Open Source in the age of license laundering (discuss.online)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by francisco_1844@discuss.online to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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Recently saw a youtube video about a service created to change an open source software license.

One agent reads code and gather specs
Another agent, without access to the original code, creates equivalent software

In theory this should allow someone to take any open source software and change it's license.

For a large portion of open source likely this is not an issue, because nobody may care for the particular software, but for larger projects I wonder what sort of impact this may have. In particular any open source software where it's authors are making a living from donations or public support.

Has anyone read, or thought, of a way to prevent getting one's code license changed this way?

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[-] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

open source licence obligations are almost always triggered upon distribution

and cloud software-as-a-service doesn't count as distribution (except under AGL and a few rarer less-used licences), because the software never leaves machines owned/operated by the "author"

so, cloud SaaS has been able to consume open source code without contributing anything back for decades already

AI-generated bespoke software might be killing SaaS, but it'll like never trigger open source obligations either, because it'll never leave machines owned/operated by the "author"

so these AI-reimplementations of existing open source software are kinda' pointless

[-] francisco_1844@discuss.online 2 points 1 week ago

I thought there are some licenses that prohibit cloud providers from using the software and offering it as a service. In those cases even though the software may not be leaving the "Author" machines, it would still be a refactor of software that otherwise the cloud provider would not have been able to run legally under the old license.

[-] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

sure, but there's so much community outrage at BSL (and similar) licences, usually because they start as open source and then later rug-pull and relicense community contributions

and this results in there usually being a non-BSL fork of everything that is BSL, or at least a very good (incompatible) alternative

e.g.