“I think it doesn't really help you to have open source that's restrictively licensed. So you might as well just go all the way with MIT license and get maximum reach. I don't think the model of building an open source project and then trying to monetize your own user base works because it's so easy to host stuff. It's so easy to fork it.”
The Changelog · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Cohen built the agent project NanoClaw over a weekend and released it under the MIT license; he is now building a company on it. Asked whether he regrets giving it away, he argues that licenses have stopped protecting anyone, because a coding agent can rewrite any open codebase in another language. The project, in his view, is for brand, community and distribution.
Transcript
…an AI native agency to be, you know, to have created a successful AI agent project. So that was my thinking. But it was totally just going to be this side project. I put it out on my personal GitHub user and only moved it to our company's GitHub after it took off. This was just a weekend project.
…road, man. You can't put the cat back in the bag, so to speak, because you've already open source an MIT licensed NanoClaw. How does that sit with you when it comes to you building a business around a code repository that's fully open with fully permissive to any degree? How do you feel about that?
…it leaks. And people posted it on GitHub. And then there were all these takedown requests. So then people had AI code. Coding agents just rewrite the entire thing in Python, in Rust, in 12 other languages. And that actually, once you rewrite it in another language, the original license doesn't apply anymore. So you can look at a project and rewrite it, and that's fully allowed by licensing. So I think it doesn't really help you to have open source that's restrictively licensed. So you might as well just go all the way with MIT license and get maximum reach. I don't think the model of building an open source project and then trying to monetize your own user base works because it's so easy to host stuff. It's so easy to fork it. I think the new model is the open source project is just about building up a brand, getting a community, getting distribution. So that's the way we're looking at it for NanoClaw. So you've got people building on NanoClaw, individuals, businesses. That's all great. Only 1%, probably much less, probably a tenth of a percent of companies are going to build their own internal agent platform on top…
I like your view on open source. It's intriguing at least. I want to hear more. And so if I understand correctly, your position is that open source has obviously changed. Even if the license is not permissive, the fact that it's there might as well be permissive because anybody who has any sort of…
We have, so we're commercializing. We have customers, we have paying customers. And I don't know if the same will hold true for every project. I think a claw type of project, personal agent, it's a unique, it's a bit of a unique thing. It's not a developer tool, right? Which most open source…
Interesting. So is that the kind of business? So while I recognize the commercial opportunity here, and maybe that's just the surface that we're scratching and that's what you can share here now, is that the business you want to run? Because I mean, to start out, you began as an engineer building…
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