Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 566 posts

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#141

Post by fladrif »

karel-3d wrote: post #113
utopiah wrote: post #103

Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them. It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify. "Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how c…

It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.

Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM.

It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#142

Post by 0x500x79 »

> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.*

I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#144

Post by nearlyepic »

zozbot234 wrote: post #114
utopiah wrote: post #103

Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them. It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify. "Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how c…

This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save…

Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?

The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).

If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?

At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#145

Post by sensanaty »

igor47 wrote: post #87
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…

This is of course assuming that politicians aren't largely duplicitious and actually believe in a word they say. I grew up in Indonesia, and the number of politicians who were extremely anti-porn getting caught watching porn in parliament is frankly staggering, yet alone the ones who are pro death penalty for drugs caught as being part of massive drug smuggling rings.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#146

Post by boondongle »

killbot5000 wrote: post #52
rhoopr wrote: post #14

> 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.

It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is considered insane.

The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades who protect their profit making potential.

Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?

Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#147

Post by throwaway2037 »

I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361

In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#148

Post by aleksi »

forvelin wrote: post #128

they really had an entertaining presentation in fosdem 2026 about this. bit too noisy for my taste but regardless: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...

I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open source (as you could guess from my profile, that’s a topic dear to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my life.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#149

Post by pfortuny »

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…

Not exactly the same but at least in Spain, the cost of constructing a new building subject to all the regulations makes them completely unafforfable for low salaries.

(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#150

Post by tavavex »

designerarvid wrote: post #69
killbot5000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is considered insane.

Easily explained by the fact that writing some types of software and seeing people using it is fun. Some people take photos for free also. Doesn’t apply everywhere though.

What's this 'fun' you mention? As far as the incentives in our systems are concerned, anything that's not done in pursuit of monetary gain is certifiably insane. What really matters in life is using all the tricks, manipulation, abuse and loopholes to attain the biggest number in your asset counter. Anyone who doesn't follow the only thing that matters in life is alien, inhuman even. How do they not see it?
Post reply on HN