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 software without crediting the original developers.

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.

  • [email protected]@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    3 hours ago

    Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines when I first learned about Malus a couple days ago. Fine, so they get a “free” copy of open-source software that they can use without restrictions. What happens as time goes by and their “free” copy no longer receives any updates, fixes, improvements? I guess they can keep repeating the process every time a new version is released, but the whole thing seems counterproductive for anyone trying this.