Discussion

MALUS

fallingmeat: Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"

observationist: 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.

ceayo: yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke!> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?ROFL

ameliaquining: Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.

schmeichel: Thank you for pointing that out, I genuinely was scratching my head and questioning if this site was serious.

tripdout: [delayed]

chilipepperhott: Yeah, thank you. I was starting to get a little heated.

bronlund: So everyone who never came around to documenting stuff, can now let out a sigh of relief ;)

spudlyo: malus, mala, malum ADJbad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky;

amiga386: > 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. You would be stealing their social currency. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.If you stop paying, 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' affidavit 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...

phpnode: 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

Lalabadie: The situation is a bit too Torment Nexus-y for my comfort, thank you very much

Pannoniae: 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: This is going to bring back software patents.

bronlund: If this site actually connects to Stripe, it is much more than satire. It is a honeypot :D

agile-gift0262: 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?

mushufasa: "Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡

roughly: 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: Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out from realizing just how damaging both were/are.

rhoopr: > 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.

killbot5000: It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is considered insane.

sigbottle: OSS has a ton of legacy behind it. Sure, some can be bad - but the compression of decades of testing by millions of people across a wide variety of hardware platforms is great, and not something that can necessarily be caught with re-implementations (as someone trying to currently re-implement a part of an OSS project myself with AI to try and "upgrade it"...). You'd have to crawl through all the issue threads and all the git commit histories, determine what parts got codified as actual tests versus a maintainer one shot it by knowing the codebase and historical context very well, then also determine which "hacks" resulted from the architecture itself versus a fundamentally hard problem, etc...Maybe in 5 years, we'll have re-implemented linux, close sourced the entire thing, and then coordinate with courts to forbid the use of actual linux under the new linux.I've looked at tmux and zsh source code. They're crazy pieces of software.

typeiierror: 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: 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.

noemit: is the motto, "Don't be good?"

psychoslave: "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=47329605https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...

kifler: Too late. Someone's senior executive management has probably already seen it and spinning up a new project to implement it.

RandomGerm4n: 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.

Maxion: 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.

nivethan: 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.

cloverich: 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: So they recreate the open source project by using an llm that was trained in the open source project's source code.

lo_zamoyski: 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: 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.

0xWTF: 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: The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.

einpoklum: 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".

OJFord: Where did they go?

sam0x17: Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy