This is indistinguishable from satire. I think it is satire? Especially the name? But tech bros have had this tendency lately to get cute about naming their company after evil things.

Final boss of permissive licensing

Just to be clear, the reason this reads like satire is that it is satire. If you click around, you’ll notice that a lot of the links don’t work, and at the bottom of the blog post there’s some fine print:

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels, Belgium. A recording of the full presentation is available upon request to customers with active liberation contracts.

MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services. The MalusCorp-0 License is provided “as is,” much like the open source software it replaces, except that we charge for it.

As you can imagine, the kind of person who gives a talk at FOSDEM is not the kind of person who would make this kind of service for real. Here’s FOSDEM’s blurb about Mike Nolan, the guy who is listed as MalusCorp’s CEO and also the one who gave said FOSDEM talk:

Mike Nolan is a software architect and social scientist researching the political economy of technology. Recent papers include the impacts of layoffs on open source communities. He also acts as the director of the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists.

He is the former Associate Director of Open@RIT and is currently working with UNDP Nature and Climate. His work experience stems from tech companies such as Amazon and GIPHY to large humanitarian organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF.

So yeah, not a ghoul. But like all good satire, the intent of the website is to make you think about the implications of its premise, and I think it’s very effective at that.

Haven’t watched the talk yet, but here’s the link:

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/

edit: big time AI slop warning on the talk—not done watching it, and the content seems solid, but for some godforsaken reason instead of just using static slides like normal human beings the presentation is filled with these 5 second AI slop clips that loop while they’re talking and it’s super distracting, so I’m basically just staring at the subs.

edit 2: after having watched that talk, you’re probably better off just reading the blog post to avoid the AI slop cognitohazards and save yourself some time. The talk has a lot more detail about the history of copyright, but I think the most important idea not present in the blog is that the judges who made the original copyright rulings lived in a world where copying the ideas (but not the exact content) of a work required a lot more labor, and if they instead lived in a world where an LLM could spit out a reworded version of something in a few seconds they may have ruled differently. But regardless, the law that flows from those interpretations is the current law of the land.

Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?

“workers should not be compensated for their work” is the end goal of these ghouls and they are not even hiding it anymore

What could possibly go wrong?

Do you think they know Mal = Bad?