At least you think that this is satire, until the author receives a DMCA from one of the big corps saying that he leaked the transcript of their last meeting

The situation is a bit too Torment Nexus-y for my comfort, thank you very much

I know this is satire, but I would wish to see something like this for liberating proprietary & closed-source hardware drivers.

I don't know - if you upload a package.json with any dependencies that map to real npmjs.com packages, it does lead you to a Stripe payment page which appears to be real... and it appears you'd be sending real money.

Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)

its partial satire. I kinda believe Claude/Codex spill lots of OSS code without license attribution for many millions of devs already.

Too late. Someone's senior executive management has probably already seen it and spinning up a new project to implement it.

Yeah, thank you. I was starting to get a little heated.

Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I spend a lot of time thinking about how laws, in practice, are not actually intended to be perfectly enforced, and not even in the usual selective-enforcement way, just in the pragmatic sense.

I didn't see it was satire (having only skimmed the site) until scrolling through the comments and seeing this fake review being quoted. That's when I went "surely not", checked the site, saw it was really there, and was quite relieved this is not yet an actual thing!

Luckily LLM’s are nowhere near capable enough to pull this off for anything other than the likes of isEven()

It wouldn't be funny if it wasn't close to the truth.

For now

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

Under this name or not I think it's happening regardless..

Isn't that the premise of Fallout ?

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".

lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an obvious giveaway in retrospect

Sounds like my CTO. Overuse of LLMs in c-suites is like overuse of weed by teenagers - it may not cause delusions, but it sure seems to make them worse.

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 of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging

And this goes both ways.

Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.

This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.

LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."

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 well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!

There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer

https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf

which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.

I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.

I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things like privacy and facial recognition.

There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.

The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.

The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement is.

To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.

> observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.

and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.

The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.

it is straightforward to build this for real, here is my nearly one-shotted tldraw clone from a couple of weeks ago, https://x.com/c_pick/status/2028669568403578931 - the implementation side never saw the code, only the spec (in reality it did see the tldraw code in its training data, but you can't escape that anymore)

Actually I have been told that replacements to (restricted subsets of) open source libraries, generated by LLM’s, vendored next to our code using the dependency, cannot be vulnerable since they don’t have cve’s, and therefore they don’t ever have to be maintained.

That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now

The people that will take this as a good thing unironically will just have their personal Yes Man do that work internally.

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" and their seal is ⍼.

https://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/solemnly-swear-no-good/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...

If the AI could do good refactor of OS project, remove unused code/features and make the code more efficient. Than we really would be out of jobs :D

Interested to keep updated on this point. As a consultant, I've worked on transformation of legacy applications so this would help me greatly as well. We've worked on pretty archaic systems where no one knows how the system works even if we have the source code.

I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface.

The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.

But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.

Well, what kind of desktop apps?

Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.

I've done a little bit of this and Claude is pretty great. Take the app and let Claude run wild with it. It does require you to be relatively familiar with the app as you may need to guide it in the right direction.

I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.

We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.

> 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.

Open source is good, washing open source licences is very bad.

I publish under AGPL and if someone ever took my project and washed it to MIT I would probably just take all my code offline forever. Fuck that.

Open sourcing all the things sounds fun right up until you hit the point where clean room claims collapse under real legal cross-examination. If you think companies with money on the line are just going to roll over and accept it all as fair play I'd like to introduce you to the concept of discovery at $900/hr. If your business model is a legal speedrun you better budget harder than you code.

I think we've already seen this with "AI writes a web-browser" type PR. I guess we can still look forward to when they make license evasion an explicit part of their marketing. Then I can wryly laugh when somebody robo-whitewashes leaked commercial software, knowing that they'll get sued anyways.

Amazon C*s calling Amazon Legal to ask if they could get away with implementing something like this internally, more like.

Yeah it's just a slightly more honest and simplified presentation of what LLMs providers do IMO.

A lot of people, including perhaps the creator of this, feel that LLMs themselves are this service.

It exists! It's called Claude Code.

Malus Corporation = EvilCorp

Thank you for pointing that out, I genuinely was scratching my head and questioning if this site was serious.

We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad.

The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...

> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.

Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.

We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.

But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.

Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.

(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).

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.

Certain views of OSS and its relation to commercial software always seemed to be fraught with highly voluntarist and moralizing attitudes and an intellectual naivete.

This is going to bring back software patents.

Same, I got as far as "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations." until I went back to the comments.

Homonym of "malice" too. Honestly kind of a brilliant name.

Often OSS is used not because you want the software, but the software and the upkeep. So even with such a service, you're now just taking code in-house that you have to maintain as well.

> I view this as an unmitigated good.

Then I don't think you've thought it through.

This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.

If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.

You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")

https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...

Nope!

As any etymology/Latin nerd will tell you, "this name" (MalusCorp) literally translates to EvilCorp, everything about the site is over the top satire. I know Poe's law and all that, but I'm looking askew at commenters in this thread who fail to realize it as either only reading the headline, or are AI-controlled.

Satire points out the absurd

> * Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.

Well, it's one thing to read licenses as a human and another to read them as a lawyer.

That's why it's useful to pick one of the standard licenses that lawyers have already combed over, even if it's a long one like the GPL.

Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out from realizing just how damaging both were/are.

> 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).

The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly design the specification (law) at the start, then persist with it without deviation from the original plan (at least for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.

How many times have we seen politicians advocate for laws against something, then do a 180 when one of their kids does it? Even if you had that system, I don't think it would work the way you say. People are dumb and politicians are no exception.

The quote above didn't mention corporations at all.

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.

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.

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.

It's perfectly realistic!

E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything you want, but actually allows its creator to view you, while manipulating you into doing whatever they want by selectively showing you some things and not others.

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.

I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not legal for them to read the message inside.

And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them.

It was never designed for this originally.

I was discussing that very point yesterday with a colleague after telling him of recent events. I pointed out that leaning on copyright/copyleft for software has always been a risky move.

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

haha did the same. that being said I’m convinced some people do think AI reimplementation actually means cleanroom…

Where did they go?

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 lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.

This is my problem with Americans and their "but the constitution" arguments.

The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.

I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.

Mal: us

Realistically, if it in fact did take 5 minutes to do the cleanroom reimplementation, you could just process updates from the OSS source in realtime.

I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput. It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with impending AI job loss across the board.

We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.

Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.

"nobody technically employs" strongly implies that this is not a corporate organization.

" maintained by people that nobody technically employs"

The value from FOSS is the collaboration between all parties.

There is a mutual agreement between all collaborating parties that "hey we ALL need these core fundamental building blocks of software. why dont we all collaborate in this open space?" And everyone wins.

There is tremendous value in the Linux kernel, and these large open source programs. And this is basically an attack by corporations to attempt to privatize it all.

It's nothing new. This is simply the latest example of capitalist "growth at any cost". We sailed past any immorality hazards a LONG time ago.

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?

It's not clear to me what your argument has to do with the license laundering service that Malus (Malice?) is offering. Their stealing from the digital commons does nothing to address paying Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians.

In fairness to the original mythos that that particular family of awful companies has misused: the palantiri were in fact designed purely for far-seeing, and Sauron wasn't the creator of them, he just got his hands on one and corrupted it into a tool for manipulation.

Especially given that a popular open source project recently tried to do exactly that.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which will take years and millions of dollars to resolve

You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 1960s/1970s, Hongkong dramatically increased the pay for civil servants (including police officers) to reduce corruption. (It worked, mostly.)

Judges and police officers have their own massive "worst excesses".

Many times when politicians get to suffer the full effects of their laws, the laws quickly change for the better.

The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone.

But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.

It's directed at the person I replied to. It's not directed at the top level OP or Malus which is hilarious, monetized satire.

Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.

"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.

Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.

Not just "tried"; the current state is that they've done so and are ignoring people telling them they cannot. The "destroy as an example to others" phase hasn't finished yet, but hopefully they'll get sufficient backlash from the projects they supposedly did this to work with to deter future attempts. e.g. they supposedly did this in order to make it part of the Python standard library, so hopefully the response from Python is a massive WTF and "nope".

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, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.

But this is a feature, not a bug.

The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal.

Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.

It sounds like you'd advocate for accelerationism (by which I mean "to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it")

The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.

But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.

The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.

I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out compliance with the person in charge.

They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally any criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or better yet, committing any crime after being released for serving a different one.

Corruption is eliminated by properly aligning incentives. Capitalism is also all about properly aligning incentives. Moving to a more capitalism-heavy system usually causes countries to get much richer.

Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on favors more than it operated on money. This definitely isn't the case any more.

This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option.

If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

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.

It's not naked accelerationism, I just don't want to see years and years of suffering and exploitation and chaos giving a permanent advantage to those already in a position to take that advantage. One significant industry is all it will take; light a fire under the ass of congress and the general public, get people motivated to start taking sensible steps to move towards UBI or some sort of Coasean scheme with nationalized shares distributed to people, or whatever. Doing anything is extraordinarily more effective than doing nothing as this plays out.

[delayed]

"Law is about justice" is one of those things a good professor gets every 1L to raise their hands in agreement to before spending the next semester proving why that's 100% not the case.