Satire AI Software called Malus has been developed, which can take open-source software and create “clean room” clones that match functionality while ditching attribution and copyleft obligations.
The tool charges via Stripe and promises to hand you a fresh codebase that looks politely unrelated to the project it is shadowing.
United Nations, political economy researcher, Mike Nolan said: “The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I’ve done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”
404 Media says Malus leans on a classic bit of software law history from 1982, when IBM ruled home computing and compatibility was the whole game. Rivals wanted machines that ran the same software without pinching IBM’s copyrighted BIOS code.
The workaround was the “clean room” design, where one team inspects the original and writes a spec, then a separate team builds to that spec without seeing the code. The end product behaves the same, yet claims to be original because it did not copy the protected implementation.
That tactic has been upheld in case law and even got a glossy telly retelling in Halt and Catch Fire, because nothing says legal doctrine like prestige drama. In the age of generative AI, the same logic is being dragged into weirder places.
It is now easier to prod an AI model into producing software that behaves like an existing open source project, then wave the words “from scratch” at anyone asking awkward questions. One camp argues that function is not copyright and the new code is distinct, so the licence strings do not apply.
The other camp points out that large language model output is steeped in what it was trained on, which includes the projects it is mimicking.
Malus pushes the fantasy harder: “Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.”
