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AFAICT, large saas players can simply implement the software interfaces regardless of business source licenses like what happened to redis, no? Or is there some specific protections for API surfaces that I'm not aware of. I vaguely recall Google v Oracle almost established some protections but then got deferred in later ruling. My memory is hazy on that though...

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Indeed. And with the frontier AI models it's worse than that. You can literally just have them write test cases for the product you want to clone, then set it loose reverse engineering the code base.

That said, all these models are trained on the open source code bases presumably, so it would be interesting to see if AI-blackbox reverse engineering actually holds up in court.

My gut says it would infact hold up in current US courts, but only because the lionshare of corporations want it to and the courts have been stacked in their favor.

I personally believe it should not and that AI code should NOT be considered a "clean room" method. That said, IANAL.

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