alt Hacker NewsMalus – Clean Room as a Service
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"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
Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
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
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?
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?
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.
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 ?
"Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡
…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!
I do sort of wonder how the law might consider attempts at trying to apply a certain license to LLM generated code. Haven't the courts essentially said something to the effect of: "No human, no copyright protection"?
This is brilliant satire. Wonderful response to the “rewrite” of chardet.
^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.
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.
Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.
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.
If this site actually connects to Stripe, it's much more than just satire. It's a honeypot :D
Amazon getting all excited hoping it's real.
Let's not give anyone ideas!
Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"
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!
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?
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?
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
Today's satire is tomorrow's reality, if the last 50 or so years is anything to go by.
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 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?
I bet someone has already made this service for real.
I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-
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)
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."
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.
Oof, this is unironically amazing!
turd.png classy
I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software.
In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.
yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke!
> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?
ROFL
[dead]
> 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.