Skip to main content
FOSDEM PWA

Let's end open source together with this one simple trick

UB5.230 | Day 1 | 18:00 - 18:50 | Speakers: Dylan Ayrey, Mike Nolan

Let's end open source together with this one simple trick
A picture of a devroom at FOSDEM 2024
Open in browser

Notes

Abstract

Clean-room design is a method of recreating and relicensing software without infringing any of the copyrights. So what happens when we use LLM's to recreate thousands of open source projects in seconds, and relicense them all to more permissive licenses?

We first started looking at this when in 2025 MongoDB used an AI agent to take thousands of lines of code from a copyleft project, and used Cursor to recreate and relicense it all under apache. The prompts used to do this were left in the repository.

What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents?

In this talk we will be demonstrating the process of large scale clean rooming, and explore what it means for open source, and what it means for community.

Speakers

Dylan Ayrey

Dylan is the original author of the open source version of TruffleHog, which he built after recognizing just how commonly credentials and other secrets were exposed in Git. Coming most recently from the Netflix security team, Dylan has spoken at a number of popular information security conferences, including Defcon and Blackhat. The popularity of TruffleHog, and growing need for services like it, led him to co-found Truffle Security to deliver technology that works across all platforms where credentials can be exposed.

Mike Nolan

Mike Nolan is a software architect and social scientist researching the political economy of technology. Recent papers include the impacts of layoffs on open source communities. He also acts as the director of the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists.

He is the former Associate Director of Open@RIT and is currently working with UNDP Nature and Climate. His work experience stems from tech companies such as Amazon and GIPHY to large humanitarian organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF.

Notice: The placeholder video image is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The original image can be found hereChanges made to the image are: Cropped the image to a new ratio, part of the image was cut off.