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?
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.
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.
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.