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Open Source in the age of license laundering (discuss.online)
submitted 7 months ago by 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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[–] 1 point 7 months 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 🤷

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