Heh, why don't you do the opposite - recreate proprietary software with open source license
Malus – Clean Room as a Service
101–110 of 566 posts
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#102Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will. I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing. Open the floodgates. Break the system. I'd cheer for a company like this. It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
> I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing.
Agree, I said this in another comment, AI-generated anything should be public domain. Public data in, public domain out.
This train wreck in slow motion of AI slowly eroding the open web is no good, let's rip the bandaid.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#103Don'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 can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#104Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#105This 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.
Where did they go?
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#106> 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 not true (and also not funny):
* Many of the people maintaining FOSS are paid to do so; and if we counted 'significance' of maintained FOSS, I would not be surprised if most FOSS of critical significance is maintained for-pay (although I'm not sure).
* Publishing software without a restrictive license is not 'generous', it's the trivial and obvious thing to do. It is the restriction of copying and of source access that is convoluted, anti-social, and if you will, "insane".
* Similarly, FOSS is not a "miracle" of human cooperation, and it what you get when it is difficult to sabotage human cooperation. The situation with physical objects - machines, consumables - is more of a nightmare than the FOSS situation is a miracle. (IIRC, an economist named Veblen wrote about the sabotaging role of pecuniary interests on collaborative industrial processes, about a century ago; but I'm not sure about the details.)
* Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
* It is not insane to use FOSS from a "fiduciary standpoint".
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#107First I thought this is about manufacturing. Like semiconductor fabs requirement for room cleanness.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#108I first encountered the concept of "clean room" in the context of Sean Lahman's free baseball stats database. While technically baseball stats are free, their compiling and manner of presentation in any given format may be claimed as proprietary by any particular provider. And so there's an extensive volunteer effort from baseball fans to "clean room" source them from independent sources such that they are verifying the stats independently of their provenance as a legally permitted basis for building out the database.
I even recall Baseball Mogul relied on the Lahman DB for a period of time. It does make me wonder if we'll see more of that.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#109Thought this was about semiconductor cleanrooms at first. Any startups doing that?
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#110An 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…
Hmm, the problem is that judges and even police officers are generally saner than voters.
Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter.
Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.