Recently saw a youtube video about a service created to change an open source software license.
- One agent reads code and gather specs
- Another agent, without access to the original code, creates equivalent software
In theory this should allow someone to take any open source software and change it’s license.
For a large portion of open source likely this is not an issue, because nobody may care for the particular software, but for larger projects I wonder what sort of impact this may have. In particular any open source software where it’s authors are making a living from donations or public support.
Has anyone read, or thought, of a way to prevent getting one’s code license changed this way?
open source licence obligations are almost always triggered upon distribution
and cloud software-as-a-service doesn’t count as distribution (except under AGL and a few rarer less-used licences), because the software never leaves machines owned/operated by the “author”
so, cloud SaaS has been able to consume open source code without contributing anything back for decades already
AI-generated bespoke software might be killing SaaS, but it’ll like never trigger open source obligations either, because it’ll never leave machines owned/operated by the “author”
so these AI-reimplementations of existing open source software are kinda’ pointless
I thought there are some licenses that prohibit cloud providers from using the software and offering it as a service. In those cases even though the software may not be leaving the “Author” machines, it would still be a refactor of software that otherwise the cloud provider would not have been able to run legally under the old license.