Can coding agents relicense open source through a "clean room" implementation?
simonwillison.netArmin Ronacher has a more interesting take on this than I do: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/theseus/
The legal intricacies of this are of course interesting and relevant.
But what are the social ramifications if this kind of thing is deemed acceptable? It feels like it would effectively be the end of OSS licensing, because it's pretty straightforward to do this for any project.
Any company that wanted a proprietary copy of a program could in theory follow this same technique, with relative ease. That feels wrong.
So maybe we need to re-think the "copyrightable API" and "clean room" legal concepts. How? I don't know. But a world in which OSS licenses are easily sidestepped feels like the wrong direction.
Is everyone here just ignoring the fact that the 12 year maintainer of this project performed the re-write? Companies cannot do this with relative ease unless they hire these OSS maintainers
If it is straightforward then the project is maybe not that interesting anymore? If an LLM can just write it?
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257803
Recent SCOTUS refusal to hear appeal could mean that clean room implementations may not be license-able at all.
If Ai produced content cannot be copyrighted, can it be licensed?