Malus, which is a piece of “satire” but also fully functional, performs a “clean room” clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the “clean room” argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software – and somehow the output of the LLMs isn’t considered a derivative work.
Hot take: You should be able to create derivative works of open source stuff and earn a living with that. Or be allowed to profit of the open source product.
You generally can, just comply with the license. This is a tool for not complying with the license.
I know. But there are parasitic licenses that try to force your commercial software to become open source even if used as a minor component. That’s stupid. And potentially dangerous to both the public, the asset producer, and the open source community.
If you’re referring to GPL variants, that depends. You can absolutely use GPL software and libraries with closed source software. You just need to separate the GPL portions from the closed source portions with some sort of boundary, like running it as a service of some sort or turning it into a CLI tool. You’re just not allowed to create derivative works of GPL software that isn’t also GPL.
Also, there should be nothing dangerous about open sourcing code (unless you’re referring to financial risk to the business I guess). Secrets should never live in code, and obscurity is never secure.
Sounds like straight up bullshit.
It’s satire which brings attention to the problem. Read the reviews on the site.
It’s satire, but also fully functional. And they take money.
So, it’s a bit like your boss saying: you’re fired! LOL. Hahahaha. It’s a joke! Laugh! But, also you are really fired.
“It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations, told me. “The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I’ve done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”
It will be fun watching those users who first make the jump to the new project.
It’s obviously not clean room since the original code was in the training data.
It feels like a very wierd compression algorithm
Yep. But good luck getting a court to agree with you.
Omg Imagine if half of the case is just an ML course to teach the jury what training data is.
That sounds painful. Absolutely no shade to the lovely older person I overheard today say: “so how do you get the little folks on the screen to know what buttons I pressed?”
But I’m guessing it could be similar to music copywrite law where jurors don’t have to understand audio engineering to know two samples sound the same.
Nope the class will be dropped down to teach all the basics and then up to vector databases and word embeddings to understand the case.
Jury #7: “But it is fine to do it because Facebook said so”
And you teach all of them the amount of data facebook takes from them. ALL of it.
