47
Open Source in the age of license laundering (discuss.online)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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
[–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago

companies will no longer publish the source code for their projects

100%

Whereas, before a company may contribute something they created for internal use and they may have put something to try and stop direct competitors from using it (like restrictions only for cloud providers) now they probably will just not publish at all.

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

To be fair, some of the "fake open source" was a result of some projects seeing their projects taken by a cloud provider, charging for it and not contributing ANYTHING back to the original project. Can't really say I blame them.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent