Mastodawn

An interesting stunt: Malus.sh will take your money and in exchange it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/23/poison-pill/#kobayashied

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Domestic Supply

Apr 23

@pluralistic I anticipate thousands of "clean room" versions of open source software that will be unmaintained from the moment they are created. Short term gain for the people doing this will become long term technical debt paid for by the people using it. This is actually a strong incentive for those of us who actually understand the consequences to rally behind real projects with real security updates.

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Khleedril

@ddgulledge @pluralistic On the other hand there will be long-legacy programs which the serious distributions will gravitate towards.