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.
Also means you can feed leaked proprietary code to it and get open sourced versions
All it will take is for the reverse uno card to be implemented at a large enough scale against proprietary software before companies throw a pissy fit and this will all go away. Alternatively GPL could stipulate that AI implementation would trigger copyleft protections.
This whole thing is stupid and in such bad faith. Maliciously clean room engineering open source software just to get around pesky licensing issues will cause so many more problems for these morons that already leech off the hard work of open source devs anyways. They literally have a steady stream of free software and all they have to do is NOT steal it. That’s it. Just don’t be a fucking evil goon, that’s the only stipulation. They’re shooting themselves in the foot so hard.
But no, having free access to the hard work of others isn’t enough, they have to hoard it for themselves, like everything else in this deeply rotten civilization.
Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines when I first learned about Malus a couple days ago. Fine, so they get a “free” copy of open-source software that they can use without restrictions. What happens as time goes by and their “free” copy no longer receives any updates, fixes, improvements? I guess they can keep repeating the process every time a new version is released, but the whole thing seems counterproductive for anyone trying this.
I kinda want to decompile the windows kernel and throw it in here and publish whatever comes out…
Haha, no doubt. I seem to recall that the Windows code was leaked a few years ago too?
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Exactly, and people are already doing this stuff incidentally https://github.com/albertan017/LLM4Decompile
Very cool
I wonder if anyone has fed Claude Code to Claude Code yet.
Yes – https://claw-code.codes/
Get console OSes since PlayStation BSD stuff could be useful for something, and Nintendo stuff just because they always lose their shit and show their true colours. Modern Windows source code for moving React OS forward because they deserve to hit a real release after so long. And of course all of the Creative Cloud shit to remove reasons for still paying the Adobe Tax.
came here to say exactly THIS
Now you get pissed at your current boss? just publish an open source version of that
I’m guessing the creating an emulator would be a bit much right?
For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that “liberates” it from any existing copyright licenses.
How isethat a “clean room”? The program is scanning the actual software and making a version based on what it learned from the scan.
I think for this to be legit, you’d have to give malus a spec (no source code) of the program and then have it generate new code from that.
Malus uses two AIs for that. One creates a spec and the other implements that spec.
But that doesn’t even work, because you would have to prove that the original software was not part of the training set. And with it being an LLM from a big corporation, that chance is close to zero.
Someone needs to make: buenus - clean room proprietary software to AGPLv3
I’ve heard ghidraMCP works pretty well.
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.
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.
I happened to hear about that instrument from a video from FOSDEM’26: https://youtu.be/9qEtm2zx314
It gives more context, but it really should’ve been a text article, imo. It talks about history of copyright, and why its application now is kinda broken, at least that was my takeaway.
