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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[–] M1k3y@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

The problem is that companies will no longer publish the source code for their projects, as they are not in control of what happens to it and they can't restrict competitors anymore.

Im not a big fan of fake open source, but source available is better than closed source.

And license laundering will not primarily be used to make projects with less restrictive licenses, its main purpose will be using copyleft or noncommercial projects in closed source products.