, generated by LLM's, vendored
| next to our code using the dependency, cannot be vulnerable
| since they don't have cve's, and therefore they don't ever have
| to be maintained.
|
| That's how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Guaranteed CVE-free at time of delivery!
| ameliaquining wrote:
| Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is
| satire.
| adampunk wrote:
| For _now_
| schmeichel wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out, I genuinely was scratching my
| head and questioning if this site was serious.
| chilipepperhott wrote:
| Yeah, thank you. I was starting to get a little heated.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Same, I got as far as "Finally, liberation from open source
| license obligations." until I went back to the comments.
| frizlab wrote:
| haha did the same. that being said I'm convinced some
| people do think AI reimplementation actually means
| cleanroom...
| dcchambers wrote:
| For now...
| tgtweak wrote:
| The best satire is that which becomes reality.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I would posit that the best satire is that which holds a
| clear enough mirror to society that people choose for it to
| not come to pass.
| intrasight wrote:
| Best comment here!
| jajuuka wrote:
| I was wondering. I had heard chardet story and wouldn't be
| surprised to see others moving into that same space.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| The situation is a bit too Torment Nexus-y for my comfort,
| thank you very much
| Habgdnv wrote:
| At least you think that this is satire, until the author
| receives a DMCA from one of the big corps saying that he leaked
| the transcript of their last meeting
| kifler wrote:
| Too late. Someone's senior executive management has probably
| already seen it and spinning up a new project to implement it.
| civvv wrote:
| Luckily LLM's are nowhere near capable enough to pull this
| off for anything other than the likes of isEven()
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| W.r.t. intent, yes. But w.r.t. content, we are long past a
| situation where it is unrealistic enough to function as satire.
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It would also entirely obviate the need for those very same
| OSS licenses, if LLMs can simply do a clean-room
| reimplementation of any copywritten software whatsoever.
| kshacker wrote:
| It will be like Galaxy Quest - they saw the historical
| records, copied them and then ... still needed humans to help
| them :)
| Robdel12 wrote:
| It legit got me. An actual "whaaaaaatttt?" out loud and then I
| had to figure out why it was the top of HN haha.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I don't know - if you upload a package.json with any
| dependencies that map to real npmjs.com packages, it does lead
| you to a Stripe payment page which appears to be real... and it
| appears you'd be sending real money.
|
| Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)
| andriy_koval wrote:
| its partial satire. I kinda believe Claude/Codex spill lots of
| OSS code without license attribution for many millions of devs
| already.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It wouldn't be funny if it wasn't close to the truth.
| scatbot wrote:
| I know this is satire, but I would wish to see something like
| this for liberating proprietary & closed-source hardware
| drivers.
| bananzamba wrote:
| Malus Corporation = EvilCorp
| scblock wrote:
| Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the
| footer, among other things.
|
| "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."
| observationist wrote:
| Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will.
| I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing.
| Open the floodgates. Break the system.
|
| I'd cheer for a company like this.
|
| It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > I view this as an unmitigated good.
|
| 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...
| observationist wrote:
| I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the
| conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput.
| It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this
| happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with
| impending AI job loss across the board.
|
| We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible
| outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job
| losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial
| hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other
| companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer
| it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by
| corporations and individuals who already have significant
| wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social
| turmoil.
|
| Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio
| level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to
| stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be
| some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope
| with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for
| the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the
| Chicxulub asteroid.
| amiga386 wrote:
| It sounds like you'd advocate for accelerationism (by which
| I mean "to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against
| it")
|
| The end result could well be the people bringing out the
| guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian
| Jihad.
|
| But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to _race_ to
| those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more
| conservative future where they nip the scamming /
| copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.
|
| The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give
| enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many
| people just lose their minds and their moral backbone.
| Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans
| especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to
| begin with.
| observationist wrote:
| It's not naked accelerationism, I just don't want to see
| years and years of suffering and exploitation and chaos
| giving a permanent advantage to those already in a
| position to take that advantage. One significant industry
| is all it will take; light a fire under the ass of
| congress and the general public, get people motivated to
| start taking sensible steps to move towards UBI or some
| sort of Coasean scheme with nationalized shares
| distributed to people, or whatever. Doing anything is
| extraordinarily more effective than doing nothing as this
| plays out.
| DrammBA wrote:
| > I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn
| thing.
|
| 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.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Open source is good, washing open source licences is very bad.
|
| 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.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| Open sourcing all the things sounds fun right up until you hit
| the point where clean room claims collapse under real legal
| cross-examination. If you think companies with money on the
| line are just going to roll over and accept it all as fair play
| I'd like to introduce you to the concept of discovery at
| $900/hr. If your business model is a legal speedrun you better
| budget harder than you code.
| fallingmeat wrote:
| Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"
| bensyverson wrote:
| Oh no... VCs will see this and take it seriously
| akovaski wrote:
| I think we've already seen this with "AI writes a web-browser"
| type PR. I guess we can still look forward to when they make
| license evasion an explicit part of their marketing. Then I can
| wryly laugh when somebody robo-whitewashes leaked commercial
| software, knowing that they'll get sued anyways.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.
| ceayo wrote:
| yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke!
|
| > Those maintainers worked for free--why should they get credit?
|
| ROFL
| logdahl wrote:
| Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.
| rhoopr wrote:
| > You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously
| generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global
| economy to run on software that nobody technically owns,
| maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by
| licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human
| cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely
| insane.
|
| Funny but true.
| aprdm wrote:
| Isn't that the premise of Fallout ?
| dmbche wrote:
| Nope!
| killbot5000 wrote:
| It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via
| any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is
| considered insane.
| designerarvid wrote:
| Easily explained by the fact that writing some types of
| software and seeing people using it is fun. Some people take
| photos for free also.
|
| Doesn't apply everywhere though.
| tavavex wrote:
| What's this 'fun' you mention? As far as the incentives in
| our systems are concerned, anything that's not done in
| pursuit of monetary gain is certifiably insane. What really
| matters in life is using all the tricks, manipulation,
| abuse and loopholes to attain the biggest number in your
| asset counter. Anyone who doesn't follow the only thing
| that matters in life is alien, inhuman even. How do they
| not see it?
| eru wrote:
| The quote above didn't mention corporations at all.
| saulpw wrote:
| "nobody technically employs" strongly implies that this is
| not a corporate organization.
| jedberg wrote:
| " maintained by people that nobody technically employs"
| boondongle wrote:
| The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades
| who protect their profit making potential.
|
| Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you
| pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings
| are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are
| also freely available to be used within the margin of error
| of a professional or a layman?
|
| Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but
| if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it
| just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a
| world where others worth are protected. And history states,
| if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining
| trades/industries will let it die.
| teachrdan wrote:
| It's not clear to me what your argument has to do with the
| license laundering service that Malus (Malice?) is
| offering. Their stealing from the digital commons does
| nothing to address paying Doctors and Plumbers and
| Electricians.
| boondongle wrote:
| It's directed at the person I replied to. It's not
| directed at the top level OP or Malus which is hilarious,
| monetized satire.
|
| Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific
| skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned
| in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap.
| Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force
| for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant
| is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not
| anything unique about the job.
|
| "The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the
| public. In the end they're just labor at that point since
| I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians
| knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other
| person who hits that level when their earnings demand it
| in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people
| in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which
| is the scenario in Tech today.
|
| Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many
| other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it
| yet.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| The value from FOSS is the collaboration between all
| parties.
|
| There is a mutual agreement between all collaborating
| parties that "hey we ALL need these core fundamental
| building blocks of software. why dont we all collaborate in
| this open space?" And everyone wins.
|
| There is tremendous value in the Linux kernel, and these
| large open source programs. And this is basically an attack
| by corporations to attempt to privatize it all.
|
| It's nothing new. This is simply the latest example of
| capitalist "growth at any cost". We sailed past any
| immorality hazards a LONG time ago.
| einpoklum wrote:
| It's not true (and also not funny):
|
| * 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".
| eru wrote:
| > * Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-
| long licenses, I would even say that most developers read
| them.
|
| Well, it's one thing to read licenses as a human and another
| to read them as a lawyer.
|
| That's why it's useful to pick one of the standard licenses
| that lawyers have already combed over, even if it's a long
| one like the GPL.
| efreak wrote:
| Where do you see this? It doesn't appear to be in the website
| (if it's in the video, I didn't watch it but it's not in the
| subtitle file)
| RandomGerm4n wrote:
| This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that
| for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too
| lucrative from a business perspective.
| tetraca wrote:
| The people that will take this as a good thing unironically
| will just have their personal Yes Man do that work internally.
| Maxion wrote:
| Often OSS is used not because you want the software, but the
| software and the upkeep. So even with such a service, you're
| now just taking code in-house that you have to maintain as
| well.
| Spoom wrote:
| Realistically, if it in fact did take 5 minutes to do the
| cleanroom reimplementation, you could just process updates
| from the OSS source in realtime.
| tripdout wrote:
| The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of
| said packages regardless, right?
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| Yeah it's just a slightly more honest and simplified
| presentation of what LLMs providers do IMO.
| dakolli wrote:
| I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are
| (genuinely) ruining software.
|
| See: https://deploycel.org/
| amiga386 wrote:
| I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it
| ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's
| mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site
| only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from
| https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/
|
| 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?
| torginus wrote:
| I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time
| to realize this was fake-
| hmokiguess wrote:
| The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this
| is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things
| are going.
|
| EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at
| first, but still damn. Hilarious
| frenchie4111 wrote:
| lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an
| obvious giveaway in retrospect
| hmry wrote:
| It's perfectly realistic!
|
| E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after
| the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything
| you want, but actually allows its creator to view _you_ while
| manipulating you by selectively showing some things and not
| others.
| whacko_quacko wrote:
| Especially given that a popular open source project
| recently tried to do exactly that.
|
| https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
|
| I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate
| reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will
| have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which
| will take years and millions of dollars to resolve
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Not just "tried"; the current state is that they've
| _done_ so and are ignoring people telling them they
| cannot. The "destroy as an example to others" phase
| hasn't finished yet, but hopefully they'll get sufficient
| backlash from the projects they supposedly did this to
| work with to deter future attempts. e.g. they supposedly
| did this in order to make it part of the Python standard
| library, so hopefully the response from Python is a
| massive WTF and "nope".
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| In fairness to the original mythos that that particular
| family of awful companies has misused: the palantiri were
| in fact designed purely for far-seeing, and Sauron wasn't
| the creator of them, he just got his hands on one and
| corrupted it into a tool for manipulation.
| Aachen wrote:
| I didn't see it was satire (having only skimmed the site) until
| scrolling through the comments and seeing this fake review
| being quoted. That's when I went "surely not", checked the
| site, saw it was really there, and was quite relieved this is
| not yet an actual thing!
| comboy wrote:
| Under this name or not I think it's happening regardless..
| overfeed wrote:
| As any etymology/Latin nerd will tell you, "this name"
| (MalusCorp) literally translates to EvilCorp, everything
| about the site is over the top satire. I know Poe's law and
| all that, but I'm looking askew at commenters in this thread
| who fail to realize it as either only reading the headline,
| or are AI-controlled.
|
| Satire points out the absurd
| phpnode wrote:
| This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do
| this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not
| be building my business around this capability however
| spudlyo wrote:
| malus, mala, malum ADJ
|
| 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 'malus' (long a, feminine noun) means apple
| tree, and 'malus' (long a, masculine noun) means the mast of a
| ship.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Homonym of "malice" too. Honestly kind of a brilliant name.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Mal: us
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| I bet someone has already made this service for real.
| OJFord wrote:
| A lot of people, including perhaps the creator of this, feel
| that LLMs themselves are this service.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| It exists! It's called Claude Code.
| ge96 wrote:
| turd.png classy
| alsetmusic wrote:
| This is brilliant satire. Wonderful response to the "rewrite" of
| chardet.
|
| ^ For those who haven't been keeping up on the debacle.
| rgilton wrote:
| It's interesting that the focus is just on open source licenses.
| If one can strip licenses from source code using LLMs, then
| surely a Microsoft employee could do the same with the Windows
| source code!
| ebiester wrote:
| The frustrating thing is I also thought about this as a natural
| conclusion - but as a natural workflow that corporations will do
| when they see AGPL dependencies they want to use. (I also think
| there's a world where we start tightening our software bill of
| materials anyway.)
|
| 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.
| boje wrote:
| Today's satire is tomorrow's reality, if the last 50 or so years
| is anything to go by.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| ... _scanning_ ... ... _fuming_ ... ... _blood pressure rising_
| ... _sees a quote attributed to_ "Chad Stockholder Engineering
| Director, Profit First LLC" ...oh phew, thank god for that. I
| actually believed this could be real for a moment!
| Goofy_Coyote wrote:
| It took me too long to understand it's satire. BP went through
| stratosphere before I noticed.
|
| 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)
| Pannoniae wrote:
| This is satire but this is where things are heading. The impact
| on the OSS ecosystem is probably not a net positive overall, but
| don't forget that this also applies to commercial software as
| well.
|
| 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?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| This is going to bring back software patents.
| OJFord wrote:
| Where did they go?
| intrasight wrote:
| I was discussing that very point yesterday with a colleague
| after telling him of recent events. I pointed out that
| leaning on copyright/copyleft for software has always been a
| risky move.
| piperswe wrote:
| Considering my name's on a software patent submitted just
| last year, I don't think software patents have gone
| anywhere...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Oof, this is unironically amazing!
| ks2048 wrote:
| "I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source
| maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn't show up on
| quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp." * Chad Stockholder
| Engineering Director, Profit First LLC
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Certain views of OSS and its relation to commercial software
| always seemed to be fraught with highly voluntarist and
| moralizing attitudes and an intellectual naivete.
| agile-gift0262 wrote:
| if it were true that indeed was legal to rewrite and relicense
| open source code, would that also be true for non-open source
| code? as in, could someone do a similar rewrite of their
| employers proprietary code and release it publicly?
| bronlund wrote:
| If this site actually connects to Stripe, it's much more than
| just satire. It's a honeypot :D
| duiker101 wrote:
| Let's not give anyone ideas!
| 0xWTF wrote:
| There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour
| and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right
| now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.
| etchalon wrote:
| The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.
| phpnode wrote:
| it is straightforward to build this for real, here is my nearly
| one-shotted tldraw clone from a couple of weeks ago,
| https://x.com/c_pick/status/2028669568403578931 - the
| implementation side never saw the code, only the spec (in
| reality it did see the tldraw code in its training data, but
| you can't escape that anymore)
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I wonder about this training data. There's so much profit
| from open source code in training data, actually the most of
| the code it was taught was open source, shouldn't it be then
| free? Or at least open weight?
| phyzome wrote:
| Well, that's not what the page describes. You'd have to train
| an LLM on everything _except_ tldraw, then use that LLM for
| code generation.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| As a hypothetical.
|
| 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 ?
| kvgr wrote:
| If the AI could do good refactor of OS project, remove unused
| code/features and make the code more efficient. Than we really
| would be out of jobs :D
| typeiierror wrote:
| I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use
| help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but
| we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them
| has probably left the planet.
|
| 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?
| ensemblehq wrote:
| Interested to keep updated on this point. As a consultant, I've
| worked on transformation of legacy applications so this would
| help me greatly as well. We've worked on pretty archaic systems
| where no one knows how the system works even if we have the
| source code.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Well, what kind of desktop apps?
|
| Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to
| decompile.
| nivethan wrote:
| I've done a little bit of this and Claude is pretty great. Take
| the app and let Claude run wild with it. It does require you to
| be relatively familiar with the app as you may need to guide it
| in the right direction.
|
| 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.
| ekidd wrote:
| I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately
| complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it
| based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual
| user interface.
|
| 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.
| sourcegrift wrote:
| Amazon getting all excited hoping it's real.
| dspillett wrote:
| Amazon C*s calling Amazon Legal to ask if they could get away
| with implementing something like this internally, more like.
| jerf wrote:
| An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post
| (https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain
| in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't
| think the legal system or people in general have dealt with,
| which is that generally _costs matter_.
|
| 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.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement
| becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few
| people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement
| is.
|
| To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto
| points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
| igor47 wrote:
| Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few
| days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with
| perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing
| laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own
| children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were
| subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community
| service).
|
| 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
| eru wrote:
| Hmm, the problem is that judges and even police officers are
| generally saner than voters.
|
| Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain
| the worst excesses of the latter.
|
| Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to
| really take into account.
| lupire wrote:
| Judges and police officers have their own massive "worst
| excesses".
| vkou wrote:
| They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is
| beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally
| _any_ criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or
| better yet, committing any crime after being released for
| serving a different one.
| wat10000 wrote:
| How many times have we seen politicians advocate for laws
| against something, then do a 180 when one of their kids does
| it? Even if you had that system, I don't think it would work
| the way you say. People are dumb and politicians are no
| exception.
| sensanaty wrote:
| This is of course assuming that politicians aren't largely
| duplicitious and actually believe in a word they say. I grew
| up in Indonesia, and the number of politicians who were
| extremely anti-porn getting caught _watching porn in
| parliament_ is frankly staggering, yet alone the ones who are
| pro death penalty for drugs caught as being part of massive
| drug smuggling rings.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You raise an interesting point: One question that I think
| about developing countries: Most of them have higher
| _perception_ of corruption compared to highly developed
| (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce
| corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in
| 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they
| dramatically reduced corruption over this time period...
| but how? Another example, in the 1960s /1970s, Hongkong
| dramatically increased the pay for civil servants
| (including police officers) to reduce corruption. (It
| worked, mostly.)
| K0balt wrote:
| I live in a developing country. What I find is that the
| corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it
| was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more
| entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the
| local level this can look like a local ordinance where
| "only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is
| needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific
| contractor. Here you just figure out compliance with the
| person in charge.
| Arrowmaster wrote:
| Part of how the USA got that way is hilariously enough,
| anti-corruption policies.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Corruption is eliminated by properly aligning incentives.
| Capitalism is also all about properly aligning
| incentives. Moving to a more capitalism-heavy system
| usually causes countries to get much richer.
|
| Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before
| the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on
| favors more than it operated on money. This definitely
| isn't the case any more.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a
| few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with
| perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory
| sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if
| their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable
| groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of
| rehab or community service).
|
| The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same
| kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly
| design the specification (law) at the start, then persist
| with it without deviation from the original plan (at least
| for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still
| pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug
| users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.
| codethief wrote:
| > I always thought laws would get more just with perfect
| enforcement
|
| As Edward Snowden once argued in an AMA on Reddit, a zero
| crime rate is undesirable for democratic society because it
| very likely implies that it's impossible to evade law
| enforcement. The latter, however, means that people won't be
| able to do much if the laws ever become tyrannic, e.g. due to
| a change in power. In other words, in a well-functioning
| democratic society it must always be possible (in principle)
| to commit a crime and get away.
| holoduke wrote:
| The people should always have the opportunity and power to
| behead the government.
| coryrc wrote:
| That's tautological without the existence of cylons.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yep, not ever being able to break a law means that whatever
| the current set of laws are will never be able to be
| changed. If people can't ever push the boundaries of the
| law, we can never realize that the boundaries are in the
| wrong place.
|
| Take some examples of laws that have changed over time.
| Say, interracial marriage. It was illegal in many places to
| marry someone of a different race. If this had been
| perfectly enforced, no one would have ever dated or see
| couples of different races, and people would have had a lot
| harder of a time exploring and realizing that the law was
| wrong.
|
| The same thing could be said about marijuana legalization.
| If enforcement was perfect, no one would have ever tried
| marijuana, and there would have never been a movement to
| legalize by people who used it and decided it was not
| something that should be banned.
|
| We need to be able to push boundaries so they can move when
| needed.
| parpfish wrote:
| I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things
| like privacy and facial recognition.
|
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect
| enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn
| into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law
| enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however
| they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having
| law enforcement make the laws is bad.
|
| 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...
| Twey wrote:
| The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal
| system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that
| 'everybody's a criminal'; I don't know if that's necessarily
| true but I do definitely believe that a large number of
| 'innocent' people are criminals (by the letter of the law)
| without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to
| prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this
| doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be
| abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law
| precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen
| to know every law -- in a de facto way, rather than just the
| de jure way we currently have as a consequence of 'ignorance
| of the law is no excuse'. So an increase of precision in law
| enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of
| the law itself -- not a bad thing by any means, but also not
| an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to
| proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate,
| or tuned, to the public sentiment.
|
| Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders
| to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label
| as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
|
| If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal
| subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and
| punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal
| terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would
| have lasted.
|
| But this is a feature, not a bug.
| c-linkage wrote:
| Code is Law is pretty much demonstrates that it is not
| possible to precisely define law.
|
| https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-
| sparks...
|
| Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice
| and justice is not logical.
| pc86 wrote:
| "Law is about justice" is one of those things a good
| professor gets every 1L to raise their hands in agreement
| to before spending the next semester proving why that's
| 100% not the case.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Justice is part of a moral framework. Law is part of a
| procedural framework. You can structure the law to try to
| optimize for justice, but the law has never been about
| morality, the law is about keeping society operating on
| top of whatever structure is dominant.
|
| Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United
| States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not
| naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin
| because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year
| in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
| that an Indian descended man could not natural despite
| being Caucasian because his skin was not white.
|
| Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the
| rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were
| swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was
| because America at that time did not want non-white
| immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means
| something completely different than what it claims to
| mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.
| RobRivera wrote:
| I hold the opinion that law is not about justice.
| ff317 wrote:
| The reason speed limits make such a great example for these
| arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically,
| nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding
| on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is
| correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against
| assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes
| the direct harm itself illegal.
|
| Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more
| sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously
| arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad
| idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily
| enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the
| action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the
| distinction to focus on.
| hamdingers wrote:
| This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted
| enforcement in service of harassment and oppression.
| There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding
| feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of
| the time as that is the only fair option.
|
| If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems
| then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or
| design the road slower).
| airstrike wrote:
| A system that solves for absolute compliance in every
| individual case does not result in the emergence of a
| fairer society.
|
| There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction,
| that demonstrate as much.
| gbalduzzi wrote:
| > If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes
| problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed
| limit, or design the road slower).
|
| Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are
| having here?
|
| Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage
| on open source project replication.
|
| They need to change, because if they are perfectly
| enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are
| clearly against the intent of the law itself.
|
| The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast
| for the laws so be fair immediately
| ompogUe wrote:
| ^This. A large % of jurisprudence is in just trying to
| keep up with how tech disrupts society.
| randallsquared wrote:
| The reason that has to be done is precisely that the law
| has no common, well-architected rationale. The vast
| majority of law in common-law jurisdictions is ad hoc
| precedent from decades or centuries ago, patchwork laws
| that match current, ephemeral intuition about what the
| law should be, etc. Perfect and inevitable enforcement
| makes this situation a nightmare, given the expectation
| that the average US citizen commits multiple felonies per
| _day_. Something will have to give.
| namlem wrote:
| There is an upside: oppressing people who consistently
| engage in antisocial behavior is good and necessary.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| The whole point is that only some of those engaging in
| anti-social behaviour recieve punishment.
| encom wrote:
| If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of
| the time, it would be impossible to drive.
|
| >only to allow targeted enforcement in service of
| harassment and oppression
|
| That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will
| recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a
| 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me
| driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human
| life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably.
| Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road?
| Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I
| done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the
| passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be
| grounds for a warning instead.
| 5upplied_demand wrote:
| > If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of
| the time, it would be impossible to drive.
|
| Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras,
| isn't that exactly how they work?
|
| > That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will
| recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a
| 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.
|
| I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume
| competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that
| traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an
| inconsistent matter that best correlates with the
| driver's race.
|
| [0] https://www.aclu-il.org/press-releases/black-and-
| latino-moto...
|
| [1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-
| publications/news/2020/may/bl...
| hamdingers wrote:
| > If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of
| the time, it would be impossible to drive.
|
| If you find it impossible to follow a simple speed limit,
| then getting you off the road is the ideal outcome.
| terryf wrote:
| The speed limit example is a great one. Consider a road
| that has a 35mph limit. Now - which of the following
| scenarios is SAFER: a) I'm driving on the road in a brand
| new 4x4 porsche on a sunny day with great visibility and
| brand new tyres. Doing 40mph. b) I'm driving on the same
| road in a 70s car with legal but somewhat worn out tyres,
| in the dark, while it's raining heavily. Doing 35mph.
|
| Of course _technically_ option a is violating the law but
| no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case.
| Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.
| hamdingers wrote:
| The Cayenne would be safer going 35 instead of 40
| regardless of all other variables. It's a trivial physics
| question, kinetic energy is a function of mass and
| velocity.
| terryf wrote:
| I meant a 911 but thank you for answering a completely
| different point than what I was making.
| okasaki wrote:
| Not really? If you're caught with burglary tools on
| private property that's still illegal even if you only
| took one step.
|
| Likewise if act in a way that makes someone feel that
| you're going to hit them that's assault regardless of
| whether you actually ever touch them.
|
| etc. Many such cases.
| derefr wrote:
| I think I would expect certain laws that are currently
| considered statutory / strict-liability laws, to be
| shifted to instead constitute only "evidence of
| negligence" and/or act as "aggravating conditions."
|
| So, in the case of speeding:
|
| - Speeding _on its own_ would only automatically
| "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell
| you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while
| after they pull you over, to ensure you don't _start_
| speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if
| you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't
| actually give them any powers that private citizens don't
| have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for
| harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search
| warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers
| per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal
| damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into
| the specified location, destroying any property therein,
| etc.)
|
| - But speeding _while in the process of_ committing some
| other "actual" crime, or speeding that _contributes to_
| some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating
| factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the
| other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other
| act.
|
| We might also then see a tweak for "threshold
| aggravations", such that e.g.
|
| - Speeding while also doing _some other_ dumb thing --
| having your brake-lights broken, say -- may be considered
| to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an
| arrest+charge, even though none of the individual
| violations has a penalty when considered independently.
|
| This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where
| there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere,
| maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is _all_
| they notice someone doing, they 'd just be catch-and-
| release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them,
| and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which
| is actually usefully deterrent on its own, _if_ there are
| enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over
| and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can 't
| just "not pull over" because they know there are no
| penalties involved; they would still be considered
| police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as
| always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run
| from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase
| you!)
|
| ---
|
| Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its
| natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it
| could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the
| bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at
| 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But
| miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a
| "driving recklessly _for your reaction speed_ " charge,
| into an actual crime.
| namlem wrote:
| Imperfect enforcement is a feature as often as it is a bug.
| You can't make "antisocial behavior" in general illegal but
| you can make certain behaviors (loitering, public
| intoxication) illegal and selectively enforce against only
| those who are behaving in an antisocial manner. Of course the
| other edge of this sword is using this discretion to blanket
| discriminate against racial or class groups.
| beagle3 wrote:
| The existing laws are rarely well specified enough for
| precise enforcement, often on purpose.
|
| You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It's
| as simple as that.
|
| The HN favorite in this respect is "fair use" under
| copyright. It isn't well specified enough for "precise
| enforcement". How do you suggest we approach that one?
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Yup :P
|
| 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!
| degamad wrote:
| If they really believed that their process eliminated any
| licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open
| source projects?
|
| High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and
| there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation
| of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after
| such a small market?
|
| I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal,
| they just think that they can get away with it because
| they're less likely to get sued.
|
| (I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and
| it's all just a really good satire - after all, they
| blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
| Pannoniae wrote:
| >If they really believed that their process eliminated any
| licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to
| open source projects?
|
| Because this is satire by FOSS people :)
| clickety_clack wrote:
| De jure, there is no difference between de facto and de jure.
| De facto there is.
| cuu508 wrote:
| > We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error
|
| > 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?
| Ntrails wrote:
| Yeah, _I 'd have to go slower_????
|
| Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based
| enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in
| people speeding and braking down to the limit as they
| approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by
| their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because
| of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce
| incidence of speeding.
|
| Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed
| cameras) resolve this pretty well.
| diacritical wrote:
| > would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the
| enforcement was enforced by a robot
|
| The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.
| cuu508 wrote:
| OK, but that would be a consequence of the specific
| enforcement method, not a consequence the law becoming de
| facto stricter due to stricter enforcement.
| lupire wrote:
| For one thing, the speed limit is _intentionally_ set 5-10mph
| too low, specifically to make it easier to prove guilt when
| someone breaks the "real" speed limit.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
|
| While it is true that many people _do_ speed, that doesn 't
| make their speeding "the real speed limit".
| pfortuny wrote:
| Not exactly the same but at least in Spain, the cost of
| constructing a new building subject to all the regulations
| makes them completely unafforfable for low salaries.
|
| (There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are
| crazy).
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting
| about it for years.
|
| "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.
| seethishat wrote:
| The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is
| that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law.
| Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding
| to avoid a collision, etc.
|
| 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.
| arcticfox wrote:
| The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have
| them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you
| speed through them. Put an exception in the law for
| emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife
| giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to
| avoid a collision
|
| I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason
| because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding
| leads to direct worse consequences.
|
| Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding
| increases the risk of accident and especially the
| consequences of an accident.
|
| I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation,
| so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk
| by speeding.
|
| The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the
| time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
| tekne wrote:
| E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to
| waiting)
|
| Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad
| thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would
| you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance
| of losing 10$?
|
| Depends how much money you have, but it can be a
| _perfectly_ rational decision.
| tinier_subsets wrote:
| The "wife giving birth" exception for speeding is always so
| amusing to me.
|
| In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10
| miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that
| means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital.
| Realistically, "speeding" in this scenario probably means
| something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5
| minutes.
|
| In other words, you just significantly increased your
| chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife,
| yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially
| arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner.
|
| Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly
| more ridiculous, since you can't teleport yourself, and if
| the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a
| difference, then driving someone to the ER is a
| significantly worse option than starting first aid while
| waiting for EMTs to arrive.
| acuozzo wrote:
| I live 1.6 miles from my county hospital.
|
| If my wife is having a stroke, I can definitely pick her
| up, toss her in the car, and get to the ER faster than an
| ambulance can reach my house.
|
| As I'm sure you know, every second counts when it comes
| to recovery from a stroke.
|
| What kind of first aid do you give to someone having a
| stroke anyway?
| adamweld wrote:
| No, that's not the reason why people speed. True emergencies
| are a rounding error.
|
| The real reason is that speed limits are generally lower than
| the safe speed of traffic, and enforcement begins at about
| 10mph over the stated limits.
|
| People know they can get away with it.
|
| If limits were raised 15% and strictly enforced, it would
| probably be better for society. Getting a ticket for a valid
| emergency would be easy to have reversed.
| mlyle wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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).
| tekne wrote:
| I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality
| where _everyone_ gets what was previously the worst outcome
| is... probably worse.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Many times when _politicians_ get to suffer the full
| effects of their laws, the laws quickly change for the
| better.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This is my problem with Americans and their "but the
| constitution" arguments.
|
| The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before
| phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in
| common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications
| networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media,
| unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the
| constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd
| totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure
| that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun
| lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone.
|
| But since having 300 million people have a detailed,
| nuanced discussion about _anything_ is impossible, everyone
| works at the edges.
| schoen wrote:
| There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and
| Suzanne Scotchmer
|
| 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.
| sweetjuly wrote:
| This has also been a common theme in recent decades with
| respect to privacy.
|
| 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.
| unreal37 wrote:
| I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to
| track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They
| have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not
| legal for them to read the message inside.
|
| And this same principle allows them to build massive
| friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The
| government knows every single person you've communicated with
| and how often you communicate with them.
|
| It was never designed for this originally.
| kibwen wrote:
| Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I spend a lot of time thinking
| about how laws, in practice, are not _actually_ intended to be
| perfectly enforced, and not even in the usual selective-
| enforcement way, just in the pragmatic sense.
| miki123211 wrote:
| And this goes both ways.
|
| 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."
| cortesoft wrote:
| I have some lawyer friends, who work as internal council to
| companies, that are already experiencing this.
|
| People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs
| and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty
| much meaningless, and should be ignored.
|
| However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to
| have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit,
| and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though.
|
| So people can generate and send millions of legal claim
| instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one.
|
| The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
| popalchemist wrote:
| If you had to put a name to this phenomenon, what would it be?
| encom wrote:
| >https://malus.sh/blog.html
|
| 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.
| tmoravec wrote:
| Privacy protection has the exact same issue. Wiretapping laws
| were created at the time there was literally a detective
| listening to a private phone conversation as it was happening.
| Now we record almost everything online, and processing it is
| trivial and essentially free. The safeguards are the same but
| the scale of privacy invasion is many orders of magnitude
| different.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Realistically, those are three completely different policies
| in every way that matters.
|
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| ...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.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of
| corruption can be done away with right now with modern
| technology.
|
| 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.
| sigmar wrote:
| >Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source
| project from scratch.
|
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| > 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.
| ramon156 wrote:
| blegh, i like the motivation but why _again_ and _again_ do you
| need to write the content of the page with Slop-LLM-GPT? Your
| motive and points are valid, why waste it on a word filter that
| cannot capture it?
| petterroea wrote:
| Now this is a conversation piece
| cloverich wrote:
| 1. Best part of this (satirical) post is, the service they offer
| isn't really needed. LLM's can do this already for small
| projects, and soon likely will for large ones too. You don't need
| a company to do this, we all have the LLM tooling to do it.
| Critical we're all spending time thinking about what that means
| in a thoughtful way.
|
| 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?
| comrade1234 wrote:
| So they recreate the open source project by using an llm that was
| trained in the open source project's source code.
| mapcars wrote:
| Heh, why don't you do the opposite - recreate proprietary
| software with open source license
| intrasight wrote:
| I expect that thousands of people are now doing just that. Most
| proprietary software is just a shiny UI in front of a crappy
| database schema.
| utopiah wrote:
| Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place
| for them.
|
| 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?!
| karel-3d wrote:
| It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are
| people that worked previously for foss communities.
| fladrif wrote:
| Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its
| community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM.
|
| It's great within the context of people who understand it,
| enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But
| outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and
| dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical
| media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could
| laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
| darkwater wrote:
| If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if
| pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest
| be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
| lupire wrote:
| PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of
| satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because
| people pretend it's truth.
| dymk wrote:
| That wasn't people weaponizing satire, that was people
| just making weapons
| fladrif wrote:
| Unfortunately it's not too bad for them, it's too bad for
| everyone they're around. They aren't the ones that lose
| out when we start dismantling open source communities.
| svnt wrote:
| There is an overlay of smeared poop on one of the license
| files... is that something you are seeing on typical tech
| company landing pages?
|
| The company is literally named "bad/evil."
| mcherm wrote:
| No one who understands the first thing about this topic
| could possibly have read that web page and not realized
| that it was satire.
|
| "Those maintainers worked for free--why should they get
| credit?"
|
| "Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you
| could help strangers."
|
| "For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky
| credit to maintainers."
|
| "Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore
| subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize
| software copyright"
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something but big corps do this, right?
| I legitimately expect folks like Musk and Zuckerberg to
| say these things. I get why that's exactly the reason
| it's satire but it's a little too close to the truth for
| me to chuckle about it.
| fladrif wrote:
| This is because you're already in that mindset.
|
| Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know
| too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to
| use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that
| corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is satire, but the very notion of open source license
| obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not
| require you to publish your purely _internal_ changes to the
| code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI
| can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of
| any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with
| a proprietary copyright isn 't going to exactly save you
| either.
| eru wrote:
| No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish
| internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you
| have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your
| own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a
| loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)
| Ethee wrote:
| The point he's making is that who is going to actually
| enforce that? If I take something that has that license and
| make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the
| underlying premise here.
| dymk wrote:
| The courts?
|
| Google "examples of GPL enforced in court" for a few
|
| Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a
| whistleblower broke their NDA?
| Ethee wrote:
| Your point is circular, let me bring it all around. If I
| make a 'clean-room' implementation using an LLM of a
| software that has a GPL license. How does the court
| enforce that my black box didn't use the original
| software in any way if there's no way to know? Does
| having that software as part of it's training corpus
| automatically enroll all output as GPL enforceable? This
| is essentially the question some courts are attempting to
| answer right now.
| piperswe wrote:
| Those clauses exclude those licenses from some very
| important definitions of free/open-source software. For
| example they would fail the Desert Island Test for the
| Debian Free Software Guidelines.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| The Debian project guidelines are not the ultimate
| arbiter of what is and isn't free software, they are just
| some of many useful guidelines to consider. Another
| useful guideline is that the user shall have freedom.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| You are either talking about a license nobody is using (at
| least I've never heard of it) or misconstruing what the
| AGPL obligates you to do.
|
| I am going to assume it's the latter.
|
| If you in your house take an AGPL program, host it for
| yourself, and use it yourself, nothing in the AGPL
| obligates you to publish the source changes.
|
| In fact, even if you take AGPL software and put it behind a
| paywall and modify it, the only people who the license
| mandates you to provide the source code for are the people
| paying.
|
| The AGPL is basically the GPL with the definition of "user"
| broadened to include people interacting with the software
| over the network.
|
| And the GPL, again, only requires you to provide the source
| code, upon request, to users. If you only distribute GPL
| software behind a paywall, you personally only need to give
| the source to people paying.
|
| Although in both these cases, nothing stops the person
| receiving that source code from publishing it under its own
| terms.
| utopiah wrote:
| "given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room
| reimplementation of any published program whatsoever"
|
| I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm
| arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation
| when the open source code is most likely in the training
| data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT
| the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but
| wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive for most, if not
| all, projects?
| bananamogul wrote:
| If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be
| released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was
| performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be
| impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look
| at the GNU code.
|
| But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's
| different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a
| compare and see if there are any parts that were copied.
| It's certainly possible to clone GNU grep without copying
| any code and I don't think it would fail any copyright
| claims just because the GNU grep code is in the wild.
|
| If that was the case, the moment any code is written under
| the GPL, it could never be reimplemented with a different
| license.
|
| So instead of a human cloner, I use AI. Sure, the AI has
| access to the GPL code - every intelligence on the planet
| does. But does that mean that it's impossible to
| reimplement an idea? I don't think so.
| iwontberude wrote:
| What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case
| law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action
| is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say
| that replicating and disseminating code with the express
| purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright
| and why it exists in the first place.
|
| Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not
| mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea
| really does matter when we are talking about defrauding
| intellectual property holders and stealing their
| opportunity.
| bananamogul wrote:
| "Reasonable people would say that replicating and
| disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding
| copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists
| in the first place."
|
| But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The
| FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it
| from scratch under a different license.
| nightshift1 wrote:
| This rewrite of GNU coreutils to rust comes to mind
| https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
| iwontberude wrote:
| Civil War Hospital Clean Room equivalent
| nearlyepic wrote:
| Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the
| way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?
|
| The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the
| people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the
| original source material, they were just given a
| specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).
|
| If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates"
| something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
|
| At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the
| LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all
| moot.
| fmbb wrote:
| > If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates"
| something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
|
| I didn't RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they
| mean you feed the code to "one" LLM and tell it to write a
| specification. Then you give the specification to "another"
| LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as
| evidence for creating a malicious copy
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| First I thought this is about manufacturing. Like semiconductor
| fabs requirement for room cleanness.
| glenstein wrote:
| I first encountered the concept of "clean room" in the context of
| Sean Lahman's free baseball stats database. While technically
| baseball stats are free, their compiling and manner of
| presentation in any given format may be claimed as proprietary by
| any particular provider. And so there's an extensive volunteer
| effort from baseball fans to "clean room" source them from
| independent sources such that they are verifying the stats
| independently of their provenance as a legally permitted basis
| for building out the database.
|
| 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.
| v9v wrote:
| Thought this was about semiconductor cleanrooms at first. Any
| startups doing that?
| CodeCompost wrote:
| I know this is satire but we're in the process of rewriting the
| .NET Mediatr library because ... it's nothing but a simple design
| pattern packaged as a paid nuget package. We don't even need LLMs
| to reprogram it.
|
| So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
| pringk02 wrote:
| > per package = max( $0.01, size_kb x $0.01 )
|
| > 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
| neya wrote:
| You know the satire is so good that people actually confused this
| for something real:))
| bingemaker wrote:
| It will be nice to know how many legal personnel fell for this
| trip. Maybe a leaderboard :D
| keeda wrote:
| The name was too much of a giveaway. I just hope that somebody
| who inevitably builds this for real is self-aware enough to name
| themselves so transparently.
|
| 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.
| n0r0n1n wrote:
| Can we stop with the AI slop here? Last chance then I have to
| look elsewhere for real content.
| forvelin wrote:
| they really had an entertaining presentation in fosdem 2026 about
| this. bit too noisy for my taste but regardless:
|
| https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
| aleksi wrote:
| I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open
| source (as you could guess from my profile, that's a topic dear
| to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my
| life.
| izucken wrote:
| Some parties wouldn't be thrilled about their "source available"
| getting cleaned this way. So when this gets completed it would
| only "clean" real open source that can't afford legal trouble.
| Satirically structured LLM text is not a defence.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| The irony of course is that this service already exists. It's
| called Claude Code (or Codex, etc...) and it costs $200 / month.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| > 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.*
|
| I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
| kypro wrote:
| The satire is A-grade.
|
| 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.
| danorama wrote:
| Poe's Law just smacked me upside the head on this one. Hard.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN
| post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so
| AI built one for me":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361
|
| 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.
| tavavex wrote:
| This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone
| done this for real? There's enough people with the right
| knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal
| gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to
| litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is
| someone already working on this, and we're just living out the
| last good days of OSS?
| imiric wrote:
| > why hasn't anyone done this for real?
|
| WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.
| tavavex wrote:
| Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many
| open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-
| dance about never seeing the source code and separating the
| system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do
| that yet?
| imiric wrote:
| Because that's impossible. Any "robot" that can generate
| code must be trained on massive amounts of code, most of
| which is open source.
| sdwr wrote:
| And how are you supposed to guarantee equivalent
| functionality by analyzing "README files, API docs, and
| type definitions"?
| dymk wrote:
| The joke is that you don't.
| Nolski wrote:
| It's described on the web page but it's by having 2
| agents. One has access to the code and one doesn't.
| fmbb wrote:
| Are they the same model?
|
| Not that it matters, I just think the joke is more fun if
| they are different.
| preisschild wrote:
| not a lot of code is public domain and thus not a lot of
| training data is available
| phyzome wrote:
| For each project you want to rip off, you'd have to first
| train an entirely new LLM on all sources _except_ for the
| target project. Prohibitively expensive.
| Aachen wrote:
| There's a lot of things you _could_ do to be malicious towards
| other people with minimal effort, yet strangely few people do
| it. Virtually everyone has morals, and most people 's are quite
| compatible with society (hence we have a society) even if small
| perturbations in foundational morals sometimes lead to
| seemingly large discrepancies in resultant actions
|
| 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
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Also, there's a difference between "willing to do a bad thing
| for money" and "actively searching out a bad thing, then
| proactively building a whole company out of it in the hopes
| of making money."
|
| It's the difference between a developer taking a job at
| Palantir out of college because nobody had a better offer,
| and a guy spending years in his basement designing "Immigrant
| Spotter+" in the hopes of selling it to the government. Sure,
| they're both evil, but lots of people pick the first thing,
| and hardly anybody does the second.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| What do you mean nobody has done it?
|
| 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.
| ash_091 wrote:
| What would be the incentive for someone to do this for real?
|
| 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?
| bob1029 wrote:
| The bottleneck is trust and security. I'd rather defenestrate
| 3rd party libraries with a local instance of copilot than send
| all my secret sauce to some cloud/SaaS system.
|
| Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use
| today.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >why hasn't anyone done this for real?
|
| 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.
| iepathos wrote:
| This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The
| 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination
| happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't
| claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the
| commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's
| patterns and edge cases baked into its weights.
|
| 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.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because [...]_
|
| it is an illusion because this is a satire site.
| melvinram wrote:
| _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._
|
| :)
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| "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?"
| gwern wrote:
| The solution here seems to be to impose some constraint or
| requirement which means that literal copying is impossible
| (remember, copyright governs _copies_ , it doesn't govern
| _ideas_ or _algorithms_ - that would be 'patents', which
| essentially no open source software has) or where any 'copying'
| from vaguely remembered pretraining code is on such an abstract
| indirect level that it is 'transformative' and thus safe.
|
| 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.
| pron wrote:
| > copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or
| algorithms
|
| The second part is true. The first is a little trickier. The
| copyright _applies_ to some fixed media (text in this case)
| rather than the idea expressed, but the _protections_ extend
| well beyond copies. For example, in fiction, the narrative
| arc and "arrangement" is also protected, as are adaptations
| and translations.
|
| If you were to try and write The Catcher in the Rye in
| Italian completely from memory (however well you remember it)
| I believe that would be protected by copyright even if not a
| single sentence were copied verbatim.
| neilv wrote:
| I think this site is either satire, or serious but with a
| certain kind of humor in which both they and the reader know
| they're lying (but it's in everyone's interest to play along).
|
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This is definitely a parody though, not a real service.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| This site is an obvious parody, but like most comedy these
| days it betrays the severity of the issues happening today.
| briandw wrote:
| Obviously satire, but it will clearly be what happens in the
| future (predicting here, I'm not endorsing this practice). We
| can scratch train a new LLM on code generated from
| "contaminated" LLMs. We can then audit all the training data
| used and demonstrate that the original source wasn't in the
| training data. Therefore the cleanroom implementation holds.
| Current LLM training is relying less and less on human
| generated code. Just look at the open source models from China.
| They rely heavily on distilling from other models. One
| additional point. Exposure to the original source isn't enough
| to show infringement. Linus looked at UNIX source before
| writing linux.
| lxe wrote:
| Distinguished staff level trolling
| asimpletune wrote:
| This is an art project right? ...right?
| tonymet wrote:
| edit: it's satire. but likely not too far off from the reality in
| 6 months.
|
| > 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.
| badrequest wrote:
| Was malice.sh taken?
| copperx wrote:
| Are licenses even enforceable now? Given that the law is not
| being followed in the United States anymore?
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Everything is enforceable by the rich, nothing is enforceable
| by the poor
| kpcyrd wrote:
| I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody
| attempting this approach for real):
|
| https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
|
| https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
| lupire wrote:
| That's worth its own submission and discussion.
| alberto-m wrote:
| It has been submitted last week, happy reading:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
| ylere wrote:
| It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6
| without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code
| in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the
| licensing header):
| https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
| codethief wrote:
| Wow, I did not expect such perfect reproduction. Link to the
| actual source code (before being rewritten):
|
| https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar.
| ..
| torginus wrote:
| This comes with the uncomfortable implication that its
| impossible to tell actually to what extent are LLMs pulling
| together snippets of GPLd code, and to what extent is that
| legally acceptable.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > and to what extent is that legally acceptable.
|
| De-jure, not at all.
|
| Parallel creation is a very minimal defense to copyright
| infringement claims. It is practically impossible to prove
| in humans, to much annoyance of musicians. "Go prove in a
| court that you have never heard this song, not even in the
| background somewhere".
|
| LLMs having been trained on all software they could get
| their hands on will fail this test. There is no parallel
| creation claim to be had. AI firms love to trot out the
| "they learn just like humans" which is both false and
| irrelevant; It's copyright when humans do it to. If you
| view a GPL'd repo and later reproduce the code
| unintentionally? Still copyright infringement.
|
| De-facto though, things are different. The technical
| details behind LLMs are irrelevant. AI companies lie and
| frustrate discovery, whilst begging politicians to pass
| laws legalizing their copyright infringement.
|
| There won't be a copyright reckoning, not anymore. All the
| dumb politicians think AI is going to bail out their
| economies.
| pera wrote:
| There are a lot of examples like that since the first
| announcement of GitHub Copilot in 2021, search for
| (copying) " _verbatim_ " in this submission:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266
|
| Here is a more recent example I found in Cursor's _browser
| experiment_ from January:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661236
| alexwebb2 wrote:
| Wow. The guy who's been thanklessly maintaining the project for
| 10+ years, with very little help, went way out of his way to
| produce a zero-reuse, ground-up reimplementation so that it
| could be MIT licensed... and the very-online copyleft crowd is
| crucifying him for it and telling him to kick rocks.
|
| Unbelievable. This is why we can't have nice things.
| RobertoG wrote:
| That's funny.
|
| 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.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a
| tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it
| completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect
| other people who can't think for themselves."
|
| 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
| himata4113 wrote:
| Wait this is joke, yep this is a joke... Wait it's not a joke why
| are people taking this seriously? Ok good this is a joke wait
| it's REAL?
| fraywing wrote:
| The smells suspiciously like a well positioned gag that is
| secretly seeking VC attention. The emotional reaction turned
| attention seeking feels a bit like having ulterior motives... or
| maybe Moltbook has made me paranoid?
| ultratalk wrote:
| Am I the only one who saw the title and thought it was about
| physical clean-rooms?
| jollyllama wrote:
| No
| tekawade wrote:
| How is this legal. Unless it's trained excluding *all* open
| source code it's not legal.
|
| 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.
| Thrymr wrote:
| You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully:
|
| > 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
| KronisLV wrote:
| I feel like we live in an interesting time, where you have to
| second guess whether someone would actually build something like
| this. Like, the language is very tongue in cheek, but given how
| messed up copyright law is, you'd think that by now someone would
| be doing this, and proudly.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| I ate the onion. But in my defense, people are really putting
| forward this argument to relicense from GPL to MIT:
|
| https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
| Perz1val wrote:
| I'd have mined the copied libraries with something that makes it
| possible to later change terms and extract fees, as it'd be
| expected that nobody reads the terms for such service
| Sardtok wrote:
| Before I visited the site, I was really confused. First, the name
| means bad, as in evil. Second, I couldn't understand what CRaaS
| was supposed to be.
|
| But I love it! The perfect response to the "clean room" AI re-
| implementation and re-licensing of whatever that library is
| called.
| edelbitter wrote:
| >whatever that library is called
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
| ftumminello wrote:
| Bruh this feels evil hahaha
| jabedude wrote:
| This is quite literally the end of open source. projects will
| find themselves in the position of making their test suites
| private to avoid being sherlocked like this
| e12e wrote:
| > Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source
| code.
|
| 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...
| sigbottle wrote:
| I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and
| ecosystem fragmentation issues.
|
| 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.
| TheMiddleMan wrote:
| Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an
| agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality
| and document it. Then have it build based on the document?
| Jerry2 wrote:
| From their front page:
|
| >*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 .
| detaro wrote:
| whoosh
| p_j_w wrote:
| I know this is satire, but I worry that it's giving some scumbags
| out there ideas.
| fuddle wrote:
| > MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for
| any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt
| spirals resulting from the use of our services.
|
| I think they should take some responsibility!
| ragazzina wrote:
| Why only FOSS? Why not Wikipedia?
|
| 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.
| STRiDEX wrote:
| aren't you describing what elon already did
| https://grokipedia.com/
| b3n wrote:
| This was already done, see: Grokipedia.
| lukev wrote:
| So Grokipedia?
| 453yuh46 wrote:
| Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and
| every nation and every political leaning has rights to have
| their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style
| of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really
| irritating. Wikipedia for a time being had already different
| POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that
| does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a
| world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that
| place already exists where that is a case and that is a
| graveyard.
| teeray wrote:
| The law should be updated to limit clean room reimplementation to
| a strictly human endeavor. Person, in a faraday cage room, with a
| machine that is too underpowered to run local LLMs. Reference
| material (stack overflow archives, language docs, specs, etc) are
| permitted.
| floathub wrote:
| Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!
| gmerc wrote:
| See also: claw-guard.org/adnet, ai-ceo.org and ai-chro.org in
| this category
| temp123789246 wrote:
| Theory: Any system, legal or otherwise, that denies the Axioms of
| Reality, will eventually fail.
|
| Axiom of Reality: "Intellectual Property" does not exist.
| mcherm wrote:
| The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer
| owns the resulting code.
|
| 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.
| semiquaver wrote:
| If you're referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not
| binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C.
| Circuit. And it only applies to "pure" AI-generated works; it
| did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be
| copyrightable.
| bananamogul wrote:
| Though here, the purpose is still served.
|
| If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it
| ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted,
| what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the
| GPL.
| metalcrow wrote:
| This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot
| _own_ copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.
| aero_code wrote:
| No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post
| was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art
| generated by artificial intelligence without human input
| cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law":
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-
| co...
| ryoshoe wrote:
| Could the prompt used to generate the art be considered
| human input, or is it that a human must to make some
| contribution to the art for it to be copyrightable?
| neutrinobro wrote:
| Ah yes, how apropos, a "modest proposal" for a new AI era.
| mikelitoris wrote:
| Clean room was a poor choice of words... I thought it was an
| actual clean room for semiconductor devices :(
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's already a term of art used for this very purpose.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
| headgasket wrote:
| interesting name. The opposite of a bonus. So what is, the fact
| that your fork looses the thousands of eyes (meat and ai) that
| spot and fix bugs and security leaks?
| jaredchung wrote:
| Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to
| see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my
| desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting
| it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they
| actually provide the literal service they're satirizing?
|
| How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually
| generate output?
| Nolski wrote:
| Is it satire? Or is it a warning?
| jaredchung wrote:
| If it's a warning, it's a warning that also delivers the
| thing it's warning about.
| arrsingh wrote:
| It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN
| comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could
| be a way for OSS devs to get paid.
|
| 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.
| devy wrote:
| LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave
| it away immediately:
|
| > "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)
|
| > (c) 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.
| yonz wrote:
| I almost lost it, didn't realize it was satire until I came
| back to these comments
| 85392_school wrote:
| If you don't have any contributors, you could just directly
| relicense without rewriting the whole codebase. If you do, it
| would be rude to do this.
| exceptione wrote:
| I am only 50% certain that your idea is expanding on the
| satire, if not: project owners can provide dual licensing. I'm
| sorry if you are serious and didn't understand you.
| killerstorm wrote:
| You need a legal contract with every contributor to be able
| to offer dual licensing. That's impractical for some types of
| projects
| fundad wrote:
| I was going to say "this is just a license"
| dworks wrote:
| This could work out great, because the OSS devs can focus on
| building their project instead of marketing to businesses,
| running sales processes, consulting on implementation and
| supporting the implementation. No need to find corporate
| sponsors either.
| egonschiele wrote:
| Good idea, but as several comments here suggest, the time when
| this sort of thing could be taken as satire is gone. I promise
| you there are multiple people here thinking that this is a good
| idea. I predict that within a year we will see a service that
| does exactly this.
| pradn wrote:
| Is AI-driven clean room implementation a wild west at the moment?
| I suppose there haven't yet been any cases to test this out in
| real life?
| neonstatic wrote:
| > 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room > 2026, Malus: Clean
| Room as a Service > 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have
| missed this business opportunity
| groby_b wrote:
| I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified
| things that _may_ be future threats.
|
| 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.
| agys wrote:
| The name gives it away :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Hope they have _very_ good lawyers...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| _New_projectname_
|
| Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
| Flemlord wrote:
| Was hoping this was a service that cleaned actual rooms,
| combining organizing and cleaning. :-(
| sharpshadow wrote:
| As if the models have not seen the open source software before.
| That should be considered in the upcoming ruling. Technically the
| models are trained on exactly that.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Yes, we hate the abuse of open source, in its everlasting legal
| purgatory, by large evil "other" shadows acting at a distance...
|
| 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.
| abrookewood wrote:
| I hate to say it, but if you dropped the sarcasm and I think
| you'd have a viable business ... Truly a bizarre place we find
| ourselves in.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It will soon not be a joke, and it reminds me of these crypto
| bitcoin tumblers
| gaigalas wrote:
| Why would I pay for this? Makes no sense.
|
| 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".
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