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Yes. Building a tool that facilitates or even automatically copies code and then using it would absolutely open you to issues. I'm actually not sure what your

Yes. Building a tool that facilitates or even automatically copies code and then using it would absolutely open you to issues. I'm actually not sure what your thought process around why it wouldn't - if you're byte for byte copying something that you, or a machine, saw, that didn't have rights to use (or rather, didn't have rights to determine how other people use it - and you tried to enforce them) would be a problem. If you're not supposed to look at GPL code, why would you train your model using such code?

smsm42 4y ago
Well, if I trained, say, search engine ranking model on GPL code, would that be a violation? Or, say, if I needed data about frequency of keywords in certain languages and I used GPL code would that be a violation? I don't think so... If so, there must be some boundary there - but I am not sure where.
- smachiz 4y ago
  If your boss says “write me code that doesn’t have a GPL license because I want to license this to other customers in a non-GPL way” you cannot use, or have a machine use, GPL code. This isn’t about whether or not you’re allowed to use GPL code, it’s about whether you’re allowed to enforce ownership rights against it, presumably. If you copy GPL code you are in violation, however it happens.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    I don't think it's true. Can a non-GPL backup tool backup files with GPL code? It will certainly be copying them, that's what backup is. I think you would agree that claiming it is a GPL violation would make no sense. What if that tool also calculates hash sums of the code? Still OK? What if it also builds inverse indexes on the content of the files, for better backup retrieval? Still OK? What if more complex calculation on the content of the files is done, for more efficient storage and compression? The resulting data set would certainly have something derived from the code, but it would not be anything like the original code. What if the same data set is used to train an ML model? I still don't see the boundary there, and "you can't touch bytes in any GPL code in any way" doesn't seem to be it. I am not talking about "enforcing ownership rights" - if I train a model on GPL code and it produces some code, I am not asking about ownership rights on that code. For all I care, that can be public domain. What I am asking is how much of the original code should be left in this product for it to be still covered under GPL and how would one find such a boundary?

smsm42 4y ago

Well, if I trained, say, search engine ranking model on GPL code, would that be a violation? Or, say, if I needed data about frequency of keywords in certain languages and I used GPL code would that be a violation? I don't think so... If so, there must be some boundary there - but I am not sure where.

smachiz 4y ago
If your boss says “write me code that doesn’t have a GPL license because I want to license this to other customers in a non-GPL way” you cannot use, or have a machine use, GPL code. This isn’t about whether or not you’re allowed to use GPL code, it’s about whether you’re allowed to enforce ownership rights against it, presumably. If you copy GPL code you are in violation, however it happens.
- smsm42 4y ago
  I don't think it's true. Can a non-GPL backup tool backup files with GPL code? It will certainly be copying them, that's what backup is. I think you would agree that claiming it is a GPL violation would make no sense. What if that tool also calculates hash sums of the code? Still OK? What if it also builds inverse indexes on the content of the files, for better backup retrieval? Still OK? What if more complex calculation on the content of the files is done, for more efficient storage and compression? The resulting data set would certainly have something derived from the code, but it would not be anything like the original code. What if the same data set is used to train an ML model? I still don't see the boundary there, and "you can't touch bytes in any GPL code in any way" doesn't seem to be it. I am not talking about "enforcing ownership rights" - if I train a model on GPL code and it produces some code, I am not asking about ownership rights on that code. For all I care, that can be public domain. What I am asking is how much of the original code should be left in this product for it to be still covered under GPL and how would one find such a boundary?