Malus – Clean Room as a Service

Post by Pannoniae » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 10:25 PM UTC

degamad wrote: post #352

Pannoniae wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup :P As in their post: "The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward." This applies to open-source but also very we…

If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects? High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market? I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that…

Post by pera » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #363

ylere wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...

This comes with the uncomfortable implication that its impossible to tell actually to what extent are LLMs pulling together snippets of GPLd code, and to what extent is that legally acceptable.

Post by dworks » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

arrsingh wrote: post #295

It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay…

Post by nightshift1 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

iwontberude wrote: post #305

bananamogul wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look at the GNU code. But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certai…

What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place. Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and cod…

Post by tombert » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC