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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

261–270 of 566 posts

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#261
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…

This has also been a common theme in recent decades with respect to privacy.

In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#263
post #237
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)

The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.

The courts?

Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few

Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#264
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a…

Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment. Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz. If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged,…

Code is Law is pretty much demonstrates that it is not possible to precisely define law.

https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks...

Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#265
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.

PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.

That wasn’t people weaponizing satire, that was people just making weapons

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#267
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)

Those clauses exclude those licenses from some very important definitions of free/open-source software. For example they would fail the Desert Island Test for the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#269

This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?

What do you mean nobody has done it?

It's an inevitable outcome of automatic code generation that people will do this all the time without thinking about it.

Example: you want a feature in your project, and you know this github repo implements it, so you tell an AI agent to implement the feature and link to the github repo just for reference.

You didn't tell the agent to maliciously reimplement it, but the end result might be the same - you just did it earnestly.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#270

This is satire but this is where things are heading. The impact on the OSS ecosystem is probably not a net positive overall, but don't forget that this also applies to commercial software as well. There will be many questions asked, like why buy some SaaS with way too many features when you can just reimplement the parts you need? Why buy some expensive software package when you can point the LLM into the binary with…

This is going to bring back software patents.

Considering my name's on a software patent submitted just last year, I don't think software patents have gone anywhere...
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