@unrtst@noc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ddgulledge @pluralistic Honestly, I see no such risk. There could be thousands of forks of open source things today! That's perfectly legal and trivial to do. Using this to shift open source into a proprietary product (eg. violating the GPL) is a legit risk. Using this on proprietary software is another likely outcome (ex. take that custom SAP app, get clean room implementation, stop paying).

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange (mute acknowledged; replying anyway) AFAICT, there are many jabber clients and servers that fulfill that checklist and have for ages. It's also got a bunch of the nice-to-haves, and options for most of the other features. IMO, Pidgin did a terrific job as a client, and there is support for voice. Screen sharing is available but it seems there were some security issues with some of those plugins. FWIW, I'm not a fan of the large window interfaces used by Teams, Slack, etc...

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@guigsy @ddgulledge @pluralistic You may have missed my point. @ddgulledge suggested Malus.sh would lead to thousands of "clean room" reimplementations of open source software; I'm saying the same could happen today with less work, so it's very unlikely. The lack of support is a separate matter, and one that's actually easy to resolve, especially for anyone with an existing software support team for their own products.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@xinniw @ddgulledge @pluralistic LLM's would only struggle with this if the closed source code actually contained novel concepts not found elsewhere. Let's put this another way - if a person was trained on every line of open source code in existence, and all the books on programming, do you think they'd have any problem within a proprietary codebase? This isn't prompting to get it to spit out copywritten works; It's getting it to code to a very detailed specification. It excels at that.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ddgulledge @pluralistic Oh, I get it! But what if the intent isn't to hide it (they don't need to hide it cause they just did a clean room implementation!). Ex.

TurboCAD finds leaked AutoCAD source.
Shove AutoCAD through Malus.sh
Rename the result: TurboCAD++ - now fully compatible with AutoCAD!
Market and support it as their own.

@ddgulledge , maybe you could give an example that would expose said risk? ... I can't think of any that aren't easier to do already.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 6mo ago

@Cal@kind.social @ret@furry.engineer I'd say absolutely yes, but that may depend on your expectations.

User friendly: Devuan, which I use, is based on Debian, and is just as easy to use. Ubuntu is also based on Debian, FWIW. When using Ubuntu, I tend to use the alternate console based installers as I find the GUI one too inflexible (I install to a raid10 mirror with LVM over it with encryption), and I think the text based one is easier to follow as well.

Community: it's been more helpful, IME. Less noise.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 6mo ago

@Cal@kind.social @ret@furry.engineer Use a distribution that does not have systemd. Ex. Devuan or Gentoo. Big list: https://nosystemd.org/#alternatives

nosystemd.org

No systemd - Resources against systemd and alternatives

A collection of resources pointing out reasons against systemd and what alternatives are available. Find Linux distributions without systemd.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 7mo ago

New business idea: NaaS - No as a Service.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@ratsnakegames@mastodon.social @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange @gabboman I'm not sure it's true that adding video/screensharing would significantly increase cost. I think the centralized service could facilitate establishing the network link between the parties and have them send the feed more-or-less directly. But I may simply be mincing words here - that could be interpreted as making it distributed.

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Joshua Miller @unrtst@noc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ddgulledge@social.linux.pizza @pluralistic@mamot.fr Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're saying Malus.sh provides incentive for proprietary forks of OSS libs to be included in commercial products, much like today but without the licensing risks. If so, sure - but does that increase said risk? I still think there's a bigger risk to proprietary software. One can't simply copy/paste in leaked code and expect to hide it from big corpos, but, theoretically, they can legally do it via Malus.sh now.

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