this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Open Source in the age of license laundering (discuss.online)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by francisco_1844@discuss.online to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think it would be pretty cool if this was used on leaked proprietary source codes

[–] melfie@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, like Anthropic’s leaked code that was converted to Python and open sourced. It seems proprietary to open source is a bigger opportunity than open source to proprietary. If there’s already a FOSS version, why would anyone bother with a proprietary bastardization of it?