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?

  • francisco_1844@discuss.onlineOP
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    19 hours ago

    I thought there are some licenses that prohibit cloud providers from using the software and offering it as a service. In those cases even though the software may not be leaving the “Author” machines, it would still be a refactor of software that otherwise the cloud provider would not have been able to run legally under the old license.

    • jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours 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 🤷