Willison: MALUS — Can Coding Agents Relicense Open Source via Clean Room?
simonwillison.net·medium signal
Simon Willison's March 12 post on MALUS raised a legally explosive question: can AI coding agents produce 'clean room' implementations of GPL or restrictively licensed software and thereby relicense it? The post builds on his earlier Codex/OSS relicensing analysis and introduces MALUS as a service concept for managed clean-room rewrites. This is an emerging IP/legal battleground that will affect every team using coding agents on projects with license-sensitive dependencies.