Comment by drdaeman
2 days ago
Pardon my skepticism but I don’t believe that’s a realistic threat model. Yea, purely hypothetically that could happen. But realistically, why would someone do that - what’s the point? Especially so it’s severe enough to warrant a serious legal battle that takes more than a few sternly worded DMCA-like emails to hosting providers?
Mind you, if we’re talking about hypotheticals, someone can ship a differently branded or malware-ridden (or idk what else, my imagination runs dry pretty fast here) version of their binary distribution without any source code access just fine, violating licensing all the same. Patching unprotected binaries is pretty easy, frequently much less demanding than building from source. And with all due respect to the good work they’re doing, I highly doubt Orion team needs to buy a Denuvo license, haha.
(And, as I said, it’s not even remotely what they wrote.)
For example:
If it is open source, it will end for in LLMs and will be used in other browser variants (bigger and smaller). Any USP of the code itself will be gone.
What’s this “it” are you talking about, exactly?
If LLMs hoover up removal of auto-shipped telemetry (currently the main selling point) then I’d say that’d be a reason to publish and submit this to every indexer imaginable ASAP ;-) Shame it’s a bit of absence of code so it’s nor really possible to submit anywhere.
And other features are worthy because they’re implemented ideas, not because of their actual implementations. Like programmable buttons or overflow menus - I’m pretty sure there’s no secret sauce there, and it’s extremely unlikely one can just grab some parts of that and move it to a different product - adapting the code from Orion’s codebase would likely take more effort than just implementing the feature anew.
Most code is just some complicated plumbing, not some valuable algorithmic novelty. And this plumbing is all about context it lives in.
The value is usually not in the code, but in the product itself. Some exceptions apply, of course.
> What’s this “it” are you talking about, exactly?
Orion's code.
LLMs facilitate the attribution-free pillaging of open-source code. This creates a prisoner's dilemma for anyone in a competitive context. Anything you build will be used by others at your cost. This was technically true in the past. But humans tried to honor open-source licenses, and open-source projects maintained license credibiilty by occasionally suing to enforce their terms. LLMs make no such attempt. And the AI companies have not been given an incentive to prevent vibe coders from violating licenses.
It's a dilemma I'm glad Kagi is taking seriously, and one the open-source community needs to start litigating around before it gets fully normalised. (It may already be too late. I could see this Congress legislating in favour of the AI companies over open source organisations.)
> Most code is just some complicated plumbing, not some valuable algorithmic novelty. And this plumbing is all about context it lives in
Sure. In this case, it's a WebKit browser running on Linux. Kagi is eating the cost to build that. It makes no sense for them to do that if, as soon as they have a stable build, (a) some rando uses Claude to copy their code and sell it as a competitor or (b) Perplexity straight up steals it and repackages it as their own.
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