this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
44 points (97.8% liked)

Open Source

45995 readers
218 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Recently saw a youtube video about a service created to change an open source software license.

  • One agent reads code and gather specs
  • Another agent, without access to the original code, creates equivalent software

In theory this should allow someone to take any open source software and change it's license.

For a large portion of open source likely this is not an issue, because nobody may care for the particular software, but for larger projects I wonder what sort of impact this may have. In particular any open source software where it's authors are making a living from donations or public support.

Has anyone read, or thought, of a way to prevent getting one's code license changed this way?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

I personally don't think this service as a license changing of an existing project. If it reads and implements the same thing from scratch, then its a new implementation with a new license. I see it similar to how reverse engineering is done in example. And with the approach of two different agents I think this is okay, as it is a new implementation. I mean this is something humans could do themselves too. The only thing is, can they actually proof that both agents aren't trained on the data they are reading and re-implementing it again (for the clean room implementation)?

The biggest problem to me is, using Ai tools in general, because of what and how they are trained on. But that is a different topic for another day.