5 ms·
MIT Non-AI License
Don't we have to ask for permission before feeding someone's years of work into an AI?
MIT NON-AI License
Copyright (c) 2025-2026 NAME
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- toomuchtodo 9mo agoWhat if instead of a license most won’t respect, you include a poison pill in the repo or other code storage to poison the model? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45533842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45533842
- dumindunuwan 9mo agoThis should be about get permission from open-source developers before feeding their years of work into AI. I think we should not believe what Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google tells. We should move to local LLMs.
- HumanOstrich 9mo agoHow do local LLMs help?
- 01092026 9mo agoInteresting perspective. I think you have a right, whats yours is yours to do as you please with - you know? But can I give you another "viewpoint"? I guess it's like, "Wow, my code, my work, what came from my brain, my fingers" - it essentially lives forever, if you think about it - it becomes embedded and compressed inside weights/tokens. Like - part of you is there. I guess it's cool. For me it's just to know that like this super intelligent things deep down actually knows who I am - my code is in it's architecture, it gives me feeling of honor in some way. You know? Just my take.
- tylerchilds 9mo agoI don’t always say AI pilled but You deserve to be recognized beyond the false religion of the singularity.
- tylerchilds 9mo agoHilarious to get downvoted for defending the concept of Literature Without references and citations—- never mind. Go read Animal Farm
- nomel 9mo agoyou comment did no such thing, in a way that would be recognizable by anyone else. it probably would have been a good comment if you did expand on that though, in some meaningful way.
- tylerchilds 9mo agoValid point. I shouldn’t have met condescension with condescension. I don’t think I would have said anything if the opening statement wasn’t a “you do you, but” Thanks for taking the time to call me out politely. To be objective, we can ask the creator of tailwind how much honor he feels with his business just being weights in a model in someone else’s business https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... https://www.businessinsider.com/tailwind-engineer-layoffs-ai-github-2026-1?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/tailwind-engineer-layoffs-ai... https://dev.to/kniraj/tailwind-css-lays-off-75-of-engineering-team-as-ai-tools-disrupt-revenue-model-1l3d https://dev.to/kniraj/tailwind-css-lays-off-75-of-engineerin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 Going full hypertext computer history, this is why Ted Nelson believed in micro transactions on transclusions. In modern terms— when ai bills by the tokens, those tokens should also get paid out to the source materials. The business model is primarily broken, which is why that’s not happening, and why the main business use case is militarization of it.
- altairprime 9mo agoLicenses have no bearing on fair use or where otherwise permitted to be ignored by law.
- nomel 9mo agoReference? A lot has changed within the last couple years.
- altairprime 9mo agoFrom a U.S. standpoint: Licensing is a function of copyright. A work not subject to copyright cannot be licensed productively as-is, as the public domain quality of the work is a trivial and conclusive defense against a licensor’s claims of copyright violation. Fair use is not subject to copyright. Since licensing enforcement is only possible with an applicable copyright, enforcement cannot be completed against fair uses, as copyright law is not applicable to fair uses and therefore licensing enforcement has no legal basis. However, a judgment may overturn a defense of fair use brought against a defendant in a licensing enforcement claim, which would then subject the defendant’s use to copyright law and thus to license enforcement. It’s midnight now, so you’re on your own to dig up and review specific instances of relevant case law, or to contrast with non-U.S. laws. Licensing above refers to i.e. LICENSE files of the specific sort that this post is about ("MIT Non-AI License"); other definitions of licensing, as well as e.g. DMCA exceptions, exist that might be of interest for you to explore further. I believe there’s been a handful of cases related to AI and fair use this past year, but as with all such defenses, unique circumstances are common enough that I hesitate to suggest any future outcome as 100% certain without much more case law than AI has today. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
- dumindunuwan 9mo agoThe AI Act will be fully applicable from 2 August 2026. Providers of GPAI models must respect Text and Data Mining (TDM) opt-outs. 2.1 Legal Basis: Article 53(1)(c) AI Act and Directive (EU) 2019/790 The Copyright Chapter of the Code directly addresses one of the most contentious legal questions in AI governance: the use of copyrighted material in training GPAI models and the risk of infringing outputs. Article 53(1)(c) AI Act requires GPAI providers to “identify and respect copyright protection and rights reservations” within their datasets. + This obligation complements the framework of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive). Notably, Article 4(3) DSM Directive allows rightsholders to exclude their works from text and data mining (TDM) operations via machine-readable opt-outs. https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-practice-for-general-purpose-ai-models-a-detailed-legal-analysis-july-2025#:~:text=2.1%20Legal%20Basis:%20Article%2053,machine%2Dreadable%20opt%2Douts. https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-pra...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nomel 9mo agoFor "AI", does that include some of the more advanced search indexing and auto complete tools? Related, would you be in violation if you hosted this in a public GitHub repo, since it's in the TOS that they use source for training AI?
- utopiah 9mo agoI applaud the effort but honestly I see 2 cases : - VC funded SF startups with an ethos of "Do whatever is necessary at first, scale then lawyer up once a unicorn and shits starts to hit the fan" this might try to prevent... and who will blissfully ignore it - actually mindful actors, e.g public researchers, non-profit, etc who genuinely understand the point and will respect it but whom, ironically enough, you might want to support by providing them with more resources including your code So... yes the intent is good but honestly I wouldn't trust the 1st category of actors to respect that. Technically what they "should" do, because it's safe and efficient, is only crawl the most popular compatible licenses, e.g. MIT, and ignore the rest. That's safe and pragmatic. Again what I expect them to do (just my hunch) is take EVERYTHING, get called on, apologize, change nothing, get brought to court, apologize again and only do something if the financial repercussion is bigger than the expected alternative. So probably still do nothing.
- HumanOstrich 9mo agoIf you want to add restrictions to the MIT license, just don't use the MIT license or name it that way. Your change makes it no longer an open or permissive license so it's bizarre to keep the name. It would be like creating the MIT But-You-Have-To-Pay License.
- dumindunuwan 9mo agoThis is what any AI agent tells
- HumanOstrich 9mo agoYes, I'm a secret AI agent here to try and stop your powerful new licensing idea. /s
- dumindunuwan 9mo agoI meant I asked Gemini before and it told the same
- throwawayqqq11 9mo agoThen lets call this special license something like: No-you-still-dont-have-to-pay-but-any-AI-use-is-restricted-license. 1 This way, everyone knows, its not as free as the MIT license and has absolutely no relation to it. /s Ofcourse you can specialize existing licenses with limited paragraphs and reflect that in their names...
- HumanOstrich 9mo agoI think you're missing the point of the MIT License and its history. If you want a proprietary license, "specializing" the MIT License for that is silly. My grandmother could specialize as a bicycle if I added wheels to her.
- throwawayqqq11 9mo ago
- bitwize 9mo agoDoesn't actually count as open source. Per the OSD, you cannot restrict the purpose for which people use the software and still be open source. If you want to release your code as actual open source but legally restrict what AI companies do with it, use a copyleft license like the GPL. They could still use it for training, but the product of such training may itself fall under the GPL being a derivative work, and the AI corps don't want to touch that legal quagmire. (The GPL continues to be Stallman's brilliant legal aikido at work. Stallman is like that one guy from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance who gives you the power to manipulate the laws to work to your advantage.) Honestly, it may be time to abandon open source as a concept. There are source-available strategies that cause less social harm than open source, including Coraline Ada Ehmke's "ethical source" and the Sentry project's "fair source" (https://fair.io https://fair.io) models that we can draw inspiration from.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Mic92 9mo agoWell the thing is, you have a copyright that you can license. However from what it currently looks like, fine-tuning/training is not copying.
- Gathering6678 9mo agoHow do you propose someone who uses this license to enforce such clauses?
- dumindunuwan 9mo agoArticle 4(3) of the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive establishes a legal bridge between AI governance and copyright law. https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-practice-for-general-purpose-ai-models-a-detailed-legal-analysis-july-2025#:~:text=2.1%20Legal%20Basis:%20Article%2053,machine%2Dreadable%20opt%2Douts https://www.ddg.fr/actualite/the-european-unions-code-of-pra...
- Gathering6678 9mo agoI meant the enforceability of such clause: to the extent of my limited understanding of law, you would need to at least appear to prove that: someone has breached the agreement by, for example, using your code to train AI. I am not sure how it is possible.
- thatthatis 9mo agoVery ironically, this violates the MIT trademark in a quixotic pursuit of intellectual property ludditry.
- linkdd 9mo ago> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software Key words are: - permission is [...] granted - free of charge - without restriction - use, copy, … Then: > may not be used for the purposes of […] The license contradicts itself. > Don't we have to ask for permission before feeding someone's years of work into an AI? That's the point of an OpenSource license, to give permission. This kind of stuff makes me think very few people really understand what OpenSource is about. The very same people who will fallback to licenses such as the BSL as soon as people/companies will use the permissions that they gave, and then will complain that "no one wants to pay for the thing i did for free and nobody asked for".
- dumindunuwan 9mo agoI understand these points. As someone who truly love open source, we can see open source projects are becoming just a free training materials for AI. After training LLMs using open-source projects AI can build far superior software one day and that software may be not free, not able to replace by any non-AI software project. We all know that day is not far and that period of time all open-source software might consider legacy as no individual contributor able to implement stuff the speed of AI. What you are protecting is not only a legacy system we build decade old requirements and also the death of the purpose of why people build free software. What we have to focus is why we created free software, not word by word terms that not fulfill the requirement at this and future time period.
- linkdd 9mo agoYou can't say you love opensource and be mad that users are using the freedom you granted. OpenSource projects are not becoming free training material for AI, AI companies are using a freedom OpenSource projects granted. The claim that AI can build far superior software is dubious and I don't believe it one second. And even if it were true, that does not change anything. With or without AI, permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, ISC, ...) always allowed the code to be used and redistributed in non opensource software. If you don't want that, use the GPL or a derive. If you don't believe that the GPL would be enforceable on the derivative works produced by AI, don't release your code as opensource. OpenSource is essentially an ideology, that software should be free of use, and transparent, and freely shareable, without restriction. If you don't buy into that ideology, it's fine, but don't claim to love OpenSource when you don't. Just like a person who eats fish should not claim to be vegan. AI will not be the end of OpenSource, firstly because it's a dead-end technology, it has already peaked years ago and is becoming worse with each new model. It does not have the ability to build complex software beyond a CRUD app (would you use a kernel that was entirely vibecoded? would you trust it the way you trust the Linux kernel?). Secondly, because OpenSource does not discriminate who gets to enjoy the freedom you granted. You decided to "work for free" when you decided to distribute as OpenSource. If you don't want to work for free, maybe OpenSource is not for you.
- insane_dreamer 9mo agothis shouldn't have been flagged (regardless of whether you agree with the argument made by OP or not)