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.
It’s obviously not clean room since the original code was in the training data.
Yep. But good luck getting a court to agree with you.
Omg Imagine if half of the case is just an ML course to teach the jury what training data is.
Jury #7: “But it is fine to do it because Facebook said so”
And you teach all of them the amount of data facebook takes from them. ALL of it.
That sounds painful. Absolutely no shade to the lovely older person I overheard today say: “so how do you get the little folks on the screen to know what buttons I pressed?”
But I’m guessing it could be similar to music copywrite law where jurors don’t have to understand audio engineering to know two samples sound the same.
Nope the class will be dropped down to teach all the basics and then up to vector databases and word embeddings to understand the case.
I would expect the jury to be nothing less than world-class experts on statistics, linear algebra, and calculus once the case is decided.
Exactly, the public will be educated one way or the other!
It feels like a very wierd compression algorithm
Sounds like straight up bullshit.
It’s satire which brings attention to the problem. Read the reviews on the site.
It’s satire, but also fully functional. And they take money.
So, it’s a bit like your boss saying: you’re fired! LOL. Hahahaha. It’s a joke! Laugh! But, also you are really fired.
“It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations, told me. “The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I’ve done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”
Hot take: You should be able to create derivative works of open source stuff and earn a living with that. Or be allowed to profit of the open source product.
You generally can, just comply with the license. This is a tool for not complying with the license.
I know. But there are parasitic licenses that try to force your commercial software to become open source even if used as a minor component. That’s stupid. And potentially dangerous to both the public, the asset producer, and the open source community.
Im not expressing an opinion on the viral nature of the licence itself, nor the pros and cons of FOSS, nor am I a FOSS evangelist of any kind.
But you understand it’s optional right? if you don’t like it, don’t use it.
This isn’t some gotcha, you can literally decide not to use the thing under the licence you don’t like. That will solve 100% of the problems you are describing (though it sounds like it’d introduce new, non-licence based problems in whatever example you are thinking of)
Well… I say that, but im actually not sure what you mean by “dangerous to the public”, if you could go in to a bit more detail about what you mean there, I’d appreciate it
My issue with viral licensing is that it means you got to rewrite the code or use another product. Also software bom is a hassle.
Some advanced manufacturing techniques rely on advanced software. So does infrastructure which is often only secured by obscurity. Also all software is filled with vulnerabilities which can get easier to exploit if you have access to the source code.
TL;DR;
Sounds like a bunch of organisational issues using licensing as a scapegoat.
Again, not giving an opinion on FOSS licencing pro’s and cons, just on the implementation of licensing in general.
My issue with viral licensing is that it means you got to rewrite the code or use another product.
Or…comply with the licence.
but yes, that’s entirely the intention of a licence.
You can use this thing as long as you adhere to the rules set forth, if you don’t want to then feel free to create your own or find something with a licence more to your liking.
They aren’t forcing this on you, using these products is optional.
Also software bom is a hassle.
Absolutely.
However, that feels more like a procurement/evaluation issue.
e.g : “is bringing in this open source, viral GPL audio processing library worth the trade-off of dealing with the compliance vs paying money for a similar commercial product (or building our own)”
Some advanced manufacturing techniques rely on advanced software. So does infrastructure which is often only secured by obscurity. Also all software is filled with vulnerabilities which can get easier to exploit if you have access to the source code.
That sounds again like a person or persons have royally fucked up their evaluation/procurement duties when selecting the components to use in the building of the product a quality/security issue rather than a licensing one.
if complying with an open source license causes a product to become a danger to the public, many people, at many stages, have utterly failed to do their job.
Also,i’m sure you know this, but security through obscurity is a poor systems design choice in almost all scenarios.
As you say though, it does happen in the real world.
In those cases someone needs to wear the grown up hat and evaluate the options available, such as removing or replacing the component that requires opening up your source code, or evaluating the trade off of how severe a risk opening up the source code is vs the costs involved in replacing it, or even the potential legal liability of just ignoring the licence.
If you can’t afford any options then your product isn’t viable ( in an “everybody follows the rules” kind of scenario, at least).
If you’re referring to GPL variants, that depends. You can absolutely use GPL software and libraries with closed source software. You just need to separate the GPL portions from the closed source portions with some sort of boundary, like running it as a service of some sort or turning it into a CLI tool. You’re just not allowed to create derivative works of GPL software that isn’t also GPL.
Also, there should be nothing dangerous about open sourcing code (unless you’re referring to financial risk to the business I guess). Secrets should never live in code, and obscurity is never secure.
Pretty sure that e.g. manufacturing techniques for physics based design are highly problematic. So is the software for military communications. The real world is in fact real.
Your first example isn’t even code, and in your second if the “software” was remotely well architectured its configuration (not code) is what would need to be kept secret. You’re also very rude!
The first one is very much software. The software enabling such designs and processes is what makes it work.
It will be fun watching those users who first make the jump to the new project.
