Malus – Clean Room as a Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#81

Post by jerf » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

robutsume wrote: post #74

[flagged]

I wrote about that recently: [1] One of the ways that code will be valued in the AI era is the extent to which it has contact with the real world. It doesn't matter how smart the AI is, the real world is always more perverse and complicated, and until their code has been tested by the real world you can't really trust it. (Even if we get superhuman AIs in the future, we have the same superhuman AIs producing superhuman amounts of new code in the world that your AI will have to interact with, and a single AI won't be able to overpower all the superhuman output in that world without testing.)

In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive.

[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#82

Post by lo_zamoyski » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

ameliaquining wrote: post #4

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

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.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#83

Post by JackYoustra » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement is.

To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#84

Post by Guillaume86 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

robutsume wrote: post #74

[flagged]

Eh I think part of the joke is that LLMs have gobbled up the original source code, and if you help them enough (identical type signatures and specs), they will output the same code, it's the copyright laundering problem.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#85

Post by frizlab » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #36

chilipepperhott wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same, I got as far as "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations." until I went back to the comments.

haha did the same. that being said I’m convinced some people do think AI reimplementation actually means cleanroom…

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#86

Post by petterroea » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

Now this is a conversation piece

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#87

Post by igor47 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service).

But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#88

Post by cloverich » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

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?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#89

Post by nivethan » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

typeiierror wrote: post #63

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…

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.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#90

Post by Maxion » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

RandomGerm4n wrote: post #15

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.

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.