Malus – Clean Room as a Service

microflash 1149 points 424 comments March 12, 2026
malus.sh · View on Hacker News

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_... https://malus.sh/blog.html

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

noemit

is the motto, "Don't be good?"

mushufasa

"Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡

ameliaquining

Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.

scblock

Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things. "This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."

observationist

Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will. I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing. Open the floodgates. Break the system. I'd cheer for a company like this. It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.

fallingmeat

Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"

bensyverson

Oh no… VCs will see this and take it seriously

hirako2000

In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.

ceayo

yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke! > Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ROFL

logdahl

Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.

rhoopr

> You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global economy to run on software that nobody technically owns, maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely insane. Funny but true.

RandomGerm4n

This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too lucrative from a business perspective.

tripdout

The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?

dakolli

I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software. See: https://deploycel.org/

amiga386

I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/ It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?

torginus

I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-

hmokiguess

The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things are going. EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious

phpnode

This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not be building my business around this capability however

spudlyo

malus, mala, malum ADJ bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky; It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.

yomismoaqui

I bet someone has already made this service for real.

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