Malus – Clean Room as a Service (malus.sh)

is the motto, "Don't be good?"

"Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡

Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.

Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things.

"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."

Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will. I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing. Open the floodgates. Break the system.

I'd cheer for a company like this.

It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.

Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"

Oh no… VCs will see this and take it seriously

In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.

yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke!

> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?

ROFL

Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.

> You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global economy to run on software that nobody technically owns, maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely insane.

Funny but true.

This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too lucrative from a business perspective.

The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?

I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software.

See: https://deploycel.org/

I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/

It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?

I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-

The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things are going.

EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious

This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not be building my business around this capability however

malus, mala, malum ADJ

bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky;

It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.

I bet someone has already made this service for real.

turd.png classy

This is brilliant satire. Wonderful response to the “rewrite” of chardet.

^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.

It's interesting that the focus is just on open source licenses. If one can strip licenses from source code using LLMs, then surely a Microsoft employee could do the same with the Windows source code!