this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Open Source in the age of license laundering (discuss.online)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by francisco_1844@discuss.online to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

open source licence obligations are almost always triggered upon distribution

and cloud software-as-a-service doesn't count as distribution (except under AGL and a few rarer less-used licences), because the software never leaves machines owned/operated by the "author"

so, cloud SaaS has been able to consume open source code without contributing anything back for decades already

AI-generated bespoke software might be killing SaaS, but it'll like never trigger open source obligations either, because it'll never leave machines owned/operated by the "author"

so these AI-reimplementations of existing open source software are kinda' pointless

[–] francisco_1844@discuss.online 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I thought there are some licenses that prohibit cloud providers from using the software and offering it as a service. In those cases even though the software may not be leaving the "Author" machines, it would still be a refactor of software that otherwise the cloud provider would not have been able to run legally under the old license.

[–] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

sure, but there's so much community outrage at BSL (and similar) licences, usually because they start as open source and then later rug-pull and relicense community contributions

and this results in there usually being a non-BSL fork of everything that is BSL, or at least a very good (incompatible) alternative

e.g.

  • redis -> valkey
  • terraform -> opentofu
  • vault -> openbao

but sure, I concede that a clean-room AI-implementation might be valuable depending on the existing licence

I just don't see this being especially common 🤷