Isn’t the real danger now not the ability to find security vulnerabilities, but rather, the ability of anyone to ask an LLM agent to rewrite your open source project in another language and thus work around whatever license your project has?

You can do the same for closed source projects.

There are real limitations of course.

This is happening quite a lot actually. People just feed an existing project into their agent harness and have it regenerate more or less the same with a few tweaks and then they publish it.

I'm not sure how this works in the legal sense. A human could ostensibly study an existing project and then rewrite it from scratch. The original work's license shouldn't apply as long as code wasn't copy & pasted, right?

What happens when an automated tool does the same? It's basically just a complicated copy & paste job.

A lot of open source projects already have licenses that allow forking and selling the fork, it hasn't been a problem most of the time... there's a lot more to operating open source as a business beyond just shipping the code