I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody attempting this approach for real):
Malus – Clean Room as a Service
181–190 of 566 posts
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#182This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights. In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs…
>The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because [...]
it is an illusion because this is a satire site.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#183That's funny.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#184An 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…
> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error > Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific…
For one thing, the speed limit is intentionally set 5-10mph too low, specifically to make it easier to prove guilt when someone breaks the "real" speed limit.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#185I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can't think for themselves."
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#186Wait this is joke, yep this is a joke... Wait it's not a joke why are people taking this seriously? Ok good this is a joke wait it's REAL?
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#187[deleted]
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#188This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights. In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs…
The solution here seems to be to impose some constraint or requirement which means that literal copying is impossible (remember, copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms - that would be 'patents', which essentially no open source software has) or where any 'copying' from vaguely remembered pretraining code is on such an abstract indirect level that it is 'transformative' and thus safe.
For example, the Anthropic Rust C compiler could hardly have copied GCC or any of the many C compilers it surely trained on, because then it wouldn't have spat out reasonably idiomatic and natural looking Rust in a differently organized codebase.
Good news for Rust and Lean, I guess, as it seems like everyone these days is looking for an excuse to rewrite everything into those for either speed or safety or both.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fa…
There is an overlay of smeared poop on one of the license files… is that something you are seeing on typical tech company landing pages?
The company is literally named “bad/evil.”
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#190The smells suspiciously like a well positioned gag that is secretly seeking VC attention. The emotional reaction turned attention seeking feels a bit like having ulterior motives... or maybe Moltbook has made me paranoid?