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?

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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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