Malus, which is a piece of satire but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell software without crediting the original developers.

Malus, which is a piece of “satire” but also fully functional, performs a “clean room” clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the “clean room” argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software – and somehow the output of the LLMs isn’t considered a derivative work.

  • James CrollEnglish
    -4•1 day ago

    I actually like this tool. Once code is public, it’s just information. The AI is learning patterns the same way any developer would. Trying to enforce licenses on whatever the model spits out feels like trying to own ideas, and I’m not a fan of that.

    • artifexOPEnglish
      9•1 day ago

      For copyleft licenses like the GPL maybe this would be true if the original, attributed code, along with all of the new alterations, modifications, enhancements and improvements, were also fed back into the machine, but even then it seems unlikely. Copyleft is explicitly about keeping derivative works in the public sphere, not really about ownership of ideas per se.