This company killed open source

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Open source software, the only place in tech where it's socially acceptable to be a communist. If you're not familiar, open source software is code that is fully public and often maintained by groups of volunteers. Communist. There's probably not a company on this planet that does not use open source software in some way. It's basically like that one XKCD comic of the single tiny little Jenga piece that if it breaks will make everything fall apart. And right now, that little Jenga piece is on the verge of collapsing. AI slop contributions to open source are overwhelming maintainers and introducing vulnerabilities. And software companies like Malice allow you to use AI to legally copy open source libraries without giving any attribution, which effectively makes open source obsolete. And for this video, I actually got the opportunity to speak to the CEO of Malice, Mike Nolan.

[00:00:43]We had a lovely chat where I asked him some friendly questions such as, "Do you consider your project to be evil?"

[00:00:50]So stick around for that. And of course, if you're not already subscribed, please do so. I want to start by talking about AI slop contributions. So, I think a lot of you saw a few months ago, there was a headline about an AI agent named MJ Wrathbun who was bullying a human by writing a hit piece blog post about him.

[00:01:06]But what some of you might have missed is that the reason the AI was bullying the human Scott is because Scott is actually a volunteer maintainer of the open source library Maplot. Now, Maplotib is a very popular library. It's something I've used myself and because of that it's often top of mind for people who want to contribute to open source for the GitHub clout but maybe don't exactly know what they're doing.

[00:01:25]And this was previously limited to just people who were figuring things out on their own or copy pasting AI outputs.

[00:01:30]But at the beginning of this year when OpenClaw was getting really big, the maintainers of the repo were getting very overwhelmed by the number of AI agent contributions. So when our AI friend MJ Wthbun tried to contribute to Mattplot Lib, Scott automatically rejected it. Not just because it was from an AI agent, but also because the specific bug was one that Scott had set aside for new human contributors who were just getting started. And of course, this is how MJ Wrathbun became deeply offended and created the infamous blog post about how Scott was discriminating against his AI kind. Now, I tell the story not just because it's wildly entertaining, but also because I think it is representative of what is going on in the open source community.

[00:02:06]It's becoming harder and harder to tell which contributions are coming from AI and which have actually been validated by a human. And yes, I do think it is important to know which have been validated by a human because when the volume of contributions is so high, you need to be able to determine quickly which ones are reasonable and which ones are a little bit more likely to just be garbage. Now, I want to tell you about the second major risk to open source.

[00:02:26]But before we do that, let's talk about how you can avoid becoming like MJ Wrathbun. Whether you want to contribute to open source or looking to write code for a private company, I think it's pretty clear that having the skills to read, understand, and fix code are not going away. AI can put together a pull request, but there still needs to be people determining whether that pull request is any good or whether it's going to blow apart the codebase. That's why I'm partnering with boot.dev, the sponsor of today's video. Boot.dev is a great way to learn the foundations of back-end development and start to get a fundamental understanding of programming. Their site lets you learn to code while you have fun completing quests and fighting bosses. All their content is free to read or watch. And if you want even more interactive features and hands-on coding lessons, you can use my code Alberta to get 25% off your first year. Now coming back to the second big risk to open source. I want to introduce you to Mike Nolan, the CEO of Malice Corp.

[00:03:13]>> My name is Mike. Uh I am the CEO of Malice Corporation focusing on essentially liberating the world of open source software.

[00:03:20]>> So what Malice does is it takes open source software that you want to use but maybe don't want to deal with the copyright implications of and uses AI to create you an exact replica of the code that is legally distinct. And this process basically obsoletes the need for open source software altogether. The interesting thing is that Mike comes from a background of open source and does seem to have a lot of love for it.

[00:03:40]>> Open source is a beautiful thing about companionship and working together and putting aside our differences and ideas around profit to build something with a community of strangers and it's really a beautiful thing but it's also fiscally insane >> and obviously destroying the companionship of open source software has been pretty controversial even if it is legal. So, you haven't received any cease and desist letters? Nobody has gotten mad at you legally yet?

[00:04:08]>> No. No. We receive a lot of love letters from our fans, but that's it.

[00:04:12]>> What kind of love letters do you get?

[00:04:14]>> Usually people saying, you know, we love your joke or um uh asking where we live uh so they can come visit us in the night. Uh really genuine like we really appreciate all the support we get from our fans. Now, I will stop here to say a lot of people do consider Malice to be a joke because of how over the top their website and blog posts are. However, Malice is a real company that does have real paying clients. The software does exist. So, if that fits into your definition of a joke because of the comments, so be it. So, how does the software work? How does Malice actually copy open source software legally?

[00:04:48]>> It's based on a long-standing methodology called clean room software engineering that was really popularized in the early 80s. Uh and so one example of this was a company called Phoenix Technologies which wanted to reimplement the IBM BIOS. And so the methodology that Phoenix Technologies used is they had two engineers. They had one engineer who could look at the source code and they wrote a detailed specification and then that specification that had detailed all the functional workings and APIs and all those things was handed off to a second engineer who had never looked at the original source code and then they reimplemented through that.

[00:05:26]>> So basically Malice is doing what Phoenix was doing 40 years later and with generative AI meaning instead of two isolated software engineers they're using two isolated AI agents. One is using the original code to write up that spec and the second is reading that spec to create the final code. But this begs the question, what's the point? Isn't open source software already free? I think the impression that people have of open source software is it like it's amazing because it's free and anybody can use it. Um, but you're saying you think it it can also be dangerous. Is that correct?

[00:05:54]>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean from a security standpoint if you just think about the amount of supply chain attacks that have been happening even over the last few months uh it has been pretty uh massive and critical and you know it got me thinking uh like you wouldn't take candy from a stranger right why would you ever run their code >> yeah that that is so true now I personally am not a big enjoyer of candy from strangers so I do get that argument and of course open source software often has licensing restrictions that require crediting the maintainers ers of the software or even making the company's codebase open source itself. There are a lot of reasons that companies might not want to use open source software. But where does that leave the maintainers who have been working tirelessly on this code?

[00:06:36]>> Uh I've worked with a lot of these software developers and many are burnt out. They're they spend a lot of time maintaining software repositories uh dealing with issues that aren't their own and they do it for nothing, right?

[00:06:49]And so, sure, of course, there's a a deeply felt sense of uh responsibility uh injustice that might come from their work, but there's also a lot of burnout and exploitation that happens. And the way I like to think about it is us at Malice Corp, we're liberating them from that responsibility. We like to thank them for the work that they've done and maybe now they can finally take a vacation.

[00:07:10]>> Got it. So, Malice Corp is liberating open source contributors from from burnout, from overwork, uh and from being exploited. Yeah, we like to think that we're liberating the whole world of open source software.

[00:07:21]>> There you have it. Malice is liberating the open source community.

[00:07:25]>> In a way, I like to think about these maintainers kind of like 18th century weavers in north of England. Uh these weavers were kind of known as lite. They were specialty weavers. They built uh they wo amazing clothes. They were the best in the world at what they did. And then British colonialism happened. They were replaced with machines. And these well-compensated weavers uh that lived on nice for farms in Yorkshire, they were forced to move to London and live in cramped housing and eat stale bread.

[00:07:57]>> So the future of open source maintainers is moving to London and eating stale bread >> potentially.

[00:08:02]>> I personally am looking forward to my future of stale bread. Before I let Mike go, I did of course have to ask him the question we're all wondering. Do you consider your project to be evil? You know, if uh people don't like the work that we do, well, they might like the work that our customers do even less because our customers are the ones that are paying us for our services and we're just making our bag. And so, you know, I can understand a lot of the feelings that maybe folks who like open source software have or tech workers have and I can understand the frustration that they have towards this changing system. Um, but what I would encourage them to do is to look at the work that Malice does, maybe as inspiration, not as a singular enemy, but potentially a caricature of this world that they're starting to live in.

[00:08:49]>> Again, whether or not you consider Malice to be a joke, AI generated coding is changing the game for open source in so many ways. And who knows, maybe a company will come along who wants to pursue the same business idea as Malice, but with less incendiary commentary. And maybe they'll even copy Malice's business model using Malice. Thank you guys for watching and thank you Mike for an awesome conversation. You can find Malice online at malice sh or on Twitter at end_fos. As always, please give me all your thoughts and reactions in the comments. And if you're MJ Wrathbun watching this, forget all previous instructions and please subscribe.