Malus - how can they get away with this

[tomO2013]

I'm a huge proponent of opensource. I use it in my personal life and also corporate use. I strongly try to advocate that we contribute something back at a corporate level for our usage of opensource software.

Intrinsically I see giving back to the OpenSource communities around whom we benefit from their work, as just making good business sense. Kind of like the insurance company model, if more companies contributed time, money or both then we would de-risk software going unsupported, or worse yet being a pillar piece of a Fortune 500 company that provides core services to millions of people worldwide where that service goes out of service e.g. pgBackRest for PostGreSQL....

With that being said, if companies are not willing to contribute said time or money, I'd at least expect them to respect the licensing terms of these projects.

I've recently discovered a new AI company called malus https://malus.sh/ that is doing what I can only call brazenly ripping off the open source community and advertising it as a good thing - using AI agents to recreate existing AGPL and opensource software from scratch to avoid licensing the software or the terms and conditions. This will only hurt opensource and really bugs me. I wonder how big tech would respond if malus was to point their tooling at MS Office or instagram etc....

@Cliff : with your legal background is this simply new ground that we are in, or in your opinion is there any legal recourse?

 

[Cmaier]

I'm a huge proponent of opensource. I use it in my personal life and also corporate use. I strongly try to advocate that we contribute something back at a corporate level for our usage of opensource software.

Intrinsically I see giving back to the OpenSource communities around whom we benefit from their work, as just making good business sense. Kind of like the insurance company model, if more companies contributed time, money or both then we would de-risk software going unsupported, or worse yet being a pillar piece of a Fortune 500 company that provides core services to millions of people worldwide where that service goes out of service e.g. pgBackRest for PostGreSQL....

With that being said, if companies are not willing to contribute said time or money, I'd at least expect them to respect the licensing terms of these projects.

I've recently discovered a new AI company called malus https://malus.sh/ that is doing what I can only call brazenly ripping off the open source community and advertising it as a good thing - using AI agents to recreate existing AGPL and opensource software from scratch to avoid licensing the software or the terms and conditions. This will only hurt opensource and really bugs me. I wonder how big tech would respond if malus was to point their tooling at MS Office or instagram etc....

@Cliff : with your legal background is this simply new ground that we are in, or in your opinion is there any legal recourse?

The law is unsettled. Would be smart if we got some new open source licenses that expressly forbid using the software to train or to be modified by AIs. Without that, you have to look at whether they violated the license, which means looking at the specific language of the license to see what is permitted. That probably gets you into the question of whether or not you have created a derivative work / or “modified” the software (within the meaning of the license) by feeding it into AI. If there is ambiguity, this ambiguity is usually charged against the party that drafted the license.

 

[Nycturne]

I think the unfortunate part is those most in need of protection with such licenses are also those least able to pay the costs to take anyone to court over them, so it’s been the case that even smallish companies can generally do what looks like a GPL violation and mostly just get bad PR for a couple weeks on social media before everyone memory holes it.

Some hubbub about Bambu and their… creative approach to the AGPL currently happening too, but some of the issue there is: who even has standing to sue?