Re: SQL Lite doesn't provide unit tests
This is now looking extremely forward-looking. To defend itself from vibe-lifting, open source software should not provide unit tests to enable cloning projects to move in and create Vibe coded copies. It is extremely hard to clone SQL lite and this was a deliberate policy on their part.
Expect to see that happen more and more on high profile open source projects.
The lesson of this Cloudflare vibe-heist is that there is now a strong incentive for open source software NOT to provide unit tests as part of the source code.
Other open source projects such as SQL lite famously do not accept public contributions and do not provide public unit tests.
They still comply with the open source licence but they effectively prevent people from cloning their software because they don't provide the validation required.
#vibelifting #vibelaundering
Re: Cloudflare vibe-heist
What I find most interesting here is not the source code that Vercel provided but its suite of validating unit tests.
This enabled a Vibe coding project to validate that they had covered all the functionality requirements that Vercel uses to validate its own software.
Without these tests, Cloudflare would have been in the dark and they would not have been able to have so rapidly developed this functionally complete clone of Next.js
If there's any awareness within the AI companies about this laundering of licences. I'm sure they're cool with it as long as their customers don't get wind of it!
Essentially, AI companies have a vested interest in driving the cost of software to zero and by encouraging the proliferation of public domain software. This will be the result pretty damn quickly!
Cloudflare by vibe-cloning Next.js are laundering an open source piece of software and converting it into something with a different licence.
That is NOT in the spirit or intention of open source!
Re: vibe coding and public domain
Cloudflare is claiming property ownership rights over something they do not own no matter how much money they invested in generating this software.
And worse I think is the fact that in the process of appropriating and deriving from an open source project, Cloudflare is inadvertently changing the terms of the licence which is not something that is permitted under open source licences.
So my issue with Cloudflare is that they are literally displaying a "Copyright 2026 Cloudflare" on this public domain work and they are literally licencing it under the MIT licence which they are not entitled to do.
This is NOT open source. This is public domain!
re: Cloudflare vibe heist
A human reading and producing a derivative work which they then licence as open source and what an LLM is doing is different in the sense that an LLM is not a human and therefore cannot be a copyrighted "author"
If there's no human author, there's no copyright and if there's no copyright then there's no open source licence. Instead the derived work is automatically deemed to be public domain.
It's "fair use" to read, analyse and understand code. So no, there's no difference between what an LLM is doing and what a human brain is doing when it comes to reading and analysing an open source project.
So what Cloudflare is doing here is not wrong. Sure, it's a little bit of a "fuck you" to Vercel but they're well within their rights to create a derivative work. They get a little bit of a leg up because the Vercel provided unit tests to validate against.
When you use AI to clone an open source project and you validate it against the original project's unit tests you're not creating a new open source project, you are in effect subverting the terms of that license and converting it into something else which may not be licensable at all.
Coining new terms:
#vibelifting
#vibelaundering
John Hardy