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Posted by microflash 10 hours ago

Malus – Clean Room as a Service(malus.sh)
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...

https://malus.sh/blog.html

926 points | 362 commentspage 4
bronlund 8 hours ago|
If this site actually connects to Stripe, it's much more than just satire. It's a honeypot :D
fallingmeat 9 hours ago||
Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"
mikelitoris 4 hours ago||
Clean room was a poor choice of words… I thought it was an actual clean room for semiconductor devices :(
CobrastanJorji 4 hours ago|
It's already a term of art used for this very purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
ragazzina 5 hours ago||
Why only FOSS? Why not Wikipedia?

You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month.

EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.

b3n 5 hours ago||
This was already done, see: Grokipedia.
453yuh46 3 hours ago|||
Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and every nation and every political leaning has rights to have their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really irritating. Wikipedia for a time being had already different POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that place already exists where that is a case and that is a graveyard.
STRiDEX 5 hours ago|||
aren't you describing what elon already did https://grokipedia.com/
lukev 4 hours ago||
So Grokipedia?
teeray 5 hours ago||
The law should be updated to limit clean room reimplementation to a strictly human endeavor. Person, in a faraday cage room, with a machine that is too underpowered to run local LLMs. Reference material (stack overflow archives, language docs, specs, etc) are permitted.
tripdout 8 hours ago||
The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?
Guillaume86 7 hours ago|
Yeah it's just a slightly more honest and simplified presentation of what LLMs providers do IMO.
sigbottle 5 hours ago||
I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation issues.

Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.

observationist 9 hours ago||
Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will. I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing. Open the floodgates. Break the system.

I'd cheer for a company like this.

It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.

amiga386 8 hours ago||
> I view this as an unmitigated good.

Then I don't think you've thought it through.

This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.

If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.

You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")

https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...

observationist 7 hours ago||
I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput. It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with impending AI job loss across the board.

We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.

Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.

amiga386 7 hours ago||
It sounds like you'd advocate for accelerationism (by which I mean "to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it")

The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.

But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.

The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.

observationist 7 hours ago||
It's not naked accelerationism, I just don't want to see years and years of suffering and exploitation and chaos giving a permanent advantage to those already in a position to take that advantage. One significant industry is all it will take; light a fire under the ass of congress and the general public, get people motivated to start taking sensible steps to move towards UBI or some sort of Coasean scheme with nationalized shares distributed to people, or whatever. Doing anything is extraordinarily more effective than doing nothing as this plays out.
DrammBA 7 hours ago|||
> I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing.

Agree, I said this in another comment, AI-generated anything should be public domain. Public data in, public domain out.

This train wreck in slow motion of AI slowly eroding the open web is no good, let's rip the bandaid.

hrmtst93837 6 hours ago|||
Open sourcing all the things sounds fun right up until you hit the point where clean room claims collapse under real legal cross-examination. If you think companies with money on the line are just going to roll over and accept it all as fair play I'd like to introduce you to the concept of discovery at $900/hr. If your business model is a legal speedrun you better budget harder than you code.
slopinthebag 6 hours ago||
Open source is good, washing open source licences is very bad.

I publish under AGPL and if someone ever took my project and washed it to MIT I would probably just take all my code offline forever. Fuck that.

Sardtok 5 hours ago||
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.

edelbitter 5 hours ago|
>whatever that library is called

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

wesselbindt 5 hours ago|
I ate the onion. But in my defense, people are really putting forward this argument to relicense from GPL to MIT:

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

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