This Is Crazy

Open source is dead. And no, I'm not talking about the AI slop apocalypse PR epidemic that has been going on for the last 6 months. I'm talking about something much much much more serious. And the weirdest part about this whole thing, it's being disguised as a joke. We're only joking. Listen here, pal. Even the Bible hates this behavior. And this was from 3,000 years ago. Ain't nobody likes this. All right. To understand what's going on, may I present to you first the website Malice Liberate opensource. Now to understand what is happening and what's going on behind all this, you got to know a little bit of history. And the first piece of history starts right here. Baker versus Seldon. Now, effectively what happened is that Baker studied everything that Seldon did and then recreated effectively Seldon's accounting work and his new novel principles and was able to sell his own version of the book. Now, of course, this went off into the courts. The courts eventually reached the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, "Hey, you can copyright expressions, but you cannot copyright ideas." This is important. Again, in the same talk and also on Malice's website is another very important piece of lore from our history. In 1984, a company called Phoenix Technologies did a very kind of clever thing. Effectively, at one point, IBM had a strangle hold on the entire computing like ecosystem. And so what Phoenix Technologies did is that they hired an engineer that would go through and effectively create a perfect spec to match exactly how the BIOS would operate from IBM. And then a second engineer would just simply implement the spec, never interacting with IBM, never attempting to steal any information, just simply looking at the spec and copying its behavior. And this allowed Phoenix Technologies to actually write its own version of some IBM firmware. And then legally they were given the thumbs up. Yes, that is okay. Legally this is called clean room engineering. Effectively you create a buffer between person who understands the technology and person who implements the technology. And by having this legally distinct separation, you prevent yourself from falling into a bunch of issues. Hopefully now it's a little bit more obvious where I'm going at this point. Robot A reads the documentation, understands the code, sees what's going on, generates a specification. Robot B implements from just the spec package liberated. What this means is that there are packages out in the ecosystem that have say GPL licenses. If you're not familiar with copy left or GPL, effectively what happens is that if you use a GPL package, you must make your package open source for everybody and you must have a GPL license. It is a viral licensing. So say you wanted this package and you're like, "Oo, I could really use that. that would be pivotal for my project. But I also don't want GPL. This is a commercial project. Well, what could I do? I could AI clean room engineer that. And this is exactly what was built by these two right here. They gave an entire presentation. It's up on YouTube and they call it the death of open source where they argue quite thoroughly of all the dangers of open source, why effectively there's a bunch of problems with it, why licenses can be pretty bad, and why copyright law is actually in their favor. Nolan right here proposes this idea of clean room as a service. So if you actually go to the website Malice, I just assumed this was just a joke, right? The name it's way too on the nose. It seems pretty obvious. The comments are from Wellington bottomline stockholder and offshore, right? Like this is all extremely on the nose. But here's the thing. I bought the service. I got is number copied. I got leftpad copied. This is the exact code that it produced. And yes, this passes the 111 test for JavaScript is number. Now, your obvious first reaction to everything I'm saying. I know it's been a lot. Your first reaction is JavaScript has an is number package that you have to download and execute to understand what a number is. Yes. Yes, it is true. And second, yes, this is a potential implementation which is entirely more than one line of code. I JavaScript is truly a cursed language. Okay, it is just the worst. But I think the second and more important reaction is, okay, this was obviously uh an elaborate setup to kind of show the weakness of our current copyright law and what's happening within open source. You can now have commercial entities effectively copy anything with AI and just say, "Yeah, we don't care about licenses." Oh, sorry. Is that GPL? More like goodbye. More like don't give a licensing going on right here. And there is legally apparently nothing we can do about it. That is just the state of affairs. You put your code on the internet, a robot can write a specification and a second robot can just straight up snatch it. Clean room engineering, baby. As you can imagine, I I feel a lot of things, right? I feel a lot of upsetness towards this entire experience. Even just reading it, it just feels very upsetting because for me, it's not really a joke. Like, yes, I believe these guys for setting up it as a joke. It's such an elaborate joke that they even took money. For me, that's typically when the I'm just joking phase stops being a joke. But you must understand that this is what's happening. Look at this tweet from Sammy Samboy right here. I have so much gratitude to the people who wrote extremely complex software character by character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point because you know what what comes after, right? Great, huh? I mean, by the way, somebody somebody needs to be monitoring some of these tweets over at Open AI and be like, "Yo, bro, just don't say that." Okay, they Okay, you just got to remember that public perception of AI is in the actual toilet. It's been falling among developers. It's been falling among game developers. It's been falling among the entire public. You just don't, whatever you do, don't say something stupid like, "Thanking everybody for their hard work. Now I'm going to go make billions of dollars off of you." Just don't do that. That's the one thing you can't do. And Sam's like, "Hold my Apple teeny. I got a tweet to send, brother. This is so bad. This is a real thing. This is not just a proof of concept. This actually works. You can actually go and pay money right now and go liberate whatever package you want. All you need to do is have a package.json and bam, it's yours. Now, new license, new code, new you. Sure, your your soul might be a little bit in trouble, but hey, you get that you get those sweet corporate dollars. Now, here's the part that I kind of have with the joking. like yes uh the these two went off and set up this whole kind of experiment saying hey this is what we're doing it's a fun joke but then they also might be making some money off of it. I don't know where the joke, you know, like when does the joke stop being a joke? Like when do you become the biblical idiot that says, "Bro, I was just joking." And even more so at this point, even if they take down the site, somebody's going to put it back up, somebody's going to make the money. And this is actually their literal argument, which is somebody is going to make the money off of this, so why not be us? And then they actually do. This is the world we're going to live in. And I do want to talk about kind of a more important point for just a quick second. Okay? I know this is not what we do around here, but I do have kind of like a follow-up worry that I've just been thinking a lot about. You see, in 2013, 2012, there was a group of people who made React. You know that I have not the highest opinions about React, but at the time it was revolutionary, right? Someone made this technology which made a great leap forward in UI programming. I don't think React could be made today. I don't think the company that produced React has any appetite for that type of engineering. Follow up. I don't think any of the engineers that are focused on trying to make some big sort of impact in the engineering world care a dime about programming anymore. I am not sure if we're going to see a world that actually gets new technology. This is it. To me, this is the final place. This is where we're at. And not only that, thank you. We have the death of open- source software. The corporations will in fact get what they want, one license change at a time. Now, what I'm actually hoping for, the actual outcome of this is that Malice, this Malice Corporation is so egregious and enough people freak out, right, that they end up having some sort of law change saying, "Hey, AI clean room engineering in fact does not count." My guess is that will never happen. But I assume that's the actual goal. That's the I was just joking behind all this. What which is I'm not joking. I actually want to create a change. And the only kind of way I can see a change happening is by creating such a stir, creating such an outrage that government officials have to step in and make up some law. All right, that's it. That's all I got to talk to you about. Uh, happy open source is dead day. I guess this is actually like my third time recording this video. Uh, the reason being is that I actually got too frustrated the other two times. Like I really I I really dislike this strongly. It makes me it makes me angry on the inside. You know what I mean? Little a little little freef fall of emotional parachuting going on right now. Okay. Quite turbulent. Buffeted by a lot OF EMOTIONS. I'M NOT HAVING FUN RIGHT NOW. The name is the primogen. Hey, is that http? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee. We order coffee via ssh terminal.shop. Yeah. You want a real experience. You want real coffee. You want awesome subscriptions so you never have to remember again. Oh, you want exclusive blends with exclusive coffee and exclusive content? Then check out CRON. You don't know what SSH is? Well, maybe the coffee is not for you. Living the dream.