alt Hacker NewsMalus – Clean Room as a Service
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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.
I ate the onion. But in my defense, people are really putting forward this argument to relicense from GPL to MIT:
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.
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.
First I thought this is about manufacturing. Like semiconductor fabs requirement for room cleanness.
Can't wait to see GPL2 ZFS :-)
Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy
Heh, why don't you do the opposite - recreate proprietary software with open source license
Today's satire is tomorrow's reality, if the last 50 or so years is anything to go by.
You know the satire is so good that people actually confused this for something real:))
I predict that licenses will adapt to close this loophole...
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?
> 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!
I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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?
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.
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."
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. :)
Are licenses even enforceable now? Given that the law is not being followed in the United States anymore?
This is an art project right? …right?
It will be nice to know how many legal personnel fell for this trip. Maybe a leaderboard :D
I think it should have been launched on April 1st.
Let's not give anyone ideas!
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?
Thought this was about semiconductor cleanrooms at first. Any startups doing that?
Just give it 2 years and this will exist for real.
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?
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 .
Poe's Law just smacked me upside the head on this one. Hard.
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.
Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!
Hope they have very good lawyers...
> 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
I bet someone has already made this service for real.
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
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/
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?