MALUS Clean Room as a Service: Satire on AI License-Washing Needs No Exaggeration
simonwillison.net·low signal
MALUS.sh launched a satirical commercial service claiming to 'liberate' companies from open source license obligations by having AI robots independently recreate any project from scratch — Simon Willison called it 'brutal satire on the whole vibe-porting license washing thing' (Mar 12). The notable signal is that the satire requires no exaggeration to land: what MALUS describes is functionally identical to real attempts by companies to circumvent copyleft through AI reimplementation. For open source maintainers, this crystallizes the threat model that the OSI and legal communities have been trying to articulate.