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Comments (99)

• senko
  Maybe, just maybe, this whole AI thing could result in us collectively waking up and realizing copyright is entirely unsuitable for software.
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  cheesecompiler
  > I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it.I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels. The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free market.
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  beloch
  Perhaps code licensing is going to become more similar to music.e.g. Somebody wrote a library, and then you had an LLM implement it in a new language.You didn't come up with the idea for whatever the library does, and you didn't "perform" the new implementation. You're neither writer nor performer, just the person who requested a new performance. You're basically a club owner who hired a band to cover some tunes. There's a lot involved in running a club, just like there's a fair bit involved in operating a LLM, but none of that gives you rights over the "composition". If you want to make money off of that performance, you need to pay the writer and/or satisfy whatever terms and conditions they've made the library available under.IANAL, so I don't even know what species of worms are inside this can I've opened up. It seems sensible, to me, that running somebody else's work through a LLM shouldn't give you something that you can then claim complete control over.---------Edit: For the sake of this argument, let's pretend we're somewhere with sensible music copyright laws, and not the weird piano-roll derived lunacy that currently exists in the U.S..
• mellosouls
  Note the Ship of Theseus, while a nice comparison for the title, is not - as the author eventually points out - an appropriate analogy here. A fundamental contribution to the idea of whether the identity of the entity persists or not is the continuity between intermediate states.In the example given and discussed here the last couple of days there seems to be a process more akin to having an AI create a cast of the pre-existing work and fill it for the new one.
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  nomdep
  In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
• benob
  It's funny that real value is now in test suites. Or maybe it's always been...
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  PaulDavisThe1st
  US courts have ruled that machine generated code cannot be copyright. Ergo, it cannot be licensed (under any license; nobody owns the copyright, thus nobody can "license" it to anyone else).You cannot (*) use LLMs to generate code that you then license, whether that license is GPL, MIT or some proprietary mumbo-jumbo.(*) unless you just lie about this part.
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  erelong
  hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon itIP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP
• fouc
  > But this all causes some interesting new developments we are not necessarily ready for. Vercel, for instance, happily re-implemented bash with Clankers but got visibly upset when someone re-implemented Next.js in the same way.Kinda surprised nobody commented on this
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  rzerowan
  Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause [1] and MIT is even more permissive. Importantly these were meant to protect the USER of the code.Not the Dev , or the Company or the CLA holder - the USER is primary in the FreeSoftware world.Or at least was supposed to be , OSS muddied the waters and forgetting the old lessons learned when thing were basically bigcorp vs indie hacker trying to getthir electronic device to connect to what they want to connect to and do what they need is why were here.Bikeshedding to eventually come full circle to understand why those decisions were made.In a world where the large OEMs and bigcorps are increasinly locking down firmware , bootloaders , kernels and the internet. I would think a reappraisal of more enforcement that benefits the USER is paramount.Instead we have devs looking to tear down the few user protections FLOSS provides and usher in a locked down hacker unfiendly future.[1] https://licensecheck.io/blog/lgpl-dynamic-linking
• infinitewars
  The ship never existed, only the idea of a ship.
• __mharrison__
  Licensing is done. Reimplementation will be to easy...
• cheesecompiler
  After cloning a test suite you're still left with ongoing maintenance and development, maintaining feature parity etc. There's a lot more than passing a test suite. If the rewrite is truly superior it deserves to become the new Ship of Theseus. But e.g. I doubt anyone's AI rewrites of SQLite will ever put a dent in its marketshare.
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  7777777phil
  The legal question is a distraction. GPL was always enforced by economics: reimplementation had to cost more than compliance. At $1,100 for 94% API coverage, it doesn't. Copyleft was built for a world where clean-room rewrites were painful but they aren't anymore.
• thangalin
  Translate an alternative?https://github.com/albfernandez/juniversalchardet
• anon
  undefined
• Devasta
  This is awful news, but I don't know what can be done, is it possible to have a new GPL4 that deals with this? I doubt it.
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  scuff3d
  The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore.Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have explicit permission to train on.
• STARGA
  [dead]
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  moralestapia
  [flagged]
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  coldtea
  [flagged]