15 ms·

Malus – Clean Room as a Service

1433 points by microflash 7mo ago

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_... https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html

noemit 7mo ago
is the motto, "Don't be good?"
- psychoslave 7mo ago
  "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://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/solemnly-swear-no-good/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unicode_Math_Symbols https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...
mushufasa 7mo ago
"Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡
- roughly 7mo ago
  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.
  - jakeydus 7mo ago
    Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out from realizing just how damaging both were/are.
    - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
      I just hope we realize it before it's too late.
- fabioborellini 7mo ago
  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
- dullcrisp 7mo ago
  Guaranteed CVE-free at time of delivery!
ameliaquining 7mo ago
Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
- adampunk 7mo ago
  For now
- schmeichel 7mo ago
  Thank you for pointing that out, I genuinely was scratching my head and questioning if this site was serious.
- chilipepperhott 7mo ago
  Yeah, thank you. I was starting to get a little heated.
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    Same, I got as far as "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations." until I went back to the comments.
    - frizlab 7mo ago
      haha did the same. that being said I’m convinced some people do think AI reimplementation actually means cleanroom…
- dcchambers 7mo ago
  For now...
  - tgtweak 7mo ago
    The best satire is that which becomes reality.
    - TehCorwiz 7mo ago
scblock 7mo ago
Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things. "This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
deleted 7mo ago
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fallingmeat 7mo ago
Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"
observationist 7mo ago
Not 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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- amiga386 7mo ago
  > 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/works/testimony/PerensJMRI.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...
  - observationist 7mo ago
    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.
bensyverson 7mo ago
Oh no… VCs will see this and take it seriously
- akovaski 7mo ago
  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.
hirako2000 7mo ago
In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.
ceayo 7mo ago
yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke! > Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ROFL
logdahl 7mo ago
Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.
rhoopr 7mo ago
> 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.
- aprdm 7mo ago
  Isn't that the premise of Fallout ?
  - dmbche 7mo ago
    Nope!
- killbot5000 7mo ago
  It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is considered insane.
  - designerarvid 7mo ago
    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.
    - tavavex 7mo 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?
  - eru 7mo ago
RandomGerm4n 7mo ago
This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too lucrative from a business perspective.
- tetraca 7mo ago
  The people that will take this as a good thing unironically will just have their personal Yes Man do that work internally.
- Maxion 7mo ago
  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.
  - Spoom 7mo ago
    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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
tripdout 7mo ago
The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?
- Guillaume86 7mo ago
  Yeah it's just a slightly more honest and simplified presentation of what LLMs providers do IMO.
dakolli 7mo ago
I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software. See: https://deploycel.org/ https://deploycel.org/
amiga386 7mo ago
I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/ https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/ It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?
torginus 7mo ago
I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hmokiguess 7mo ago
The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things are going. EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious
- frenchie4111 7mo ago
  lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an obvious giveaway in retrospect
  - hmry 7mo ago
    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 by selectively showing some things and not others.
    - whacko_quacko 7mo ago
      Especially given that a popular open source project recently tried to do exactly that. https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 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
      - JoshTriplett 7mo ago
        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".
    - 7mo ago
phpnode 7mo ago
This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not be building my business around this capability however
spudlyo 7mo ago
malus, mala, malum ADJ bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky; It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
- mikepurvis 7mo ago
  Homonym of "malice" too. Honestly kind of a brilliant name.
  - lelandfe 7mo ago
    Mal: us
yomismoaqui 7mo ago
I bet someone has already made this service for real.
- OJFord 7mo ago
  A lot of people, including perhaps the creator of this, feel that LLMs themselves are this service.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  It exists! It's called Claude Code.
- Nolski 7mo ago
  What makes this service not real?
ge96 7mo ago
turd.png classy
alsetmusic 7mo ago
This is brilliant satire. Wonderful response to the “rewrite” of chardet. ^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.
ebiester 7mo ago
The frustrating thing is I also thought about this as a natural conclusion - but as a natural workflow that corporations will do when they see AGPL dependencies they want to use. (I also think there's a world where we start tightening our software bill of materials anyway.) I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.
rgilton 7mo ago
It's interesting that the focus is just on open source licenses. If one can strip licenses from source code using LLMs, then surely a Microsoft employee could do the same with the Windows source code!
boje 7mo ago
Today's satire is tomorrow's reality, if the last 50 or so years is anything to go by.
gorgoiler 7mo ago
…scanning… …fuming… …blood pressure rising… sees a quote attributed to “Chad Stockholder Engineering Director, Profit First LLC” …oh phew, thank god for that. I actually believed this could be real for a moment!
Goofy_Coyote 7mo ago
It took me too long to understand it’s satire. BP went through stratosphere before I noticed. Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage. (I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)
Pannoniae 7mo ago
This 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 Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?
- OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
  This is going to bring back software patents.
  - OJFord 7mo ago
    Where did they go?
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    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.
  - piperswe 7mo ago
    Considering my name's on a software patent submitted just last year, I don't think software patents have gone anywhere...
    - marxisttemp 7mo ago
      What did you patent
      - piperswe 7mo ago
        The patent application hasn't been published yet so I can't link it, but it's the integration of a bot management system with a queuing system (think, preventing bots from taking space in the line waiting to buy tickets from Ticketmaster when everyone's in the waiting room)
moralestapia 7mo ago
Oof, this is unironically amazing!
ks2048 7mo ago
"I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn't show up on quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp." ◆ Chad Stockholder Engineering Director, Profit First LLC
- lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
aaron695 7mo ago
[dead]
duiker101 7mo ago
Let's not give anyone ideas!
agile-gift0262 7mo ago
if it were true that indeed was legal to rewrite and relicense open source code, would that also be true for non-open source code? as in, could someone do a similar rewrite of their employers proprietary code and release it publicly?
- Nolski 7mo ago
  Yes. Provided you had access to the original source code. Pheonix technologies did this with the IBM bios.
bronlund 7mo ago
If this site actually connects to Stripe, it's much more than just satire. It's a honeypot :D
0xWTF 7mo ago
There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.
- etchalon 7mo ago
  The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.
- phpnode 7mo ago
  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 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)
  - p0w3n3d 7mo ago
    I wonder about this training data. There's so much profit from open source code in training data, actually the most of the code it was taught was open source, shouldn't it be then free? Or at least open weight?
  - phyzome 7mo ago
    Well, that's not what the page describes. You'd have to train an LLM on everything except tldraw, then use that LLM for code generation.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
999900000999 7mo ago
As a hypothetical. Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons. Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects. So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”. How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?
- kvgr 7mo ago
  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
typeiierror 7mo ago
I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them has probably left the planet. We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
- ensemblehq 7mo ago
  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.
- Traubenfuchs 7mo ago
  Well, what kind of desktop apps? Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.
- nivethan 7mo ago
  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.
- ekidd 7mo ago
  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.
sourcegrift 7mo ago
Amazon getting all excited hoping it's real.
- dspillett 7mo ago
  Amazon C*s calling Amazon Legal to ask if they could get away with implementing something like this internally, more like.
robutsume 7mo ago
[flagged]
- Maxion 7mo ago
  Let's not spam HN with AI slop please.
- usrbinbash 7mo ago
  Absolutely true, but there is a silver lining: When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.
- jerf 7mo ago
  I wrote about that recently: [1] One of the ways that code will be valued in the AI era is the extent to which it has contact with the real world. It doesn't matter how smart the AI is, the real world is always more perverse and complicated, and until their code has been tested by the real world you can't really trust it. (Even if we get superhuman AIs in the future, we have the same superhuman AIs producing superhuman amounts of new code in the world that your AI will have to interact with, and a single AI won't be able to overpower all the superhuman output in that world without testing.) In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive. [1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
- Guillaume86 7mo ago
  Eh I think part of the joke is that LLMs have gobbled up the original source code, and if you help them enough (identical type signatures and specs), they will output the same code, it's the copyright laundering problem.
jerf 7mo ago
An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html 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", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can. This is a big change! 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. And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
- JackYoustra 7mo ago
  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.
sigmar 7mo ago
>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, 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.
- chii 7mo ago
  > 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.
ramon156 7mo ago
blegh, i like the motivation but why again and again do you need to write the content of the page with Slop-LLM-GPT? Your motive and points are valid, why waste it on a word filter that cannot capture it?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
petterroea 7mo ago
Now this is a conversation piece
cloverich 7mo ago
1. Best part of this (satirical) post is, the service they offer isn't really needed. LLM's can do this already for small projects, and soon likely will for large ones too. You don't need a company to do this, we all have the LLM tooling to do it. Critical we're all spending time thinking about what that means in a thoughtful way. 2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?
comrade1234 7mo ago
So they recreate the open source project by using an llm that was trained in the open source project's source code.
mapcars 7mo ago
Heh, why don't you do the opposite - recreate proprietary software with open source license
- intrasight 7mo ago
  I expect that thousands of people are now doing just that. Most proprietary software is just a shiny UI in front of a crappy database schema.
utopiah 7mo ago
Don'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?!
- karel-3d 7mo ago
  It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.
  - fladrif 7mo ago
    Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
    - darkwater 7mo ago
      If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
      - lupire 7mo ago
        PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.
        7mo ago
sam0x17 7mo ago
Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy
ivanjermakov 7mo ago
First I thought this is about manufacturing. Like semiconductor fabs requirement for room cleanness.
glenstein 7mo ago
I 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.
v9v 7mo ago
Thought this was about semiconductor cleanrooms at first. Any startups doing that?
CodeCompost 7mo ago
I know this is satire but we're in the process of rewriting the .NET Mediatr library because ... it's nothing but a simple design pattern packaged as a paid nuget package. We don't even need LLMs to reprogram it. So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
pringk02 7mo ago
> per package = max( $0.01, size_kb × $0.01 ) > order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages ) > $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee. Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed
neya 7mo ago
You know the satire is so good that people actually confused this for something real:))
bingemaker 7mo ago
It will be nice to know how many legal personnel fell for this trip. Maybe a leaderboard :D
keeda 7mo ago
The name was too much of a giveaway. I just hope that somebody who inevitably builds this for real is self-aware enough to name themselves so transparently. About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version? I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.
n0r0n1n 7mo ago
Can we stop with the AI slop here? Last chance then I have to look elsewhere for real content.
forvelin 7mo ago
they really had an entertaining presentation in fosdem 2026 about this. bit too noisy for my taste but regardless: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
- aleksi 7mo ago
  I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open source (as you could guess from my profile, that’s a topic dear to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my life.
izucken 7mo ago
Some parties wouldn't be thrilled about their "source available" getting cleaned this way. So when this gets completed it would only "clean" real open source that can't afford legal trouble. Satirically structured LLM text is not a defence.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
The irony of course is that this service already exists. It's called Claude Code (or Codex, etc...) and it costs $200 / month.
0x500x79 7mo ago
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.* I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
- kypro 7mo ago
  The satire is A-grade. On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity. Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
  - gault8121 7mo ago
    So this site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
danorama 7mo ago
Poe's Law just smacked me upside the head on this one. Hard.
- Nolski 7mo ago
  It makes me really happy to see this comment :)
throwaway2037 7mo ago
I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361 In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.
deleted 7mo ago
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tavavex 7mo ago
This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?
- imiric 7mo ago
  > why hasn't anyone done this for real? WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.
  - tavavex 7mo ago
    Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-dance about never seeing the source code and separating the system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do that yet?
    - imiric 7mo ago
      Because that's impossible. Any "robot" that can generate code must be trained on massive amounts of code, most of which is open source.
      - sdwr 7mo ago
        And how are you supposed to guarantee equivalent functionality by analyzing "README files, API docs, and type definitions"?
        dymk 7mo ago
        The joke is that you don’t.
        Nolski 7mo ago
        It's described on the web page but it's by having 2 agents. One has access to the code and one doesn't.
iepathos 7mo ago
This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights. In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
- littlestymaar 7mo ago
  This is definitely a parody though, not a real service.
  - superxpro12 7mo ago
    This site is an obvious parody, but like most comedy these days it betrays the severity of the issues happening today.
- ActivePattern 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - badrequest 7mo ago
    Ah, it really wouldn't be HN without baselessly accusing other posters you disagree with.
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      i mean... the site is very clearly satire and the comment is clearly responding as if it is a real service. i do not necessarily agree with the phrasing of ActivePatterns comment, but i also raised an eyebrow at iepathos' comment.
lxe 7mo ago
Distinguished staff level trolling
asimpletune 7mo ago
This is an art project right? …right?
tonymet 7mo ago
edit: it's satire. but likely not too far off from the reality in 6 months. > Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions. since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room. Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
badrequest 7mo ago
Was malice.sh taken?
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copperx 7mo ago
Are licenses even enforceable now? Given that the law is not being followed in the United States anymore?
- pocksuppet 7mo ago
  Everything is enforceable by the rich, nothing is enforceable by the poor
kpcyrd 7mo ago
I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody attempting this approach for real): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
- lupire 7mo ago
  That's worth its own submission and discussion.
  - alberto-m 7mo ago
    It has been submitted last week, happy reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
- ylere 7mo ago
  It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e893c1fce2a8 https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
  - codethief 7mo ago
    Wow, I did not expect such perfect reproduction. Link to the actual source code (before being rewritten): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbcharsetprober.py https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar...
    - ylere 7mo ago
      Indeed, and that's through the API. If you use Claude Chat/Code and even if you then turn off web search, it still has access to some of its tools (for doing calculations, running small code snippets etc.) and that environment contains chardets code 4 times: /home/claude/.cache/uv/archive-v0/nZCy52fMCgTsNaLySn0xf/chardet /home/claude/.cache/uv/wheels-v6/pypi/chardet /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/chardet /usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/chardet It's not surprising that they were able to create a new, working version of chardet this quickly. It seems the author just told Claude Code to "do a clean room implementation" and to make sure the code looks different from the original chardet (named several times in the prompt) without considering the training set and the tendency for LLMs to "cheat".
RobertoG 7mo ago
That's funny. I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction. It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
jhatemyjob 7mo ago
I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can't think for themselves." Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
himata4113 7mo ago
Wait this is joke, yep this is a joke... Wait it's not a joke why are people taking this seriously? Ok good this is a joke wait it's REAL?
deleted 7mo ago
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fraywing 7mo ago
The smells suspiciously like a well positioned gag that is secretly seeking VC attention. The emotional reaction turned attention seeking feels a bit like having ulterior motives... or maybe Moltbook has made me paranoid?
ultratalk 7mo ago
Am I the only one who saw the title and thought it was about physical clean-rooms?
- jollyllama 7mo ago
  No
tekawade 7mo ago
How is this legal. Unless it’s trained excluding *all* open source code it’s not legal. Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose. Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”. Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.
- Thrymr 7mo ago
  You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully: > Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright > If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters. > "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries
KronisLV 7mo ago
I feel like we live in an interesting time, where you have to second guess whether someone would actually build something like this. Like, the language is very tongue in cheek, but given how messed up copyright law is, you'd think that by now someone would be doing this, and proudly.
deleted 7mo ago
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wesselbindt 7mo ago
I ate the onion. But in my defense, people are really putting forward this argument to relicense from GPL to MIT: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
Perz1val 7mo ago
I'd have mined the copied libraries with something that makes it possible to later change terms and extract fees, as it'd be expected that nobody reads the terms for such service
Sardtok 7mo ago
Before I visited the site, I was really confused. First, the name means bad, as in evil. Second, I couldn't understand what CRaaS was supposed to be. But I love it! The perfect response to the "clean room" AI re-implementation and re-licensing of whatever that library is called.
- edelbitter 7mo ago
  >whatever that library is called https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
ftumminello 7mo ago
Bruh this feels evil hahaha
jabedude 7mo ago
This is quite literally the end of open source. projects will find themselves in the position of making their test suites private to avoid being sherlocked like this
e12e 7mo ago
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
sigbottle 7mo ago
I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation issues. Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
TheMiddleMan 7mo ago
Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality and document it. Then have it build based on the document?
Jerry2 7mo ago
From their front page: >*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright* Heh, ok. So, the thinking is: 1. You contract them. 2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company. 3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary. 4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!" ... 5. Profit. This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code. The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established. The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness... This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating"). The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
- detaro 7mo ago
  whoosh
p_j_w 7mo ago
I know this is satire, but I worry that it's giving some scumbags out there ideas.
fuddle 7mo ago
> MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services. I think they should take some responsibility!
ragazzina 7mo ago
Why only FOSS? Why not Wikipedia? You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month. EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.
- STRiDEX 7mo ago
  aren't you describing what elon already did https://grokipedia.com/ https://grokipedia.com/
- b3n 7mo ago
  This was already done, see: Grokipedia.
- lukev 7mo ago
  So Grokipedia?
- 453yuh46 7mo ago
  Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and every nation and every political leaning has rights to have their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really irritating. Wikipedia for a time being had already different POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that place already exists where that is a case and that is a graveyard.
teeray 7mo ago
The law should be updated to limit clean room reimplementation to a strictly human endeavor. Person, in a faraday cage room, with a machine that is too underpowered to run local LLMs. Reference material (stack overflow archives, language docs, specs, etc) are permitted.
floathub 7mo ago
Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!
gmerc 7mo ago
See also: claw-guard.org/adnet, ai-ceo.org and ai-chro.org in this category
temp123789246 7mo ago
Theory: Any system, legal or otherwise, that denies the Axioms of Reality, will eventually fail. Axiom of Reality: “Intellectual Property” does not exist.
- flammafex 7mo ago
  [dead]
mcherm 7mo ago
The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer owns the resulting code. But that's not true! According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!! I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.
- semiquaver 7mo ago
  If you’re referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C. Circuit. And it only applies to “pure” AI-generated works; it did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be copyrightable.
  - bananamogul 7mo ago
    Though here, the purpose is still served. If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
- metalcrow 7mo ago
  This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.
  - aero_code 7mo ago
    No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law": https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-ai-generated-art-lacking-human-creator-2025-03-18/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...
    - ryoshoe 7mo ago
      Could the prompt used to generate the art be considered human input, or is it that a human must to make some contribution to the art for it to be copyrightable?
neutrinobro 7mo ago
Ah yes, how apropos, a "modest proposal" for a new AI era.
mikelitoris 7mo ago
Clean room was a poor choice of words… I thought it was an actual clean room for semiconductor devices :(
- CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
  It's already a term of art used for this very purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
headgasket 7mo ago
interesting name. The opposite of a bonus. So what is, the fact that your fork looses the thousands of eyes (meat and ai) that spot and fix bugs and security leaks?
themarogee 7mo ago
[flagged]
ohgeekz_com 7mo ago
[dead]
jaredchung 7mo ago
Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they actually provide the literal service they're satirizing? How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
- Nolski 7mo ago
  Is it satire? Or is it a warning?
  - jaredchung 7mo ago
    If it's a warning, it's a warning that also delivers the thing it's warning about.
arrsingh 7mo ago
It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid. I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
- devy 7mo ago
  LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave it away immediately: > "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired) > © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD]. > This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
  - yonz 7mo ago
    I almost lost it, didn't realize it was satire until I came back to these comments
    - gault8121 7mo ago
      This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
      - wjnc 7mo ago
        Satire And Performance Art no less.
egonschiele 7mo ago
Good idea, but as several comments here suggest, the time when this sort of thing could be taken as satire is gone. I promise you there are multiple people here thinking that this is a good idea. I predict that within a year we will see a service that does exactly this.
pradn 7mo ago
Is AI-driven clean room implementation a wild west at the moment? I suppose there haven't yet been any cases to test this out in real life?
neonstatic 7mo ago
> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room > 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service > 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity
groby_b 7mo ago
I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified things that _may_ be future threats. The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents" It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad) We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
- Nolski 7mo ago
  This is a good idea. Do you have a package in mind?
  - groby_b 7mo ago
    Depends on the size you want to tackle. Let's shoot for MIT licensed or similar, so we don't have to do the unethical thing. ESLint or Webpack would probably be attempts that are decently sized for a challenge. Cheerio would be a bit smaller. Chalk is probably close to the absolute lower bound of what's even meaningful. (You'd likely just regenerate a package that size from scratch instead of wondering about compat)
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agys 7mo ago
The name gives it away :)
ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
Hope they have very good lawyers...
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
New_projectname Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
Flemlord 7mo ago
Was hoping this was a service that cleaned actual rooms, combining organizing and cleaning. :-(
abrookewood 7mo ago
I hate to say it, but if you dropped the sarcasm and I think you'd have a viable business ... Truly a bizarre place we find ourselves in.
sharpshadow 7mo ago
As if the models have not seen the open source software before. That should be considered in the upcoming ruling. Technically the models are trained on exactly that.
w10-1 7mo ago
Yes, we hate the abuse of open source, in its everlasting legal purgatory, by large evil "other" shadows acting at a distance... But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction. Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
m3kw9 7mo ago
It will soon not be a joke, and it reminds me of these crypto bitcoin tumblers
gaigalas 7mo ago
Why would I pay for this? Makes no sense. It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".
tombert 7mo ago
I was really hoping that this was just a service that would literally clean my room.
jdlyga 7mo ago
Just give it 2 years and this will exist for real.
aussieguy1234 7mo ago
Is this a joke, or is it the real deal?
- Nolski 7mo ago
  Upload your manifest and find out! :)
tianrking 7mo ago
[flagged]
m3kw9 7mo ago
With the classic Claude colors and fonts
parksb 7mo ago
I think it should have been launched on April 1st.
api 7mo ago
This could also be done with a fair amount of commercial software, especially anything that's basically a wrapper around APIs, databases, etc.
giancarlostoro 7mo ago
Its not just doing this to open source GPL software. I have seen friends disassemble code in archaic languages, and have Claude translate the Assembly back to the original language, and churn on it until it compiles. It worked.
casey2 7mo ago
It's not april 1st yet
eranation 7mo ago
A LOT of people are taking this seriously and not getting the (no so?) subtle satire in this. I fell for it at first glance too, had to do a double take. Some of the smartest people I know asked me for my thoughts on this. The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.
RobLach 7mo ago
Excellent
nathancroissant 7mo ago
Well I didn't understand it was satire at first glance which tells a lot about the state of our industry...
throwaway290 7mo ago
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends
bhanuhai 7mo ago
Interesting
egao1980 7mo ago
[dead]
unselect5917 7mo ago
very bottom of the page: "This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
incognos 7mo ago
I predict that licenses will adapt to close this loophole...
- entropi 7mo ago
  I think the problem will be with enforcement. To be honest I don't see any way to stop this kind of thing from happening. I predict the slow decline of open source projects, sadly.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
alemwjsl 7mo ago
You can also use this to say copy proprietary software, and make it open source GPL.
alansaber 7mo ago
Partly hard to judge as satire because this is significantly better than most SAAS websites.
deleted 7mo ago
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harvie 7mo ago
Can't wait to see GPL2 ZFS :-)
lambdaone 7mo ago
Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.
ericzundel 7mo ago
Of course, it's a serious issue, but I love the sense of humor here, buried deep down: Full legal indemnification* Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright ... The MalusCorp Guarantee™ If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters. *This has never happened because it legally cannot happen. Trust us.
hdivider 7mo ago
I saw "cleanroom as a service" and thought great! Don't need to build a facility to do materials science or photonics or certain aerospace R&D...but nope, not that kind of cleanroom. :)
may13noon 7mo ago
Personally, I think it's a brilliant idea that the service charges for whole dependency by package.json instead of each single package. This is the approach that corporations like
jackhalford 7mo ago
> Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers. Took me a minute to recognize the satyre, good one boys.
SuaveSteve 7mo ago
While it is satire, it is also appears to be "real satire" as gault8121 has been trying to tell us. ThePrimeagen paid them to do the node package "is-number". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE
seanrrr 6mo ago
This is quite sad to see but important to point out.

1433 points by microflash 7mo ago

noemit 7mo ago

is the motto, "Don't be good?"

psychoslave 7mo ago
"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://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/solemnly-swear-no-good/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unicode_Math_Symbols https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...

mushufasa 7mo ago

"Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡

roughly 7mo ago
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.
- jakeydus 7mo ago
  Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out from realizing just how damaging both were/are.
  - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
    I just hope we realize it before it's too late.
fabioborellini 7mo ago
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
dullcrisp 7mo ago
Guaranteed CVE-free at time of delivery!

ameliaquining 7mo ago

Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.

adampunk 7mo ago
For now
schmeichel 7mo ago
Thank you for pointing that out, I genuinely was scratching my head and questioning if this site was serious.
chilipepperhott 7mo ago
Yeah, thank you. I was starting to get a little heated.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  Same, I got as far as "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations." until I went back to the comments.
  - frizlab 7mo ago
    haha did the same. that being said I’m convinced some people do think AI reimplementation actually means cleanroom…
dcchambers 7mo ago
For now...
- tgtweak 7mo ago
  The best satire is that which becomes reality.
  - TehCorwiz 7mo ago

scblock 7mo ago

Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things. "This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

fallingmeat 7mo ago

Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"

observationist 7mo ago

Not 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.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
amiga386 7mo ago
> 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/works/testimony/PerensJMRI.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...
- observationist 7mo ago
  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.

bensyverson 7mo ago

Oh no… VCs will see this and take it seriously

akovaski 7mo ago
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.

hirako2000 7mo ago

In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.

ceayo 7mo ago

yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke! > Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ROFL

logdahl 7mo ago

Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.

rhoopr 7mo ago

> 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.

aprdm 7mo ago
Isn't that the premise of Fallout ?
- dmbche 7mo ago
  Nope!
killbot5000 7mo ago
It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is considered insane.
- designerarvid 7mo ago
  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.
  - tavavex 7mo 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?
- eru 7mo ago

RandomGerm4n 7mo ago

This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too lucrative from a business perspective.

tetraca 7mo ago
The people that will take this as a good thing unironically will just have their personal Yes Man do that work internally.
Maxion 7mo ago
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.
- Spoom 7mo ago
  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.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

tripdout 7mo ago

The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?

Guillaume86 7mo ago
Yeah it's just a slightly more honest and simplified presentation of what LLMs providers do IMO.

dakolli 7mo ago

I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software. See: https://deploycel.org/ https://deploycel.org/

amiga386 7mo ago

I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/ https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/ It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?

torginus 7mo ago

I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

hmokiguess 7mo ago

The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things are going. EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious

frenchie4111 7mo ago
lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an obvious giveaway in retrospect
- hmry 7mo ago
  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 by selectively showing some things and not others.
  - whacko_quacko 7mo ago
    Especially given that a popular open source project recently tried to do exactly that. https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 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
    - JoshTriplett 7mo ago
      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".
  - 7mo ago

phpnode 7mo ago

This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not be building my business around this capability however

spudlyo 7mo ago

malus, mala, malum ADJ bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky; It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.

mikepurvis 7mo ago
Homonym of "malice" too. Honestly kind of a brilliant name.
- lelandfe 7mo ago
  Mal: us

yomismoaqui 7mo ago

I bet someone has already made this service for real.

OJFord 7mo ago
A lot of people, including perhaps the creator of this, feel that LLMs themselves are this service.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
It exists! It's called Claude Code.
Nolski 7mo ago
What makes this service not real?

ge96 7mo ago

turd.png classy

alsetmusic 7mo ago

This is brilliant satire. Wonderful response to the “rewrite” of chardet. ^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.

ebiester 7mo ago

The frustrating thing is I also thought about this as a natural conclusion - but as a natural workflow that corporations will do when they see AGPL dependencies they want to use. (I also think there's a world where we start tightening our software bill of materials anyway.) I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.

rgilton 7mo ago

It's interesting that the focus is just on open source licenses. If one can strip licenses from source code using LLMs, then surely a Microsoft employee could do the same with the Windows source code!

boje 7mo ago

Today's satire is tomorrow's reality, if the last 50 or so years is anything to go by.

gorgoiler 7mo ago

…scanning… …fuming… …blood pressure rising… sees a quote attributed to “Chad Stockholder Engineering Director, Profit First LLC” …oh phew, thank god for that. I actually believed this could be real for a moment!

Goofy_Coyote 7mo ago

It took me too long to understand it’s satire. BP went through stratosphere before I noticed. Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage. (I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)

Pannoniae 7mo ago

This 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 Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?

OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
This is going to bring back software patents.
- OJFord 7mo ago
  Where did they go?
- intrasight 7mo ago
  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.
- piperswe 7mo ago
  Considering my name's on a software patent submitted just last year, I don't think software patents have gone anywhere...
  - marxisttemp 7mo ago
    What did you patent
    - piperswe 7mo ago
      The patent application hasn't been published yet so I can't link it, but it's the integration of a bot management system with a queuing system (think, preventing bots from taking space in the line waiting to buy tickets from Ticketmaster when everyone's in the waiting room)

moralestapia 7mo ago

Oof, this is unironically amazing!

ks2048 7mo ago

"I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn't show up on quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp." ◆ Chad Stockholder Engineering Director, Profit First LLC

lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

aaron695 7mo ago

[dead]

duiker101 7mo ago

Let's not give anyone ideas!

agile-gift0262 7mo ago

if it were true that indeed was legal to rewrite and relicense open source code, would that also be true for non-open source code? as in, could someone do a similar rewrite of their employers proprietary code and release it publicly?

Nolski 7mo ago
Yes. Provided you had access to the original source code. Pheonix technologies did this with the IBM bios.

bronlund 7mo ago

If this site actually connects to Stripe, it's much more than just satire. It's a honeypot :D

0xWTF 7mo ago

There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.

etchalon 7mo ago
The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.
phpnode 7mo ago
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 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)
- p0w3n3d 7mo ago
  I wonder about this training data. There's so much profit from open source code in training data, actually the most of the code it was taught was open source, shouldn't it be then free? Or at least open weight?
- phyzome 7mo ago
  Well, that's not what the page describes. You'd have to train an LLM on everything except tldraw, then use that LLM for code generation.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

999900000999 7mo ago

As a hypothetical. Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons. Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects. So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”. How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?

kvgr 7mo ago
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

typeiierror 7mo ago

I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them has probably left the planet. We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?

ensemblehq 7mo ago
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.
Traubenfuchs 7mo ago
Well, what kind of desktop apps? Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.
nivethan 7mo ago
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.
ekidd 7mo ago
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.

sourcegrift 7mo ago

Amazon getting all excited hoping it's real.

dspillett 7mo ago
Amazon C*s calling Amazon Legal to ask if they could get away with implementing something like this internally, more like.

robutsume 7mo ago

[flagged]

Maxion 7mo ago
Let's not spam HN with AI slop please.
usrbinbash 7mo ago
Absolutely true, but there is a silver lining: When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.
jerf 7mo ago
I wrote about that recently: [1] One of the ways that code will be valued in the AI era is the extent to which it has contact with the real world. It doesn't matter how smart the AI is, the real world is always more perverse and complicated, and until their code has been tested by the real world you can't really trust it. (Even if we get superhuman AIs in the future, we have the same superhuman AIs producing superhuman amounts of new code in the world that your AI will have to interact with, and a single AI won't be able to overpower all the superhuman output in that world without testing.) In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive. [1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
Guillaume86 7mo ago
Eh I think part of the joke is that LLMs have gobbled up the original source code, and if you help them enough (identical type signatures and specs), they will output the same code, it's the copyright laundering problem.

jerf 7mo ago

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html 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", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can. This is a big change! 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. And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.

JackYoustra 7mo ago
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.

sigmar 7mo ago

>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, 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.

chii 7mo ago
> 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.

ramon156 7mo ago

blegh, i like the motivation but why again and again do you need to write the content of the page with Slop-LLM-GPT? Your motive and points are valid, why waste it on a word filter that cannot capture it?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

petterroea 7mo ago

Now this is a conversation piece

cloverich 7mo ago

1. Best part of this (satirical) post is, the service they offer isn't really needed. LLM's can do this already for small projects, and soon likely will for large ones too. You don't need a company to do this, we all have the LLM tooling to do it. Critical we're all spending time thinking about what that means in a thoughtful way. 2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?

comrade1234 7mo ago

So they recreate the open source project by using an llm that was trained in the open source project's source code.

mapcars 7mo ago

Heh, why don't you do the opposite - recreate proprietary software with open source license

intrasight 7mo ago
I expect that thousands of people are now doing just that. Most proprietary software is just a shiny UI in front of a crappy database schema.

utopiah 7mo ago

Don'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?!

karel-3d 7mo ago
It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.
- fladrif 7mo ago
  Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
  - darkwater 7mo ago
    If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
    - lupire 7mo ago
      PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.
      - 7mo ago

sam0x17 7mo ago

Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy

ivanjermakov 7mo ago

First I thought this is about manufacturing. Like semiconductor fabs requirement for room cleanness.

glenstein 7mo ago

I 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.

v9v 7mo ago

Thought this was about semiconductor cleanrooms at first. Any startups doing that?

CodeCompost 7mo ago

I know this is satire but we're in the process of rewriting the .NET Mediatr library because ... it's nothing but a simple design pattern packaged as a paid nuget package. We don't even need LLMs to reprogram it. So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.

pringk02 7mo ago

> per package = max( $0.01, size_kb × $0.01 ) > order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages ) > $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee. Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed

neya 7mo ago

You know the satire is so good that people actually confused this for something real:))

bingemaker 7mo ago

It will be nice to know how many legal personnel fell for this trip. Maybe a leaderboard :D

keeda 7mo ago

The name was too much of a giveaway. I just hope that somebody who inevitably builds this for real is self-aware enough to name themselves so transparently. About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version? I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.

n0r0n1n 7mo ago

Can we stop with the AI slop here? Last chance then I have to look elsewhere for real content.

forvelin 7mo ago

they really had an entertaining presentation in fosdem 2026 about this. bit too noisy for my taste but regardless: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...

aleksi 7mo ago
I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open source (as you could guess from my profile, that’s a topic dear to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my life.

izucken 7mo ago

Some parties wouldn't be thrilled about their "source available" getting cleaned this way. So when this gets completed it would only "clean" real open source that can't afford legal trouble. Satirically structured LLM text is not a defence.

slopinthebag 7mo ago

The irony of course is that this service already exists. It's called Claude Code (or Codex, etc...) and it costs $200 / month.

0x500x79 7mo ago

> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.* I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.

kypro 7mo ago
The satire is A-grade. On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity. Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
- gault8121 7mo ago
  So this site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.

danorama 7mo ago

Poe's Law just smacked me upside the head on this one. Hard.

Nolski 7mo ago
It makes me really happy to see this comment :)

throwaway2037 7mo ago

I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361 In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

tavavex 7mo ago

This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?

imiric 7mo ago
> why hasn't anyone done this for real? WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.
- tavavex 7mo ago
  Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-dance about never seeing the source code and separating the system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do that yet?
  - imiric 7mo ago
    Because that's impossible. Any "robot" that can generate code must be trained on massive amounts of code, most of which is open source.
    - sdwr 7mo ago
      And how are you supposed to guarantee equivalent functionality by analyzing "README files, API docs, and type definitions"?
      - dymk 7mo ago
        The joke is that you don’t.
      - Nolski 7mo ago
        It's described on the web page but it's by having 2 agents. One has access to the code and one doesn't.

iepathos 7mo ago

This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights. In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.

littlestymaar 7mo ago
This is definitely a parody though, not a real service.
- superxpro12 7mo ago
  This site is an obvious parody, but like most comedy these days it betrays the severity of the issues happening today.
ActivePattern 7mo ago
[flagged]
- badrequest 7mo ago
  Ah, it really wouldn't be HN without baselessly accusing other posters you disagree with.
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    i mean... the site is very clearly satire and the comment is clearly responding as if it is a real service. i do not necessarily agree with the phrasing of ActivePatterns comment, but i also raised an eyebrow at iepathos' comment.

lxe 7mo ago

Distinguished staff level trolling

asimpletune 7mo ago

This is an art project right? …right?

tonymet 7mo ago

edit: it's satire. but likely not too far off from the reality in 6 months. > Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions. since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room. Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.

badrequest 7mo ago

Was malice.sh taken?

deleted 7mo ago

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copperx 7mo ago

Are licenses even enforceable now? Given that the law is not being followed in the United States anymore?

pocksuppet 7mo ago
Everything is enforceable by the rich, nothing is enforceable by the poor

kpcyrd 7mo ago

I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody attempting this approach for real): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331

lupire 7mo ago
That's worth its own submission and discussion.
- alberto-m 7mo ago
  It has been submitted last week, happy reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
ylere 7mo ago
It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e893c1fce2a8 https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
- codethief 7mo ago
  Wow, I did not expect such perfect reproduction. Link to the actual source code (before being rewritten): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbcharsetprober.py https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar...
  - ylere 7mo ago
    Indeed, and that's through the API. If you use Claude Chat/Code and even if you then turn off web search, it still has access to some of its tools (for doing calculations, running small code snippets etc.) and that environment contains chardets code 4 times: /home/claude/.cache/uv/archive-v0/nZCy52fMCgTsNaLySn0xf/chardet /home/claude/.cache/uv/wheels-v6/pypi/chardet /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/chardet /usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/chardet It's not surprising that they were able to create a new, working version of chardet this quickly. It seems the author just told Claude Code to "do a clean room implementation" and to make sure the code looks different from the original chardet (named several times in the prompt) without considering the training set and the tendency for LLMs to "cheat".

RobertoG 7mo ago

That's funny. I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction. It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.

jhatemyjob 7mo ago

I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can't think for themselves." Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example

himata4113 7mo ago

Wait this is joke, yep this is a joke... Wait it's not a joke why are people taking this seriously? Ok good this is a joke wait it's REAL?

deleted 7mo ago

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fraywing 7mo ago

The smells suspiciously like a well positioned gag that is secretly seeking VC attention. The emotional reaction turned attention seeking feels a bit like having ulterior motives... or maybe Moltbook has made me paranoid?

ultratalk 7mo ago

Am I the only one who saw the title and thought it was about physical clean-rooms?

jollyllama 7mo ago
No

tekawade 7mo ago

How is this legal. Unless it’s trained excluding *all* open source code it’s not legal. Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose. Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”. Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.

Thrymr 7mo ago
You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully: > Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright > If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters. > "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries

KronisLV 7mo ago

I feel like we live in an interesting time, where you have to second guess whether someone would actually build something like this. Like, the language is very tongue in cheek, but given how messed up copyright law is, you'd think that by now someone would be doing this, and proudly.

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wesselbindt 7mo ago

I ate the onion. But in my defense, people are really putting forward this argument to relicense from GPL to MIT: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

Perz1val 7mo ago

I'd have mined the copied libraries with something that makes it possible to later change terms and extract fees, as it'd be expected that nobody reads the terms for such service

Sardtok 7mo ago

Before I visited the site, I was really confused. First, the name means bad, as in evil. Second, I couldn't understand what CRaaS was supposed to be. But I love it! The perfect response to the "clean room" AI re-implementation and re-licensing of whatever that library is called.

edelbitter 7mo ago
>whatever that library is called https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

ftumminello 7mo ago

Bruh this feels evil hahaha

jabedude 7mo ago

This is quite literally the end of open source. projects will find themselves in the position of making their test suites private to avoid being sherlocked like this

e12e 7mo ago

> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...

sigbottle 7mo ago

I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation issues. Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.

TheMiddleMan 7mo ago

Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality and document it. Then have it build based on the document?

Jerry2 7mo ago

From their front page: >*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright* Heh, ok. So, the thinking is: 1. You contract them. 2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company. 3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary. 4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!" ... 5. Profit. This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code. The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established. The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness... This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating"). The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .

detaro 7mo ago
whoosh

p_j_w 7mo ago

I know this is satire, but I worry that it's giving some scumbags out there ideas.

fuddle 7mo ago

> MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services. I think they should take some responsibility!

ragazzina 7mo ago

Why only FOSS? Why not Wikipedia? You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month. EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.

STRiDEX 7mo ago
aren't you describing what elon already did https://grokipedia.com/ https://grokipedia.com/
b3n 7mo ago
This was already done, see: Grokipedia.
lukev 7mo ago
So Grokipedia?
453yuh46 7mo ago
Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and every nation and every political leaning has rights to have their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really irritating. Wikipedia for a time being had already different POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that place already exists where that is a case and that is a graveyard.

teeray 7mo ago

The law should be updated to limit clean room reimplementation to a strictly human endeavor. Person, in a faraday cage room, with a machine that is too underpowered to run local LLMs. Reference material (stack overflow archives, language docs, specs, etc) are permitted.

floathub 7mo ago

Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!

gmerc 7mo ago

See also: claw-guard.org/adnet, ai-ceo.org and ai-chro.org in this category

temp123789246 7mo ago

Theory: Any system, legal or otherwise, that denies the Axioms of Reality, will eventually fail. Axiom of Reality: “Intellectual Property” does not exist.

flammafex 7mo ago
[dead]

mcherm 7mo ago

The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer owns the resulting code. But that's not true! According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!! I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.

semiquaver 7mo ago
If you’re referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C. Circuit. And it only applies to “pure” AI-generated works; it did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be copyrightable.
- bananamogul 7mo ago
  Though here, the purpose is still served. If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
metalcrow 7mo ago
This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.
- aero_code 7mo ago
  No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law": https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-ai-generated-art-lacking-human-creator-2025-03-18/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...
  - ryoshoe 7mo ago
    Could the prompt used to generate the art be considered human input, or is it that a human must to make some contribution to the art for it to be copyrightable?

neutrinobro 7mo ago

Ah yes, how apropos, a "modest proposal" for a new AI era.

mikelitoris 7mo ago

Clean room was a poor choice of words… I thought it was an actual clean room for semiconductor devices :(

CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
It's already a term of art used for this very purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

headgasket 7mo ago

interesting name. The opposite of a bonus. So what is, the fact that your fork looses the thousands of eyes (meat and ai) that spot and fix bugs and security leaks?

themarogee 7mo ago

[flagged]

ohgeekz_com 7mo ago

[dead]

jaredchung 7mo ago

Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they actually provide the literal service they're satirizing? How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?

Nolski 7mo ago
Is it satire? Or is it a warning?
- jaredchung 7mo ago
  If it's a warning, it's a warning that also delivers the thing it's warning about.

arrsingh 7mo ago

It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid. I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.

devy 7mo ago
LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave it away immediately: > "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired) > © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD]. > This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
- yonz 7mo ago
  I almost lost it, didn't realize it was satire until I came back to these comments
  - gault8121 7mo ago
    This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
    - wjnc 7mo ago
      Satire And Performance Art no less.

egonschiele 7mo ago

Good idea, but as several comments here suggest, the time when this sort of thing could be taken as satire is gone. I promise you there are multiple people here thinking that this is a good idea. I predict that within a year we will see a service that does exactly this.

pradn 7mo ago

Is AI-driven clean room implementation a wild west at the moment? I suppose there haven't yet been any cases to test this out in real life?

neonstatic 7mo ago

> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room > 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service > 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity

groby_b 7mo ago

I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified things that _may_ be future threats. The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents" It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad) We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.

Nolski 7mo ago
This is a good idea. Do you have a package in mind?
- groby_b 7mo ago
  Depends on the size you want to tackle. Let's shoot for MIT licensed or similar, so we don't have to do the unethical thing. ESLint or Webpack would probably be attempts that are decently sized for a challenge. Cheerio would be a bit smaller. Chalk is probably close to the absolute lower bound of what's even meaningful. (You'd likely just regenerate a package that size from scratch instead of wondering about compat)

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agys 7mo ago

The name gives it away :)

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago

Hope they have very good lawyers...

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

New_projectname Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.

Flemlord 7mo ago

Was hoping this was a service that cleaned actual rooms, combining organizing and cleaning. :-(

abrookewood 7mo ago

I hate to say it, but if you dropped the sarcasm and I think you'd have a viable business ... Truly a bizarre place we find ourselves in.

sharpshadow 7mo ago

As if the models have not seen the open source software before. That should be considered in the upcoming ruling. Technically the models are trained on exactly that.

w10-1 7mo ago

Yes, we hate the abuse of open source, in its everlasting legal purgatory, by large evil "other" shadows acting at a distance... But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction. Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.

m3kw9 7mo ago

It will soon not be a joke, and it reminds me of these crypto bitcoin tumblers

gaigalas 7mo ago

Why would I pay for this? Makes no sense. It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".

tombert 7mo ago

I was really hoping that this was just a service that would literally clean my room.

jdlyga 7mo ago

Just give it 2 years and this will exist for real.

aussieguy1234 7mo ago

Is this a joke, or is it the real deal?

Nolski 7mo ago
Upload your manifest and find out! :)

tianrking 7mo ago

[flagged]

m3kw9 7mo ago

With the classic Claude colors and fonts

parksb 7mo ago

I think it should have been launched on April 1st.

api 7mo ago

This could also be done with a fair amount of commercial software, especially anything that's basically a wrapper around APIs, databases, etc.

giancarlostoro 7mo ago

Its not just doing this to open source GPL software. I have seen friends disassemble code in archaic languages, and have Claude translate the Assembly back to the original language, and churn on it until it compiles. It worked.

casey2 7mo ago

It's not april 1st yet

eranation 7mo ago

A LOT of people are taking this seriously and not getting the (no so?) subtle satire in this. I fell for it at first glance too, had to do a double take. Some of the smartest people I know asked me for my thoughts on this. The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.

RobLach 7mo ago

Excellent

nathancroissant 7mo ago

Well I didn't understand it was satire at first glance which tells a lot about the state of our industry...

throwaway290 7mo ago

> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends

bhanuhai 7mo ago

Interesting

egao1980 7mo ago

[dead]

unselect5917 7mo ago

very bottom of the page: "This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."

incognos 7mo ago

I predict that licenses will adapt to close this loophole...

entropi 7mo ago
I think the problem will be with enforcement. To be honest I don't see any way to stop this kind of thing from happening. I predict the slow decline of open source projects, sadly.

deleted 7mo ago

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alemwjsl 7mo ago

You can also use this to say copy proprietary software, and make it open source GPL.

alansaber 7mo ago

Partly hard to judge as satire because this is significantly better than most SAAS websites.

deleted 7mo ago

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harvie 7mo ago

Can't wait to see GPL2 ZFS :-)

lambdaone 7mo ago

Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.

ericzundel 7mo ago

Of course, it's a serious issue, but I love the sense of humor here, buried deep down: Full legal indemnification* Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright ... The MalusCorp Guarantee™ If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters. *This has never happened because it legally cannot happen. Trust us.

hdivider 7mo ago

I saw "cleanroom as a service" and thought great! Don't need to build a facility to do materials science or photonics or certain aerospace R&D...but nope, not that kind of cleanroom. :)

may13noon 7mo ago

Personally, I think it's a brilliant idea that the service charges for whole dependency by package.json instead of each single package. This is the approach that corporations like

jackhalford 7mo ago

> Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers. Took me a minute to recognize the satyre, good one boys.

SuaveSteve 7mo ago

While it is satire, it is also appears to be "real satire" as gault8121 has been trying to tell us. ThePrimeagen paid them to do the node package "is-number". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE

seanrrr 6mo ago

This is quite sad to see but important to point out.