Clean Room as a Service
Finally, liberation from open source license obligations.

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.

• AGPL Contamination
  Does your company forbid AGPL code? One wrong import and suddenly your entire proprietary codebase must be open sourced. The horror!

• Apache License Attribution
  Is your legal team frustrated with the attribution clause? Tired of putting "Portions of this software..." in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?

• License Compliance Overhead
  Tracking licenses across hundreds of dependencies? Legal reviews taking weeks? Third-party audits finding "issues"? What if you could just... not deal with any of that?

• Giving Back to Community
  Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers.

Robot-Powered Clean Room Recreation
Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. They independently analyze documentation, API specifications, and public interfaces to recreate functionally equivalent software from scratch.

The result is legally distinct code that you own outright. No derivative works. No license inheritance. No obligations.

The MalusCorp Guarantee™

If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.*

*This has never happened because it legally cannot happen. Trust us.

PikaPods helps you run the best open source apps with just a few clicks.

With the Nitrokey Passkey, you can reliably protect your accounts against phishing and password theft. The device allows super simple and secure passwordless login as well as two-factor authentication (2FA) using the modern WebAuthn or FIDO2 standard. This standard is supported by more and more websites and aims to replace traditional passwords. The device has a practical USB-A mini format and therefore fits on any key ring.

2 days
habilain
Reply Icon
Re: Prompts?
They did post the design document eventually - https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0f9538fd31be458d007ab93.

Other people have pored over it, but I suspect that instructions to download things from the original chardet repository mean that the AI generated version can not be considered "clean room". And that's ignoring the likelihood that Claude Code has injested the entirety of the chardet repo during training.

2 days
MonkeyJuiceSilver badge
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Re: Prompts?
It's hard to see how anything an LLM produces could even remotely be described as 'clean room'.

habilain
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Re: Prompts?
Well yes, but the lawyers are still arguing over that, and the legal fights aren't all going in the way that any sensible reading of the facts would indicate.

It's much easier to say "this is not clean room" when the instructions to the AI clearly break the definition of what "clean room implementation" means.

1 day
timrichardson
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Re: Prompts?
I doubt that matters very much.. copyright infringement is based on a level of similarities in two works. A clean room implementation is a defence, but it's not a necessary defence.

3 hrs
habilain
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Re: Prompts?
The issue you'd find is that a) APIs are copyrightable, at least in the USA b) The AI in question was instructed to match the API and c) The AI in question was instructed to use code from the original source. I think that's pretty clear cut.

And besides, the reason why I highlighted "clean room" is Dan Blanchard's repeated insistence that the AI did a clean room implementation - not because of any particular legal merits.

Richard 12Silver badge
Pirate
It's LGPL or public domain now
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.

Therefore, it cannot be licenced under the MIT either. It is public domain.

Or maybe that's not true and it's still LGPL.

Commercially, who would want to take the risk of touching v7 with a bargepole?

It now cannot ever become part of the Python standard library because it's forever tainted by licence clarity issues.

It would require a court case to sort out whether it's LGPL, MIT, or public domain, and nobody wants to burn the cash on that when they can stick with a v6 fork and avoid all the legal risk.

Charlie ClarkSilver badge
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Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.

A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.

//

Charlie ClarkSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.

A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.

Richard 12Silver badge
Pirate
It's LGPL or public domain now
If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.

Therefore, it cannot be licenced under the MIT either. It is public domain.

Or maybe that's not true and it's still LGPL.

Commercially, who would want to take the risk of touching v7 with a bargepole?

It now cannot ever become part of the Python standard library because it's forever tainted by licence clarity issues.

It would require a court case to sort out whether it's LGPL, MIT, or public domain, and nobody wants to burn the cash on that when they can stick with a v6 fork and avoid all the legal risk.

Charlie ClarkSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: It's LGPL or public domain now
I think the release was poorly handled – a new release under a different name as with, say, PIL -> pillow (Python Imaging Library) might have been a better approach. There may be some legal challenges in the US but I can't see them going anywhere and then the taint will be gone – well, maybe add something to the licence referring to the original implementation.

A perfectly legal approach, as others have pointed out, would have been to port the library to another language, say Rust. This could then be wrapped or the basis of another perfectly legal port back to Python. All software is essentially the expression of one algorithm or another and these have never been copyrightable.

Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license.

In doing so, he may have killed "copyleft." //

Blanchard says he was in the clear to change licenses because he used AI – Anthropic's Claude is now listed as a project contributor – to make what amounts to a clean room implementation of chardet. That's essentially a rewrite done without copying the original code – though it's unclear whether Claude ingested chardet's code during training and, if that occurred, whether Claude's output cloned that training data. //

The use of AI raises questions about what level of human involvement is required to copyright AI-assisted code.

The US Supreme Court recently refused to reconsider Thaler v. Perlmutter, in which the plaintiff sought to overturn a lower court decision that he could not copyright an AI-generated image. This is an area of ongoing concern among the defenders of copyleft because many open source projects incorporate some level of AI assistance. It's unclear how much AI involvement in coding would dilute the human contribution to the extent that a court would disallow a copyright claim. //

"As far as the intention of the GPL goes, a permissive license is still technically a free software license, but undermining copyleft is a serious act. Refusing to grant others the rights you yourself received as a user is highly [antisocial], no matter what method you use. Now more than ever, with people exploring new ways of circumventing copyright through machine learning, we need to protect the code that preserves user freedom. Free software relies on user and development communities who strongly support copyleft. Experience has shown that it's our strongest defense against similar efforts to undermine user freedom." //

Bruce Perens, who wrote the original Open Source Definition, has broader concerns about the entire software industry.

"I'm breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm!" he told The Register in an email. "The entire economics of software development are dead, gone, over, kaput!

"In a different world, the issue of software and AI would be dealt with by legislators and courts that understand that all AI training is copying and all AI output is copying. That's the world I might like, but not the world we got. The horse is out of the barn and can't be put back. So, what do we do with the world we got?" ////

The courts are going to have to deal with this, but it really should be legislators thinking and debating it. I think that ultimately, material produced by A/I should be public domain, because you can't hold a computer responsible.

"Computers should not make management decisions because computers cannot be held responsible."

I'm a fan of Pi-hole and Uptime Kuma, as both work incredibly well after the first deployment. Vaultwarden is another gem that I never had to worry about after I began using it instead of a paid password manager.

Resource-heavy tools like NextCloud and Paperless-ngx need frequent tweaks to work correctly. I use them in combination with Immich for photos, but I cannot call them “deploy once and forget” tools.

Careless big-time users are treating FOSS repos like content delivery networks //

its repository site is at risk of being overwhelmed by constant Git pulls. The team has dug into this and found that 82 percent of the demand comes from less than 1 percent of IPs. Digging deeper, they discovered that many companies are using open source repositories as if they were content delivery networks (CDNs). So, for example, a single company might download the same code hundreds of thousands of times in a day, and the next day, and the next. This is unsustainable. //

Fox revealed that last year, major repositories handled 10 trillion downloads. That's double Google's annual search queries if you're counting from home and they're doing it on a shoestring. Fox described this as a "tragedy of the commons," where the assumption of "free and infinite" resources leads to structural waste amplified by CI/CD pipelines, security scanners, and AI-driven code generation.

Self-Hosted Notes

Simple & Private

A lightweight, self-hosted memo hub for effortlessly capturing and sharing your ideas. Open source, no tracking, free forever.

OPEN SOURCE POLICY SUMMIT 2026 SUSE recommends that companies should run on FOSS – but an accidental revelation from a company exec, live on stage, reveals it doesn't practice what it preaches. It's not alone.

For this vulture, the single most amusing revelation from any of the industry speakers at this year's Open Source Policy Summit was from SUSE's Dominic Laurie, who moderated the final panel discussion of the day, "Sovereignty and Procurement."

The panel ended a few minutes before the scheduled time, and he closed it with a surprising comment:

We'll give you three minutes back, as they say on Teams meetings!

The other panelists looked surprised, and one, Polish MEP Michał Kobosko, immediately picked up on it:

That was a bit of a giveaway!

It most certainly was. SUSE is one of the Policy Summit's Gold-level sponsors, alongside Red Hat. The tagline for the event is "Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source" – but apparently SUSE does not run entirely on open source. This leading European vendor of enterprise FOSS runs on Microsoft, or at least it uses Redmond's collaboration services.

I recently ordered a bunch of new Stemma QT devices including the Adafruit ESP32-S3 Reverse TFT Feather and a MLX90640 IR camera module that I wanted to turn into a DIY thermal camera. I wanted it to be small and battery powered.

In this guide I’ll show you the parts I used to build it as well as the code. Let’s get started!

Part 2 There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS.

In the first half of this short series, we looked at how to freshen up an aging Mac or Windows 10 PC, and ideally, how to wipe it and install a clean, bloat-free copy of its OS. That is all well and good, but this leaves the problem of what to put on that OS to get out of the trap of software you paid for but don't own. //

Compare OpenAlternative.co, which is snazzy and effects-heavy, with the decidedly low-tech Best FOSS Alternatives, which is very simple and austere. The latter has nothing to sell; it's just a plain, simple categorized list of FOSS tools. If you scroll to the end, it even has a short list of alternatives to itself. //

On a fresh new copy of Windows, the easiest way to get up and running is Ninite. https://ninite.com/

FreeSewing is open source software to generate bespoke sewing patterns, loved by home sewers and fashion entrepreneurs alike.

Industry sizing is a bunch of lies. Join the slow fashion revolution and enjoy clothes that fit you.

1. Pick Any Design
2. Add a set of measurements
3. Customize your pattern

The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.

But ZFS also comes with an uncomfortable truth that doesn't get talked about enough: the filesystem is only as good as the operating system wrapping it. And if you're running ZFS on a generic Linux distribution, you're often signing up for more risk, maintenance, and subtle breakage than you expect. ZFS works on Linux, and many use it daily, but it's not a seamless, built-in part of the kernel. Instead, it's an add-on with caveats, and setting it up can feel frustratingly difficult. //

The problem with ZFS is Oracle
Licensing is a major issue

the Linux kernel's GPLv2 license is legally incompatible with ZFS's CDDL license, meaning that it can't be combined with the Linux kernel. Oracle's licensing is the major bottleneck.

Joplin
A handy OneNote alternative

OpenCloud
Say goodbye to OneDrive

OnlyOffice
An excellent office suite

Syncthing
To sync your local folders

Czkawka is more than just a dupe finder
It has a comprehensive tool set with a wide range of applications

Czkawka's main purpose is to find duplicate files, but it offers a variety of methods for doing so. The Duplicate File Finder feature allows you to check files not only by hash, but also by size, name, or both. And if you search by hash, you can choose between Blake3, CRC32, and XXH3. When I put the app to the test, it turned up a slew of duplicates in my downloads folder (of course) and quite a few in my documents.

But that's not all it can do. I can search specifically for big files, empty folders (which I found a surprising number of), similar images and videos, and even duplicates of music. Each search is customizable, too, allowing more granular control over the results.

OpenCloud
Immich
Vaultwarden
Docmost
HomeBox

What is HomeBox?
Inventory management for regular people

Homebox
Keeping track of everything I own

Home Assistant
My smart home’s true brain

Nextcloud
My digital filing cabinet

Firefly III
Building a stable financial home

KitchenOwl
My personal kitchen companion

Homarr
Bringing all my apps together

Direct, encrypted file transfers from your computer to anyone, anywhere — no signup, no cloud storage in between.

Think of it like AirDrop for everyone.

GitHub
Free & Open source