Malus: This could have bad implications for Open Source/Linux

General
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Crossposted from r/linux

So this site came up recently, claiming to use AI to perform ‘clean-room’ vibecoded re-implementations of open source code, in order to evade Copyleft and the like.

Clearly meant to be satire, with the name of the company basically being “EvilCorp” and the fake user quotes from names like “Chad Stockholder”, but it does actually accept payment and seemingly does what it describes, so it’s certainly a bit beyond just a joke at this point. A livestreamer recently tried it with some simple Javascript libraries and it worked as described.

I figured I’d make a post on this, because even if this particular example doesn’t scale and might be written off as a B.S. satirical marketing stunt, it does raise questions about what a future version of this idea could look like, and what the implication of that is for Linux. Obviously I don’t think this would be able to effectively un-copyleft something as big and advanced as the Kernel, but what about FOSS applications that run on Linux? Could something like this be a threat to them, and is there anything that could be done to counteract that?

This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
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Good. I hope this brings about the death of viral copyleft licenses like the GPL.

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Relevant video:

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I thought this was an interesting video. Fundamentally though, I don’t see why AI clean room re-implementation is inherently better or worse than when it’s done by humans.

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I would argue it’s probably not possible for AI to truly do a clean room reimplementation of an open source project since it’s likely the model was trained on any significant open source codebase. A clean room reimplementation requires that the “reimplementer” has never seen the original code before.

You would need to use a likely custom model that has verifiably not been trained on the target codebase.

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For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that “liberates” it from any existing copyright licenses.

The site is an elaborate bit of satire designed to bring attention to a very real problem in open source, but it also does exactly what it advertises and is a real LLC that is making money by using AI to produce “clean room” clones of existing software.

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This would clearly be damaging to FLOSS.
The best example is BSD vs Linux.
BSD is just in many things, but since there is no copyleft, it can just be exploited without giving back and therefore it is a lot less developed then Linux