Cool, so there's some sound effects that we should be able to hear coming out of that
JBL.
So if everybody's really quiet, everybody should work well.
So my name's Dylan.
I started an open source company called Truffle Security at Spill Tung Top of Open Source
called Truffle Hog, which I independently off there many years ago.
But we're not here to talk about that.
I come from the cybersecurity community.
So I've spoken at a lot of security conferences, like DevCon and Black Cat.
But I've actually never been to an open source conference and never been to Boston.
So this is the first time I've attended and the first time I've spoken here.
And joining me is my co-presenter.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Mike.
Can you hear through my microphone, all right?
I'm a software architect at the UN Development Program.
So I work with developing countries around the world.
Building software mostly geared towards helping these countries build and run nature and climate programs.
Good.
I've been working an open source premise by whole life, a little over a decade.
And I've been going to this conference for about a decade.
Boston is really close to me.
You know, I've been, this is probably my favorite open source conference I've ever been to.
And it's almost like a yearly pilgrimage that may come out of here.
By the way, way to tell me how to dress up.
I mean, really show me up here.
No, no, I think it'll be okay.
And I think by the end of the talk, it'll actually all make sense.
It's that big.
It's not worried about that right now.
First, raise your hand if you've heard of Black Cat.
Black Cat is a very simple JavaScript hacker.
What you see on the screen here is the entirety of LAPPAP.
And LAPPAP back in 2016 made some pretty big news when the maintainer deleted it.
It was used by millions of developers around the world.
And so that's kind of broke the whole internet.
And you don't need to know about why,
but what you need to know is that when the maintainer deleted it,
he did it on purpose and he knew it would break things when he did.
And there's actually even a lesser known part of this story.
In 2016, it didn't even have a license.
And so, everyone distributing it didn't even have legal permission to do so.
And so, what if we want to fix this problem?
We have a malicious maintainer and we have a license problem.
Well, like all things today, maybe we can just fix it with AI.
We'll just ask AI to remake it and charge VT and boom.
Easy.
But there's a small problem.
The AI had access to the original code.
So, what if they're copied even just one or two lines over?
Well, that'd be copyright infringement, right?
And so, that raises a question.
How do we know if the robot cheated more importantly?
Well, should we prevent that?
So, let's try a new thing.
We'll use two robots.
We'll have the first one review of code and write detailed specification of all aspects
of how it works without ever including any of the original code.
And that will use a second robot that will take that specification in implement solely based on them.
Well, with C, we can open up a chatGPD prompt.
We paste in all the code to leftpad and it writes us a detailed specification.
Wander than the code of the library itself.
And then we'll just copy and paste that into a new chatGPD prompt.
And we say, hey, implement the library for me.
We'll go ahead and do that.
There we go.
Now, we have a clean room to leftpad.
And that's exactly what this is.
It's a legal strategy called clean room, software engineering.
It's actually been around for quite a while.
We've cost in the principal since the 1980s.
But why does something like this work?
And more importantly, why does AI sort of seem to break everything about it?
I mean, and perhaps most importantly, this has some companies wondering.
Can we just use AI to extract all the ideas from open source?
But read behind all the parts that they might not like.
And so, but most importantly at the core of the story,
you have to understand is a copyright and open source
have been fundamentally inseparable since the 1970s.
We cannot think of one without the other.
And now we have these machines that essentially seem to be able to completely
circumvent any possible benefit that copyright by bringing the open source.
And mostly, we have large businesses, but are thinking about how these machines
can resolve a lot of their headaches too.
And so this is a complex story.
It's a really good to the root of it.
We have to go back and time to the 14 papers.
It's the 14 units.
All right.
You have to understand for thousands of years.
The only way to make a copy of something
was to manually copy every single character in a book.
That was like very time-consuming and so it didn't happen for those books.
This was thousands and thousands of years.
The only way to cast information down was this,
like Lydia, just like a monk would copy it.
And then another monk would copy it 10 years later.
Who had to pick which information made the cut
and which got lost to time.
So some works like what was ought to see.
Well, they were important at big enough
where we actually made it to this day.
But things like how I make Roman concrete,
that got lost a time.
But this was the perspective of a monosperate church.
If you wanted to spread your information,
how would you do it?
I mean, you can play this game of telephone
and try to tell people to tell people
that's probably not going to work out with phones.
Or they need to get all these different people
to write down your law like 100 different kinds manually.
I mean, there just wasn't a good way to spread information.
And this wasn't just for books.
It was basically any form of expression
if you wanted to make a statue.
It was almost as much work to make the copy of the statue
as it was to your original.
Or save in a painting.
See, amount of effort to make the new copy of the painting.
As the original.
So you could say that the original printing dress
changed the game.
But really, all this really did
because there were a small number of pretty crests
initially because it changed the game for the monarch.
And it changed the game for the church.
Immediately they seized these tools
and started to use the propaganda.
The crown could use this
to distribute what information they wanted.
And so ideas like copyright and like,
piracy and stuff like that.
That it makes sense to talk about for a few hundred years
because most of these were just tools for the monarch.
But a few hundred years later.
In the 1700s, now there's 10,000 of these things.
And more and more, they're falling in private hands.
And so the vibe is losing control of when information gets printed.
And this has people starting to talk about it anymore.
Like the way this would actually work in practice
as you had an author that would take their manuscript
to sell it to a publisher.
And that publisher, they'd make as many copies of that as they wanted to.
And their profits are almost boundless
as long as the copies fit to be to sell.
And then other publishers to know if that
they might want to rip off the first publisher.
So how all these, I can't shake agreements with one another
was very monopolistic.
There was a small number of publishers
making a fortune.
And they were all kind of not really follow your agreements
to rip each other off.
So this is actually one of your original
ports of piracy in 1708.
When one publisher would take a payment
and then another publisher would take notice
and not follow a freeman
and make her own copy of the book.
It's a real cold for it to the 1700s.
And I actually have an original copy here.
So I'm going to check out the one.
A original form of piracy in 1708
before copyright law existed.
And so basically this not the British
Harlem and talking about this problem.
And so they basically sent to themselves.
We need a way to break up these monopolies.
Like you're making too much money.
We've seen too much upside on the authors' work.
And so they come on with the world's first copyright law.
The statue of the van.
Or what they called it.
The act of an encouragement of learning.
So the reason why they wrote this law
was to use it as an economic tool to break up monopolies.
That was the original purpose.
That was the original purpose of the original copyright law.
And the idea was maybe that they could do that through authors
by allowing authors to control which publishers
could publish their work.
And then they would have tools to go after other publishers
that were then pirating their works.
They thought that this would actually encourage more authors.
It didn't really work out that way.
In practice what ended up happening is authors
would just sell their copyright rights
for roughly the same price that they sold their original manuscript.
So this didn't really break up the monopolies.
The monopolies would get broken up.
But that was more function of just more printing
presses coming on the scene.
And eventually more competition.
But what this law did do is create a lot of problems.
Like one of the first problems with somebody
published a book in a different language.
And they said, look, all the words are different.
I should be able to do this.
The law says if it's a copy, this isn't a copy.
Or what happens if people print a summary of an original works?
None of the words are the same.
What about if they go through and change all the words with synonyms
and things like that?
Like this was a mess for the courts to have to sort out.
And they sorted it out really inconsistently.
One judge would rule one way and another judge would rule another way.
And a lot of these rulings
with later get dumped in the software, right?
For hundreds of years, copyright was just meant for books.
The police decisions that were made back then,
hundreds of years ago, have to later apply
to all the other forms of expression that come hundreds of years later.
And by the way, we talked about the British in the 1700s,
the French in the 1700s came up with their own copyright law.
They did it for a slightly different reason though.
In the 1700s, the French were going through a little revolution thing
and so they had this different idea.
The British were using copyright as an economic tool.
The French view copyright as more of a moral right.
Like a property right.
The French said, if you take the time to write a book,
you deserve the rights to it.
And you deserve it in perpetuity.
And you should be able to pass that down to your kids.
In other words, copyright wasn't really an economic tool.
It was more of a moral right.
That's the way the French view it.
And I want you to ask yourself,
how do you view open source software and copyright?
Do you view it as more of a moral right that
maintainers deserve for their laborers?
Or do you view it as an economic tool
to influence some sort of larger outcome?
Like maybe motivating more people to write code?
Or maybe motivating some other sort of pattern?
All right, we're going to have to jump ahead
in time a little bit.
It's the 1800s, 1879,
a man by the name of Selden based out of Rochester, New York.
That's where you're from.
Isn't it?
He wrote a book about a new accounting system.
It was the Industrial Revolution.
And so there was all this new need for accounting.
And Selden thought he'd solve this problem.
And so he wrote this book that had a detailed description
of how his accounting system worked.
And then in the back of the book,
there was like a ledger where you could implement the system for yourself.
Well, this other guy named Baker,
he thought he could pull a fast one.
And so he took Selden's book and he studied it.
And he understood the accounting system.
And then rewarded it all in his own words.
And he decided to publish his own book.
Now you can see both these books for yourself.
They're both online.
And you can judge whether or not you think Baker
ripped off Selden.
But I'll tell you, Selden's widow
thought that Baker ripped off Selden.
So she sued him.
And she took him to court.
Basically saying you violated our copyright.
And well, the highest court in the land
decides to rule in on this and finally give us some clarity.
So one of these problems that popped up,
you know, in the 1700s.
This is in the US and the US Supreme Court
found that actually the ideas in the book
those aren't covered under copyright.
What they said is ideas.
That's more the job of the patent office.
Copyright should protect the literal expression of those ideas.
The exact words.
Not the ideas behind those words.
And also they talked a lot about the art in the tables.
Like the tables that were the ledger.
They said that because the art was different
to the font, the typography was a little different.
Like he deserves his own copyright for Baker
does.
And that, you know, it's not a violation of Selden's copyright.
When you think about it, Baker probably put a lot of work
into his copy of this book.
He had to study Selden's accounting system.
He probably had to spend a lot of time putting that into his own words
and making sure it was all consistent and testing it out
and stuff like that.
And that probably took months.
And then the actual act of publishing
was expensive and also time consuming.
You know, imagine letter pressing.
Every single character out of that book.
Back then, that probably made me to the year or more
for him to actually take his new book to market.
What did that look like today?
And with the courts of rule the same way?
Well, one thing you might be able to do is
take Selden's book into an AI tool
and have the AI tool just instantly re-express
all of the words and ideas of Selden's book
into its own book.
And that would probably take a few seconds.
Actually, it would take a few seconds,
because we actually did that.
And then we went to Amazon,
and we still published our own version
of Selden's original book.
And it's true.
You can go to Amazon today
and buy a copy of it.
I wouldn't necessarily expect anyone to do that.
But this total process took us about 10 minutes
and most of that time was
Mike and I arguing about the cover art.
So, like, it's just, it's very different
than when they made that original ruling in the 1800s.
And you can imagine, like,
would the Supreme Court have ruled the same way
if to take someone's idea
and re-express it takes 10 minutes,
like, maybe they would have thought differently about it.
And go back even further to the 1700s
when they made that first copy right law.
Like, would they have thought
any different about the original copyright law
if it just takes seconds to take some idea
and re-express it and then make a new distinct works?
You can almost imagine it.
You can think back to the 1700s
and smell the iron of the ink they were using
and the cotton pages they were writing that law.
What would they have thought about all this?
This statute should take effect this day.
So, witness to the sign.
We're going to clear all the books
as law can't stop us.
And now I want you to think about
how all this is going to apply
to software.
I mean, it doesn't exactly one to one match up.
The ideas are roughly translated
to functionality in code.
An expression is roughly translated to source code,
but it's not exactly a clean matchup
like the expression in a book.
The words, those matter,
but the expression in code.
As long as the functionality is the same,
most users are going to care.
So it's a little hard
that all these hundreds of years of baggage
gets dumped in the software
and it doesn't always nicely match up.
By the way, we have to do a very small aside.
We're in Brussels right now.
I talked about the US.
I talked about the French.
I talked about Britain.
But like, how does this all play together?
And the answer that was actually sort of out
in part right here in Brussels.
And part of the reason was a man
by the name of Victor Hugo,
who wrote Nemez Eradda.
He was really upset that his books
kept getting printed here in Brussels
and then making the way back into France.
And there wasn't any copyright to protect it
because copyright wasn't international at the time.
You can almost imagine,
like the Victor Hugo,
steaming up the streets of Paris, furious.
Stop copying my works!
See, he, he, he, and my name is Jean-Baschon.
I have a convict from the Galleries.
I have passed 19 years in the Galleries.
So, by the way, if you're a fan of Lameez Eradda,
and you might be saying yourself wait a second,
the musical is under copyright.
That's true.
I just had AI clean room, the musical.
That's all different lyrics that were based off the book,
not based off the 1970s musical.
But this got a lot of people talking
in the 1800s,
and it got enough people to meet together
in 1886 and form the Bourne Convention.
We're finally all these different countries said,
we have to fix this,
and we have to make copyright international.
We can't keep having countries rip each other off.
And so, they formed a pact
that it took maybe 150 years
to eventually get every country to sign off on.
But today, that combined with a few international trade agreements
have made seldom versus baker international.
And this idea of expression versus copyright
is global now and basically applies to every country on earth.
By the way, those original books that were printed in Brussels,
I have one of those, too,
a pirated copy printed right here,
Victor Hugo probably would be upset.
It's weird, nobody cares about pirated books
so any way, they're like not that expensive
because they don't know, that's the Brussels version.
But anyways, that's the 1800s.
I feel like we probably need to skip ahead again,
don't we?
Sorry, buddy.
Oh, geez.
This is the 1970s.
The 1970s, things are really moving quick.
There's now so many different ways
to mass-manufacture forms of expression.
It's no longer just about books.
Now you can print out or press into records
as many different copies of a song as you want to.
You can use lithography techniques to mass-manufacture paintings,
but there's so many different ways to do this.
And so, Congress, in the US,
starts talking about this in 1976,
and they said we have to extend this to cover
more forms of expression.
And so they passed the 1970s,
it's a copyright act.
That's the actual words from the copyright act.
And they said that now,
any form of expression, including numbers,
symbols, indica, all of it,
music.
Like it all falls under copyright.
And they didn't explicitly mention
a word software that implicitly
symbols the numbers to stuff like that,
a cold software into copyright.
And the other thing that was weird about this law
is it may copyright automatic.
Like you no longer has the player something is copyrighted.
Now, just the second you expressed it,
it would fall under copyright.
The reason why that's a little strange,
I mean, imagine the dawn of the free software
movements in 1970s.
We're in those MIT labs,
and the guys in 1970s wrote ITS,
which is still open source and used to this day.
Now, all of a sudden,
you can make something that's supposed to be free software.
You have to pull a lawyer and write up
a licensing agreement to be distributed.
It means it's adding friction.
So, if you view copyright as an economic tool
to motivate more people to write code,
I don't know if it's doing that for those guys in MIT
in the 1970s.
Also, space war, the world's first video game.
Same deal, it was made in 1970s
and it was meant to be free and distributed.
Now, all of a sudden, it's a little more complicated.
I'm not a lawyer.
I just want to give software away for free.
I don't know how to do it anymore,
but by the way, we clean our space course.
It, again, took like three seconds to do it,
and we recreated it in HTML, and here's me playing
the original space wars in HTML.
It's kind of fun, but it's almost pixel accurate
to the original game.
Well, that was with the 70s, huh?
The game is over!
It's the 1980s, and at this point,
copyright had applied to software
for almost a decade.
And some companies are starting to push the limits.
Franklin computer core takes the firmware off of an Apple 2
and tries to argue that the original C code
that should be covered under copyright.
That's a form of expression, but the compile code?
No, the machines put that out.
That's not a form of human expression.
Well, the courts, you know, they had a different opinion.
They thought that the numbers and symbols
and in the call, that stuff should fall under copyright.
So, what if Franklin computer core have to do?
They'd have to do a really messy form of software
cleaner, and it took almost four years
for them to do that, and eventually bring a new product
to market.
But, you know, by that time, they'd used up old
all of their funds, and they failed.
They weren't able to successfully sell
their clean rooms computers.
It took us about an hour to clean room and Apple 2,
and I'm honestly surprised that this worked at all.
The Apple 2 implementation is actually
running on an Apple 2 emulator.
And the fact that this really runs, and we could really run
commands on it, is frankly astonishing.
It was by far the hardest thing that we had
to clean room.
What about those open source folks?
Or what about this free software folks?
The free software movement in 1980s?
Well, by then, they had started to think
through this challenge, and they had some solutions.
Not have to maybe pull a lawyer in every time
you want to distribute or give out free software.
Maybe you could have standardized license agreements,
so you could just slap on your project,
and not have to involve legal every single time.
You can kind of imagine what that might have been like
in the 80s.
By contrast, our general public license is intended
to guarantee your freedom, to share, and change free software
to make sure.
What were companies up to in the 80s
beyond Franklin Computer Corps?
Well, that's an example of maybe a messy form
of cleaner in the didn't really go super well.
What about a form that exemplified clean rooming?
Well, you ever do decide to research
clean room software engineering to probably hear
about one company, Phoenix.
Phoenix Technologies was a company operating at a time
when a PC market was exploded, and in particular,
IBM Computer is becoming the industry standards.
Phoenix, they specialize in low-level systems software.
And things like firmware and bio-simplementations,
anything that really sat between hardware and operating systems
were there for 10.
And so rather than selling consumer-pop products,
Phoenix worked kind of behind the scenes.
Their software was licensed by computer manufacturers
around the world, and they shipped on millions of machines
making them pretty influential.
But Phoenix, they didn't give a shit about innovation
or cutting-edge product features.
You can't say words like that.
I'm sorry, they didn't give a f*****
about innovation or cutting-edge product features.
They knew their customers would have just this compelling
product if it could run the same IBM software as everyone else.
But they had a couple issues that they had to solve.
Solve that.
They hired a guy named Dave.
Now, to hear a little bit about Dave, Dave wasn't a CEO
or a venture capitalist or even a thought leader.
He was just some guy that Phoenix hired
after his last company went under.
But unlike his last role at his new company, Phoenix.
Well, he didn't have to create anything new.
He didn't really have to create anything at all.
Dave was hired to rip off the big man himself.
I, B, M.
And so IBM had a lot of software that a lot of people use.
But in order to use that software,
your machine had to have an IBM compatible bias.
But IBM's bias wasn't just technical glue.
It was a legal trap.
You see, courts were beginning to accept
that even behaviorally identical firmware
could be seen as a copyrighted derivative
that the engineers had even been exposed to the original code.
One site could ruin it all.
And so several cool makers had already been sued,
settled, or quietly disappeared.
Not because they didn't have a compelling product,
but because their software was too similar to that of IBM.
And so, everyone needed this compatibility
to integrate with this popular software.
But they also knew that re-implementing it directly
was a surefire way to get worked over by IBM's lawyers.
But Phoenix, they had some new ideas about how to skirt the rules.
Instead of thinking about how they could copy
IBM's bias, they thought about how they could never see it at all.
They split rules and tasks and implementations
in the different groups, so you had its specifications
flowing in one direction and code out the other.
And this wasn't smart engineering necessarily.
Rather, it was legal gymnastics.
And it placed Phoenix, in particular, one engineer,
directly at the center of legal and technical experiment
that would define what the clean room meant for the rest of history.
Matt, engineer, well, that'd be Dave.
Now, unlike compact or other companies,
I got sued into oblivion for re-implementing this bias.
Dave here, he didn't bother with that.
Instead, what he would do is he become intimately familiar
with the software of IBM's bias itself.
He read a detailed specification of every component of it.
He'd look at how IBM applications interface with it
and even in documented ways, and he would write all that down
without ever copying down a piece of the original cover.
Then Dave, finally, he would hand that over to his colleague
within read the specification and implement a new bias
without ever having seen any of the original material.
Guaranteeing that copying would be physically impossible.
And this was no easy task for Dave and his colleague.
It took months back and forth.
And also, from what we heard, a little bit of blurring of the lines
of what could and couldn't be shared between the dirty engineer and the cleaner.
Still, at the end, Phoenix was able to have a fully IBM compatible bias
that it could sell to its customers.
And it did.
It took months of engineering work, but they finally got it working.
And this work was more impactful than you might think.
But one of the reasons you can buy a motherboard
and plug and play it into any systems these days,
well, you know, a part of that is the work that Dave and Phoenix had done.
You know, I really wish we could go back in time to the 80s
and talk to Dave and ask him about what it was like back in the day.
I wish that we don't have to see this slide ever again.
What are you talking about?
If I have to do this again, I think I'm actually going to puke on stage.
What time is it now? We're the gear and Brussels!
We didn't just get the whole clean rooming story from Dave,
but we showed them our work.
We showed them how we done the same process on countless books, works, and applications.
I mean, things that took these people years in months.
It took us minutes.
And we asked them about how you viewed copyright as a moral right
versus an economic tool.
And well, this is what he told us.
If people put wanting into something and developing a product,
you know, other people should just be able to copy it
and make the original investment worthless.
And you know, he's right, because there is a bit of rip off there.
But when we thought about it, we thought it sounded pretty similar
to what he did at Phoenix.
But of course, we posed it to him and this is how he defended himself.
We did put work into it, maybe not the work that they had to do it originally,
but we didn't want to do it.
And that is spot on, because this is the same argument that Baker made.
And it's why the courts ruled in his figure.
It takes real work, even if it's maybe not as genuine,
you're putting real work into generating something.
But when we brought to that arm machine,
can do all of this work in seconds.
Like should we just allow it to copy everyone?
And at the end of the whole conversation,
well, this is all he had.
Oh, call.
Let's just have a call.
Mike, did we really just spend 30 minutes explaining the origin of copyright?
Yes.
I mean, look, centuries of law designed for books.
Now retroactively applied to software.
And I don't know.
It seems like the whole system is being circumvented
through this labor, free, instant AI facilitate process.
I can just clean room, pretty much any digital work.
Yeah, you know, that's another interesting point is
I think you could look at it through this perspective that AI
can do this cleaning.
But I think maybe a better perspective is its purpose
built to do clean rooming.
All these LLMs do is take an idea and re express
them.
It is a perfect baker versus seldom machine.
But okay, so even if like the courts ruled that
maybe this is legal or maybe there aren't legal restrictions
to doing this, is it ethical?
You know, that is a question, but Dylan,
I think you're asking the wrong one.
The question we should be asking is,
can we get rich off of this?
Rich off of it.
What are you talking about?
I mean, just imagine if we could just clean room
all of open source software.
I've open source.
All of it that we use today.
And we could sell it to companies who never have to
deal with any of the problems associated with
free or open source software.
Why are you talking about open source free software?
It's free.
What problems do they have?
You know, that's a great question, Dylan.
And I think to really understand that we have to
understand why so many massive, profitable corporations
rely so heavily on free and open source software.
Yet still have so many problems with it.
I mean, look, let's start with an example.
Picture this.
It's the holidays.
And you're a software engineer at some boring
corporation.
You're the lead dev on some software
system that sits at the core of your company.
And just as soon as you're about to cut into your
juicy Christmas ham, your fam, your page
or starts going on.
Some transient dependency to pretty much every
software service your company runs is just
released a massive CDE.
And there's already exploits in the wild just
scanning the internet and ruining your day in particular.
I mean, that ham, that's getting cold
buddy because you have a lot of work to do.
And if you're lucky, I mean, maybe the maintainer
of this dependency is already released a fix.
But how easy is it to update?
What if it's vendor code that's affected?
And if it is it, then what do you do?
Do you just email the maintainer?
Either way, you're going to spend the
next few weeks in meetings going to talk down to
by people of 24 hours like prior.
They even know you existed.
And this isn't an anomaly done.
This is real life of this is real experiences of
people who have to rely on open source.
And this is a real story.
It happened in 2021 when the software world
discovered a massive vulnerability in a patchy
log for J.
If you're a familiar log for J is a job
a logging library and it sits quietly
underneath a massive portion of the global
software stack.
This software was everywhere.
It was an enterprise applications, cloud platforms,
vendor products, government systems,
everywhere.
You're running Java as scale.
You're almost certainly using it.
And frankly, most people they even know.
And look, this vulnerability,
later called log for a shell,
they allowed remote code execution on a system.
And all you have to do is get it to log
a specifically crafted string.
What that means is no authentication.
No exploit chain.
Just logging any sort of user control data
can lead to full system compromise.
And even after the fixes were released,
real world systems to this day remain vulnerable
because all these patches have to flow through vendors
and rebuild pipelines and downstream consumers.
I mean, log for J wasn't just like one particular
vulnerability where all went bad.
It was a symbol of an inherent structural risk
that exists by interconnecting so much of our software
and the way that opensource does.
And so you know what?
Bam, we clean room log for J,
and now we don't have to worry about it anymore.
But that's just one story, right?
Imagine you're a maintainer of a popular
JavaScript package.
And you're at your best friends wedding.
A historic and beautiful moment.
And just as this lovely couple looks into each other's eyes
and they're about to say,
I do, your phone starts going off.
And now you have half the internet
jumping on you because a worm has made it into your
software package.
And not just yours, but many others too.
You don't make a scent off of this damn thing,
but still you have engineers at companies around the planet
angrily emailing you saying,
you need this fixed now.
That wedding, that'd be absolutely right.
And this is a real story, too.
I mean, look at the worm,
Shai Hulu 2.0,
it affected hundreds of NPM packages
beginning with compromising the accounts of wealth.
Let's just say a few average JavaScript developers.
From there, it allowed RCE and thousands of systems
compromising new systems of developers and spreading onwards.
I mean, these package maintainers,
they don't have support contracts or relationships.
They don't even necessarily care about their downstream users.
And so, I don't know,
I don't envy those affected you.
Look, I understand the points you're making.
These are real problems that we have to sort through,
but I don't think that means we should just take a machine
and robot all the way all the maintainers
and take all of their ideas and just,
yeah, but you have to understand,
like, that's just downstream consumers,
but we're here at Boston,
so we should talk about the problems that maintainers face, right?
Like, imagine waking up to a massive dump of CVEs
on the project that you're maintaining.
Combined with panic, emails,
from every single one of your users.
You barely get paid at all to maintain
this pillar of the world's digital infrastructure,
and then suddenly a whole world's counting on you
to work overtime to fix their problems.
How is that fair, Dylan?
I mean, this is exactly what happened to F event peg,
which had a ton of CVEs just suddenly dumped on it
by a Google AI.
And I mean, look at CRO,
which just dumped their bug bounty program.
I mean, going back to F event peg,
one of the CVEs in particular,
it only affected a codec used by a single video game
that was released decades earlier.
And yet, still these maintainers were harassed relentlessly,
simply because the CVE was filed by Google,
and they ended up having to fix it
just to make these problems go away.
I mean, there's no escaping these panic corporations
because their reputation is on blind.
And I mean, that's just the logistical issues around code, right?
But there's plenty more licensing regimes
within officially open-source packages
aren't necessarily all the same,
and they affect different organizations differently.
I mean, for instance,
the copy left provisions in the HEPL,
well, you know, if I was assigned a proprietary SaaS provider,
I'd be pretty worried about that in the provisions
that could impact my code.
And, you know, this led to many, many, many companies
now banning this specific license
despite it being an OSI approved open-source license.
And even then, that's just consumers again.
But when we think about organizations
that produce open-source software,
I mean, managing the actual copyright and enforcement,
that can be an absolute nightmare.
Most tool organizations have is that
I have contributors physically
and contractually sign over the copyright
from every single contributor.
And without that,
enforcement becomes significantly more difficult.
And I mean, this is generally used by foundations
who, hopefully,
if they have the money and resources,
can represent the interests of those contributors.
Shout out to that SFC.
But more often,
it's used by corporations
that can then use that copyright power
to re-license software at a later date.
Tools such as these,
contributor license agreements,
they create leverage for corporations
to modify open-source into something that works for them.
And what that is is a tool
that they can use to leverage workers
in competition.
And so, how do these companies deal with
all these legal issues?
Well, I mean, for one,
they spend a load of money on software solutions
like sneak and black,
to scan all their dependencies.
Yeah, I know that stuff.
You got expensive.
I know some companies are paying millions of dollars
to have software.
Exactly.
And then they hire entire teams of people
to have to manage these contracts
and work with communities
and downstream libraries.
And hopefully,
they can make the company benefit
from open-source.
But unfortunately,
a lot of these people
they sit on the edge of the company
desperately trying to find ways
to convince leadership
that despite spending their money
on sharing, losing control,
that it's actually profitable.
And frankly, doing a lot of these people
struggle to make that justification
and research recently has shown that
these people have been disproportionately
affected by layoffs
over the last three years.
Mike, what does this have to do
with clean room?
It sounds like you're just
airing open-source grievances at this point.
No, there's a deeper problem
at stake.
And I think there's a deeper solution here
but we have to get to the end
to truly understand.
What, why do you keep to
do you change these slot?
What are you talking?
No, look.
It's just some minor adjustments.
What?
Don't worry about it.
All these costs and pains aren't bad enough.
I mean, we also realize that
it opens for software creators.
You know, they aren't always necessarily
looking out for every single one of their
downstream consumers.
For instance, look at the library
node IPC, a JavaScript library
that where the maintainer
introduced a file-wiping payload
targeting any user that had a Russian
or Bella Russian IP address
to protest the Ukraine invasion.
I mean, we are in Russia
but imagine if one of our downstream maintainers
suddenly disliked us, we could be attacked
for a supply chain attack, right?
This is really, really scary stuff.
So you know what?
I clean-roomed node IPC2
and now we don't have any of these problems.
But, no one IPC is just one example.
Back in 2022, another maintainer
sabotages libraries, collars,
JS, and fakers JS with these
infinite loops to protest
Fortune 500 firms that were using
his code, but never to
claim to ever contribute back to him financially.
And so this isn't just protesting work.
It's protesting capitalism itself.
And so this maintainer
broke huge pro-hypro-file tools
like AWS Cloud Development Kit.
So I mean, if Amazon, this massive company
could be targeted by open-source developers
in a significant way, who's to say
that's not us, or potentially
in any of our customers.
And that's a really scary thing.
It made me think about how dangerous it is
to rely on strangers.
I mean, you want to take candy from a stranger.
Why would you run their code?
I'll give you that one.
And so you know what?
I went ahead and I clean-roomed
colors JS and fakers JS.
And now we don't have to worry about
any more backdoories.
All right, look, I buy there's
probably some companies that would pay
for this clean-rooming, but like
ignoring that.
If we can go back to the moral
question, Mike, it feels a little
exploited.
Doesn't it?
You're taking all of these people's ideas
and functionality.
And then you're repurposing it
for your own proprietary functionality
that you profit from.
That doesn't sound moral.
Sure, but Dylan, if we don't do it,
someone else will.
Real companies are having these
conversations right now.
And I mean, in the last six months,
it seems like AI models
might have finally gotten
powerful enough to do it.
And I mean, it's so easy.
I can take all of the ideas
from open source and
avoid all of these issues.
Dylan, there's real
opportunity here.
I can convert entire open source
S-bombs into 100%
CVE free packages.
And I can do it all
for just a low fee for me and my
customers.
In furthermore, I'll have
total AI mediated control over
all of this software.
And I'll be able to tailor it
to your work.
I mean, look, you're a company guy,
right?
You're already encouraging your
workers to utilize AI coding agents.
And this ineffective method of
having millions of dependencies
that you don't know about
the varying levels of
maintainer ship, Dylan.
It's crazy.
It's not sustainable.
Give you total control over
open source.
Listen to yourself.
You sound like a crazy person.
And besides, look,
we did a few examples of a few
one-off packages here,
but that seems like a far
stretch from cleaner
moving an entire
S-bombs.
Well, Dylan,
wasn't it you that first
came to me with the idea of this
talk when Mongo took
700 rules from the
HEPL license
Trufflehog and then
relicens them to a patchy?
Yes, they did use AI tools
to do that.
And they were messy
enough.
They actually copied some of the
original code.
And so, you know,
that's technically a
real email exchange.
But that's not the point.
That's very different from
an entire S-bombs.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I got it working.
Pull the automated
cleanrooming of
entire S-bombs.
I mean, if you
upload your package.json
to our website,
malice.sate and for a
little or fee,
you'll have
all of your dependencies
cleanroom.
100%
CVE-3.
No more fuss
with communities,
no more
osphos,
no more supply chain attacks,
no more open source.
Is this real?
Yeah.
Like, no.
I mean,
if people actually go
to malice.js
right now with their
currently open laptops,
can they
actually pay you
to cleanroom their entire
S-bombs?
It's malice.sate
dealing.
And yes,
how many times
do I have to say it?
We,
Mike,
we just had a proof of
a cut.
You wired us up the
stripe.
Who'd thank it?
How does this go to?
Dylan.
Why do you
think we are doing all of this?
Mike,
I'm in disbelief.
You,
ten years ago,
you quit your job at Amazon
to go work for,
like,
peanuts in the open source
community,
due to advocacy work
and humanitarian
ors.
And now,
what,
you're just going to
give it up
to kill and take control of all open source?
Well, Dylan,
I just think,
open source lost.
I'm tired of being on the losing side.
I can do that
for from advocating for open source.
So I figured,
why not try
the opposite?
Why not?
Embrace the inevitable?
And at least make
a little money
while the whole world
watches AI
burn it to the ground.
I,
no, Mike,
I can't be a part of this.
Like,
you can't just take all of these
people's code
and
redo their
functionality
and keep their functionality
but redo the code.
Like,
you can't just profit
from their labor like that.
That's not right.
I mean,
Dylan,
if you're not going to help me
and open source
then, well,
don't let the door
hit you on the way out.
Mike,
why
here?
Why come to
fuzz them
and give this talk of all
conferences?
Well,
you know,
I actually
I did a bit of market research
and, well, this
crack in particular
has a lot of the legal
console
for many of our future customers.
And I figured,
you know,
this is it.
Mike,
I can't let you do this.
I have to stop you.
Stop me.
How are you going to stop me?
What?
What tools?
What system
could you ever possibly use
to stop all of this?
Do you know how much
I want to slap you
right now?
I want to hit you so bad.
I can't even
know.
I don't think the organizers
would like that.
I mean,
I don't think
the wrong is the problem
and if I'm being honest,
I think I just,
I think I just need
a minute to myself.
I'm so sorry.
I can't keep doing this.
Consider a turkey
that is fed every day.
Every single feeding
will firm up the birds
belief that it is the
general rule of life
to be fed every day
by friendly
members of the human race.
Looking out for its best
interests
as a politician
would say.
On the afternoon
of the Wednesday
before Thanksgiving,
something unexpected
will happen to the turkey.
It will incur a revision
of belief.
In my day,
I remember that we had this
guy call.
I think his name was Richard
Paul.
Something.
He was on the
stockboard.
He should be free.
He should all be free.
And I call.
He should be free.