When I look at this website, which seems to be intended as a serious project and not a joke, to me it kind of feels like it would be the end of FOSS… https://malus.sh/ Is it just me?
Or will the majority of contributors still bother if they won’t even get the most basic attribution anymore, let alone GPL and other complex licenses being enforcable at all?
There are also these events that make me wonder if this service can even work, given the apparent training data plagiarism problem. This feels kind of independent from whether a gen AI being fed a project can ever be “clean room”:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583199
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorization-research/685552/
I feel like there are more reasons than ever to tell people to cut out gen AI code from FOSS entirely, if they care about respecting attribution and the work of others. Even if just morally. This whole ride seems to be going in a bad direction.
I’m curious about other people’s thoughts, however.
PS: Don’t trust me on any law-related guesses, IANAL. This isn’t legal advice. I’m just a concerned coder.
Update: seems like it is satire https://malus.sh/blog.html but the trend as a whole seems to be real: https://www.mrlatte.net/en/stories/2026/03/05/relicensing-with-ai-assisted-rewrite/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/06/ai_kills_software_licensing/ https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/
It might be the end of GPL-type licenses. But, at least as far as I’ve understood it, the point of copyleft was to use copyright against itself in the first place, because copyright sucks, and at the end of the day we don’t really want copyright OR copyleft. They’re both asserting “ownership” of stuff that honestly belongs in the public domain free to all humans to use (in an ideal world, that doesn’t contain evil corporations that are considered people for some reason). We already know copyleft open source has been widely abused in proprietary software. This is not new nor surprising. We gave them the richly deserved middle finger whenever we could find out they did it before, and we hate it, but it was never “the end” of open source software because making it publicly available is precisely the defiance we are ultimately aiming for and we will always do that no matter how much they steal it and make it closed source.
People making closed source software are the enemy, and our war of freedom against them continues regardless of what tactics they use to demean our efforts while they make their closed source software. We will never let them win. They think they’ve found a new way around the GPL, that’s a shame, but so be it. The arms race will continue, but open source will not go away, because the point of it has nothing to do with meekly relying on the law to allow open source to exist, that’s just a method that has been used, with some success, and allowed a lot of people to turn it into a livelihood, and it will be a terrible shame to lose that.
Those things are not the true goal of open source though. The intention of open source, is to not let proprietary, hidden software dictate the fate of humanity and we will do it for as long as we have to. We’ll do it if we’re protected by copyleft, we’ll do it if we’re not. We’ll still do it even if they make it illegal, and we’ll call it reverse engineering, hacking, and piracy if we have to. Because the information and code that humanity relies on must be free, not owned.