Since the explosion in generative AI, there has been a rash of “decompilations” of video games and various other software (such as this example from earlier today disputed – see below) that have been published to Github and advertised as “Open Source.” That claim is a lie.
The phrase “Open Source” has a specific meaning (and similarly for “Free Software,” by the way1), and it isn’t merely that the source code is there for you to look at. It means that the copyright holder is explicitly giving you permission to read that source code, modify it, redistribute it, etc. Without that element of permission, the code cannot be “Open Source” even if you can physically read it. At best, it might be “Fair Use” depending on the circumstances, but it’s most likely just a fancy means of copyright infringement.
Remember, copyright is a legal construct, not a technical one. It depends much more on the intent of the human doing the copying than it does on the technical details of what they actually did. If the thing they have is obviously intended to be a copy of something else, it is a Derivative Work no matter what technical means were used to create it. That means the original copyright still attaches to it and the person who made the copy doesn’t get to choose a new license for it, “Open Source” or otherwise.
Why YSK:
You don’t have to like the way copyright law works – I sure don’t! – but you do have to understand it because there’s a lot of misinformation going around right now with people claiming things are “Open Source” when they aren’t and a lot of people are going to get in trouble for it. It also dilutes the public understanding of what actual legitimate Open Source software is, which is a problem in and of itself.
Conflating real Open Source software with proprietary software that’s been ‘pirated with extra steps’ is harmful both for developers of the former, who have their reputations damaged by association, and for users/sharers of the latter, who might be misled into not taking the same precautions that they would if they understood that they were dealing with warez. Just because you might think Big Tech can get away with laundering copyright through LLMs – and even that remains to be seen – doesn’t mean the little guys can.
TL;DR: Proprietary software cannot become Open Source software by any means except (a) the express consent of the copyright holder or (b) the copyright expiring and the work becoming Public Domain. Whatever technological end-run you think you have around this legal fact, no you don’t.
EDIT: dispute over example
In giving that example I was relying on the claim in the linked thread, which comes from this guy on BlueSky. Seems like a lot of people think he’s wrong, so maybe that’s not a good example after all.
However, there are also things like this, and those are examples I feel very confident in citing because (a) they explicitly call them “decompliations,” (b) at least one of them has a LICENSE file that says it’s MIT, and (c) there’s zero chance Nintendo or Rare or anyone else legitimately gave them permission for it.
footnote
1 “Free Software” has essentially the same denotation as “Open Source” – close enough that every “Free Software” license is also “Open Source” and vice-versa – but a different connotation. The term “Free Software” tends to get used by people who wish to emphasize the rights of the end-user, while the term “Open Source” tends to get used by people who wish to emphasize that the software is available to be modified.
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we’re bringing back the term “freeware”
opened source != open source
If companies can recreate open source projects to change their license, I don’t see why commercial software should be more protected. Let OpenAI and others justify to Adobe why it’s ok and legal to do instead of policing it yourself.
While I’m not pro “LLM rewrite everything”, this is the best case scenario for the tech: unleashing software from the grips of their master, and free their users from predatory practices.No one would argue anything about the source code. The game assets, however, are still protected under copyright law.
I’m talking about the vibe coded Adobe suite, which doesn’t use any official assets from Adobe.
In cases of games, generally the assets are never provided and you’re expected to get them from your own ripped copy.
But even then I wouldn’t put it past an AI bro to recreate all the assets using gen AI. Not sure what the legality of that would be.
Yep. If AI can plagiarize open source software all day every day, let it plagiarize closed-source software as well, why not?
If it makes all software copyright protections obsolete and dead, then maybe that’s at least a silver lining to AI.
Now, somebody do the nvidia Linux drivers next!
I’m not following your logic here. Decompilers like the N64 decomp tool are open source. They do not contain any proprietary code or copywritten assets, and their source code is freely available to review. The copyright holder of the decomp tool is not the same entity as the copyright holder of the game being decompiled.
Yes, to do anything useful, you need a proprietary file (usually, a very specific ROM). But that is true for a lot of software that can read or interact with copyrighted content. GIMP doesn’t stop being open source the second I import a Google logo in for editing.
You are definitely right in the case of clean room rewrites that basically achieve the same behavior independently (at least it can be argued they didnt just rewrite the original decompile code ig).
What I see people doing now is give Claude a game binary and ask it to reverse engineer and rewrite the game. I’m not a lawyer but I don’t think that can be redistributed legally, it’s basically a transformation of the original game even if the final product doesn’t contain any original assets. And I also saw a guy that did this to port some skating game to pc, and he said he believes all games will be open source in a few years. Not sure how he meant it, but it doesn’t make sense to me in any way, being able to reverse engineer or decompile a product was never an issue in making something open source, it’s an issue of copyright or licensing.
and he said he believes all games will be open source in a few years
He’s wrong on that, but it would be kind of cool to see truly ‘closed source’ software quickly become a thing of the past.
Yes, it’s not legally open source, but maybe it could be functionally open source, if everybody has relatively easy access to the source code. Imagine, say, being able to actually turn off Windows telemetry because you decompiled it, edited out the telemetry, and then compiled and installed your own custom version…
The Adobe suite thing you linked in your post isn’t a decompilation, it’s a clean-room reimplementation.
Whether it qualifies as a clean room implementation is going to spark some debate (and some lawsuits).
You could argue that “vibe coded” and “clean room reimplementation” are by nature incompatible with one another, since you can’t prove the AI didn’t ingest the original code. But you could also question whether the AI could possibly be trained on Adobe’s code when Adobe keeps that under wraps. It could be trained on leaked code, but that would be hard to prove.
If they used decompilation as a guide for the AI, that might be easier to establish regardless of what the LLM was trained on. There could be telltale implementation details that Adobe could cite.
In any case, Adobe has a huge number of patents on its software, so I imagine there could be grounds for legal action just because these applications faithfully copy the look and feel and functionality of Adobe products. That might be easier for them to prove in court than anything about the code’s provenance.
That’s true, but OP is calling it a decompilation in the text portion of the post, which is incorrect.
There’s certainly going to be lawsuits claiming it’s effectively a decompilation as well. We’ll see how it goes.
Well, if that’s the case then I’ve been hoodwinked by this guy.
I looked at the repo and it looks like that is guy is spreading misinfo.
I’ve edited the post accordingly.
I haven’t seen that, but I have seen a lot of open-weight AI models being described as open-source, which they really are not, and that misuse of the term is something that I really don’t like. Open-weight models are basically analogous to getting the binary for a closed-source software package, rather than only having to interact with it via a remote server. That’s not to say that that can’t have value, but it is not the same as having the source, which would be getting the training corpus and procedures that would let one reconstruct the model.
There is the possibility of having an Open Dataset of license-free data plus open-weights, which is probably the closest you can get towards Open Source in that space. There’s currently no way to make the model itself transparent simply because of the principle of how these things work.
Best Practice Example i can offer is Apertus 1.5 -> https://huggingface.co/swiss-ai/collections for models and datasets, https://github.com/orgs/swiss-ai/repositories?q=apertus for training code and similar, https://www.apertus-ai.org/ for the homepage
Agreed, and that’s a whole 'nother problem. “Open Source” as a term is inadequate to apply to AI models because the only part that actually counts as “source code” is just the harness/framework that runs it – even closed-weight models can be (and mostly are, AFAIK) technically “Open Source,” but that does you no good when the important part is the gigantic opaque vector of data it needs to actually do anything.
All that aside, I really want to reply to:
I haven’t seen that
First of all, there’s the example I already cited, which is allegedly a decompilation of Adobe Suite that claims on their main page under the heading “Open Source” that “every line is on GitHub under permissive licenses” (even though they’re lying about that because it isn’t even a real OSI-compatible license, LOL).
Second, there have been a bunch of decompilations of Nintendo 64 games including Mario and Zelda ones, and Nintendo, of all companies, sure as Hell didn’t approve that!
That license suggests these people don’t know what they’re doing, or don’t care. Maybe they think they’re geographically out of reach of Adobe’s lawyers. In any case, it’s hardly striking a blow for open-source software when its provenance and legal status are so dubious. FOSS should be done honestly and with pride.
Indeed. Having something decompiled doesn’t make it right in multiple meanings.
Uncomfortable but very valuable YSK in this context.
Too bad most lemmites won’t understand.
They want to look like tech experts when they’re not, so they use a bunch of buzzwords they vaguely understand and hope for the best.
To be fair, to have even heard of Lemmy means you’re probably much more of a ‘tech expert’ than 95% of normies.
also, anything created by an llm can, by definition, not be open sourced, because the prompter does not have any rights to give away.
IMO the most important part of open source licenses is the obligation that anyone who modifies and shares the code publishes the changes with the same license. It’s not just that the original creator is giving permission to use the code, they’re doing it so the code can become the foundation of something everyone can add to in perpetuity.
So calling unlicensed software “open source” isn’t just abusing the original creator, it’s abusing everyone who invests their time in it with the thought of potentially adding their own improvements.
IMO the most important part of open source licenses is the obligation that anyone who modifies and shares the code publishes the changes with the same license.
That is only true of “copyleft” Open Source licenses (e.g. GPL). There is also an entire category of “permissive” Open Source" licenses that don’t require that, yet still comply with the definition of “Open Source.”
I agree with you that copyleft is essential, BTW. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to call BSD a “cuck license” on occasion. But sadly, OSI makes the rules about which licenses count, not me.
Could you walk me through the damage that this mistake does to well-and-proper open source developers?
I don’t think it is likely that they would be harmed by things like new regulation on ‘public source code’ projects? Anybody looking to hire a developer who confuses these two wasn’t serious/relevant in the space. Open source developers do not, at least in my media diet, seem to get a lot of airtime or respect for their work (or money, for that matter). And the places they do get these things are sufficiently literate that I’m not concerned.
Could you help me out with this claim? What’s the model of harm?
I don’t think it is likely that they would be harmed by things like new regulation on ‘public source code’ projects?
Just wait until idiot politicians start drafting laws to stop these “open source” projects … and of course end up painting with such a broad brush that it catches actual open source software distribution as well. (Maybe also influenced by a few corporate donors who would like nothing better than to legally kill open source projects.)
Free- and open source is not the same! Open source doesn’t necessarily grant you the right to modify and redistribute
Free- and open source is not the same!
You’re right, but in reality it usually doesn’t matter. All common licenses (GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, MPL) fit both definitions: free software as defined by FSF, and open-source as defined by OSI.
It’s only really niche licenses where it differs - for example NASA’s Open Source Agreement is open-source (OSI approved) but not free (not FSF approved) because of this clause:
Each Contributor represents that its Modification is believed to be Contributor’s original creation and does not violate any existing agreements, regulations, statutes or rules, and further that Contributor has sufficient rights to grant the rights conveyed by this Agreement.
This is what the FSF say about it:
The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a free software license because it includes a provision requiring changes to be your “original creation”. Free software development depends on combining code from third parties, and the NASA license doesn’t permit this.
Note that “free” refers to freedom, not price. Both definitions allow you to charge money for the software. However, you can’t restrict the user’s freedoms, so someone that buys the software could give it to someone else for free, and you wouldn’t be able to stop that while still remaining FOSS.
No, read the definition I cited. “Open Source” is a term of art defined by the Open Source Initiative, and definitely does grant you the right to modify and redistribute.
I thought they were all separate. Distribution and modification are defined by the license type and open source means you can see the code.
All three are defined by the license.
Some software is “source-available”, meaning you can see the code but it’s not open-source. Microsoft uses to do this a lot with the .NET Framework (they called it “shared source”), before they created a new version that was open-source from the beginning.
One of the issues with this type of code is that it often taints you. With the old .NET shared source for example, you weren’t allowed to redistribute the code or use it for other purposes. if you ever looked at that source code, you weren’t allowed to contribute to competing open-source projects like Mono, since they had no way to guarantee that the code you were contributing wasn’t influenced by what you saw in the shared source, or that you didn’t just copy and paste it from Microsoft’s code.
There’s some popular self-hosted projects that are source-available rather than open-source, like n8n and Sentry.
These days it’s more common for software to be “open core”, meaning the core functionality is open-source, but extra stuff around it is only source-visible with a proprietary license, usually requiring a paid subscription to be allowed to use it.
Nah, that’s just what corporate bad actors like Microsoft want you to think. Lots of entities have an ulterior motive to dilute the term “Open Source” to make their proprietary stuff seem more open than it is, but that must be resisted.
See also:
What you have in mind is “source available”.
