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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.

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[-] Cricket@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Ithral@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 week ago

I kinda want to decompile the windows kernel and throw it in here and publish whatever comes out...

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
205 points (99.0% liked)

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