16 ms·

Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

• wccrawford 7mo ago
  "Antirez closes his careful legal analysis as though it settles the matter. Ronacher acknowledges that “there is an obvious moral question here, but that isn't necessarily what I'm interested in.” Both pieces treat legal permissibility as a proxy for social legitimacy. " This whole article is just complaining that other people didn't have the discussion he wanted. Ronacher even acknowledged that it's a different discussion, and not one they were trying to have at the moment. If you want to have it, have it. Don't blast others for not having it for you.
  • wizzwizz4 7mo ago
    Having this discussion involves blasting others for not considering it. Consider the rest of the paragraph you quoted: > But law only says what conduct it will not prevent—it does not certify that conduct as right. Aggressive tax minimization that never crosses into illegality may still be widely regarded as antisocial. A pharmaceutical company that legally acquires a patent on a long-generic drug and raises the price a hundredfold has not done something legal and therefore fine. Legality is a necessary condition; it is not a sufficient one.
    • amarant 7mo ago
      If the discussion inherently cannot be had without blasting innocent bystanders, I don't think it's a discussion worth having. It might even be morally abhorrent to have such a discussion in the first place!
      • wizzwizz4 7mo ago
        They're not innocent bystanders: if you take the premise of the article seriously, their actions should be criticised. Please consider re-reading the article more slowly.
• ordu 7mo ago
  I believe it is a narrow view of the situation. If we take a look into the history, into the reasons for inventing GPL, we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights. The very name 'copyleft' is trying to convey the idea. What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated it already, there were stories here on HN about it. AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon.
  • stebalien 7mo ago
    Copyleft is a mirror of copyright, not a way to fight copyright. It grants rights to the consumer where copyright grants rights to the creator. Importantly, it gives the end-user the right to modify the software running on their devices. Unfortunately, there are cases where you simply can't just "re-implement" something. E.g., because doing so requires access to restricted tools, keys, or proprietary specifications.
    • rileymat2 7mo ago
      > It grants rights to the consumer where copyright grants rights to the creator. It also grants one major right/feature to the creator, the ability to spread their work while keeping it as open as they intend.
    • ordu 7mo ago
      These are words of Stallman: "So, I looked for a way to stop that from happening. The method I came up with is called “copyleft.” It's called copyleft because it's sort of like taking copyright and flipping it over. [Laughter] Legally, copyleft works based on copyright. We use the existing copyright law, but we use it to achieve a very different goal." https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/ https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/
      • sarchertech 7mo ago
• sharkjacobs 7mo ago
  > Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse" Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. The premise is that he prompted Claude to reimplement it, without using his own knowledge of it to direct or steer.
  • re-thc 7mo ago
    > This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to... Technically did look.
    • amarant 7mo ago
      The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code! What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performance! It's just API-compatible with the original. Which as per the Google Vs oracle 2021 decision is to be considered fair use.
      • mrgoldenbrown 7mo ago
        did he claim that Claude wasn't trained on the original? Or just that he didn't personally provide Claude with a copy?
        • amarant 7mo ago
          I recon the latter, how would he know what was in Claude's training data?
• throwaway2027 7mo ago
  I think we're going one step too far even, AI itself is a gray area and how can they guarantee it was trained legally or if it's even legal what they're doing and how can they assert that the input training data didn't contain any copyrighted data.
  • observationist 7mo ago
    Google already spent billions of dollars and decades of lawyer hours proving it out as fair use. The legal challenges we see now are the dying convulsions of an already broken system of publishers and IP hoarders using every resource at their disposal to manipulate authors and creators and the public into thinking that there's any legitimacy or value underlying modern copyright law. AI will destroy the current paradigm, completely and utterly, and there's nothing they can do to stop it. It's unclear if they can even slow it, and that's a good thing. We will be forced to legislate a modern, digital oriented copyright system that's fair and compatible with AI. If producing any software becomes a matter of asking a machine to produce it - if things like AI native operating systems come about, where apps and media are generated on demand, with protocols as backbone, and each device is just generating its own scaffolding around the protocols - then nearly none of modern licensing, copyright, software patents, or IP conventions make any sense whatsoever. You can't have horse and buggy traffic conventions for airplanes. We're moving in to a whole new paradigm, and maybe we can get legislation that actually benefits society and individuals, instead of propping up massive corporations and making lawyers rich.
    • casey2 7mo ago
      Google has cut out some very specific ruling that have nothing to do with modern AI. These systems are just a really slow/lossy git clone, current law has no trouble with it, it's broadly illegal. If corporations are allowed to launder someone else work as their own people will simply stop working and just start endlessly remixing a la popular music.
• moi2388 7mo ago
  Perhaps we should finally admit that copyright has always been nonsense, and abolish this ridiculous measure once and for all
  • vladms 7mo ago
    Probably a wiser approach is to consider different times require different measures (in general!). I did not study in detail if copyright "has always been nonsense", but I do agree that nowadays some of the copyright regulations are nonsense (for example the very long duration of life + 70 years)
  • intrasight 7mo ago
    I think AI is very much eroding the legitimacy of copyright - at least to software, which is long been questioned since it's more like math than creative expression. I think the industry will realize that it made a huge mistake by leaning on copyright for protection rather than on patents.
  • joshmoody24 7mo ago
    IMO the core idea of copyright isn't nonsense, but I do think the current implementation (70+ years after death) is egregiously overpowered. I've always thought the current laws were too deeply entrenched to ever change, but I'm tentatively optimistic AI will shock the system hard enough to trigger actual reform.
  • mbgerring 7mo ago
    Actually I think the last 20 years of the Internet demonstrates that copyright is more important than ever, because unless it's enforced, people with more capital than the copyright owner will simply steal creative works and profit from them. The idea that "information wants to be free" was always a lie, meant to transfer value from creators to platform owners. The result of that has been disastrous, and it's long past time to push the pendulum in the other direction.
• throawayonthe 7mo ago
  shall we now have to think about the tradeoffs in adopting - proprietary - free - slop-licensed software?
  • megous 7mo ago
    We should just use LLMs to free more software and HW. Make it work against the system.
• mfabbri77 7mo ago
  What if someone doesn't declare that it has been reimplemented using an LLM? Isn't it enough to simply declare that you have reimplemented the software without using an LLM? Good luck proving that in court... One thing is certain, however: copyleft licenses will disappear: If I can't control the redistribution of my code (through a GPL or similar license), I choose to develop it in closed source.
  • bigyabai 7mo ago
    Arguably, the GPL has always been the wrong choice if you want to authoritatively control redistribution.
• dwroberts 7mo ago
  One of the things that irks me about this whole thing is, if it’s so clean room and distinct, why make the changes to the existing project? Why not make an entirely new library? The answer to that, I think, is that the authors wanted to squat an existing successful project and gain a platform from it. Hence we have news cycle discussing it. Nobody cares about a new library using AI, but squash an existing one with this stuff, and you get attention. It’s the reputation, the GitHub stars, whatever
  • nicole_express 7mo ago
    I mean, Blanchard was the longtime maintainer of chardet already, and had wanted to relicense it for years. So I think that complicates your picture of "squatting an existing successful project". Honestly it's a weird test case for this sort of thing. I don't think you'd see an equivalent in most open source projects.
  • intrasight 7mo ago
    I agree. But you can't copyright goodwill and reputation. Trademark does provide some protection there, right?
• delichon 7mo ago
  Imagine if the author has his way, and when we have AI write software, it becomes legally under the license of some other sufficiently similar piece of software. Which may or may not be proprietary. "I see you have generated a todo app very similar to Todoist. So they now own it." That does not seem like a good path either for open source software or for opening up the benefits of AI generated software.
• logicprog 7mo ago
  > Ronacher notes this as an irony and moves on. But the irony cuts deeper than he lets on. Next.js is MIT licensed. Cloudflare's vinext did not violate any license—it did exactly what Ronacher calls a contribution to the culture of openness, applied to a permissively licensed codebase. Vercel's reaction had nothing to do with license infringement; it was purely competitive and territorial. The implicit position is: reimplementing GPL software as MIT is a victory for sharing, but having our own MIT software reimplemented by a competitor is cause for outrage. This is what the claim that permissive licensing is “more share-friendly” than copyleft looks like in practice. The spirit of sharing, it turns out, runs in one direction only: outward from oneself. This argument makes no sense. Are they arguing that because Vercel, specifically, had this attitude, this is an attitude necessitated by AI, reimplementation, and those who are in favor of it towards more permissive licenses? That certainly doesn't seem to be an accurate way to summarize what antirez or Ronacher believe. In fact, under the legal and ethical frameworks (respectively) that those two put forward, Vercel has no right to claim that position and no way to enforce it, so it seems very strange to me to even assert that this sort of thing would be the practical result of AI reimplementations. This seems to just be pointing towards the hypocrisy of one particular company, and assuming that this would be the inevitable universal, attitude, and result when there's no evidence to think so. It's ironic, because antirez actually literally addresses this specific argument. They completely miss the fact that a lot of his blog post is not actually just about legal but also about ethical matters. Specifically, the idea he puts forward is that yes, corporations can do these kinds of rewrites now, but they always had the resources and manpower to do so anyway. What's different now is that individuals can do this kind of rewrites when they never have the ability to do so before, and the vector of such a rewrite can be from a permissive to copyleft or even from decompile the proprietary to permissive or copyleft. The fact that it hasn't been so far is a more a factor of the fact that most people really hate copyleft and find an annoying and it's been losing traction and developer mind share for decades, not that this tactic can't be used that way. I think that's actually one of the big points he's trying to make with his GNU comparison — not just that if it was legal for GNU to do it, then it's legal for you to do with AI, and not even just the fundamental libertarian ethical axiom (that I agree with for the most part) that it should remain legal to do such a rewrite in either direction because in terms of the fundamental axioms that we enforce with violence in our society, there should be a level playing field where we look at the action itself and not just whether we like or dislike the consequences, but specifically the fact that if GNU did it once with the ability to rewrite things, it can be done again, even in the same direction, it now even more easily using AI.
• throwaway2027 7mo ago
  Perhaps software patents may play an even bigger role in the future.
  • intrasight 7mo ago
    Or, hopefully, even less of a role.
• drnick1 7mo ago
  It should be noted that the Rust community is also guilty of something similar. That is, porting old GPL programs, typically written in C, to Rust and relicensing them as MIT.
  • wolvesechoes 7mo ago
    > porting old GPL programs, typically written in C, to Rust and relicensing them as MIT Everything for memory safety.
  • phendrenad2 7mo ago
    And BSD drivers are "clean-room reimplementations" of the GPL drivers from Linux (but we all know they aren't).
  • bananamogul 7mo ago
    ...and the main distros are enthusiastically adopting them. Within a relatively short time frame, expect everything in your Linux distro other than the kernel to be MIT-licensed because everything that is FSF-maintained will be rewritten in Rust with the MIT license. The kernel will then be next, though it'll take a longer timeframe. The GPL just didn't win in the marketplace of ideas.
    • wolvesechoes 7mo ago
      People criticized Stallman et al. for being ideological, but popularity of permissive licenses is actually pure ideology, in Marxian sense - people doing without knowing, and conflating their interests with interests of big capital. You can see the same with people defending AI-laundering. Stallman's proposal is opposite of ideology, it is conscious political project. And thus it is failing.
• nicole_express 7mo ago
  Not a lawyer, but my understanding is: In theory, copyright only protects the creative expression of source code; this is the point of the "clean room" dance, that you're keeping only the functional behavior (not protected by copyright). Patents are, of course, an entirely different can of worms. So using an LLM to strip all of the "creative expression" out of source code but create the same functionality feels like it could be equivalent enough. I like the article's point of legal vs. legitimate here, though; copyright is actually something of a strange animal to use to protect source code, it was just the most convenient pre-existing framework to shove it in.
  • dathinab 7mo ago
    > this is the point of the "clean room" dance which is the actual relevant part: they didn't do that dance AFIK AI is a tool, they set it up to make a non-verbatim copy of a program. Then they feed it the original software (AFIK). Which makes it a side by side copy, as in the original source was used as reference to create the new program. Which tend to be seen as derived work even if very different. IMHO They would have to: 1. create a specification of the software _without looking at the source code_, i.e. by behavior observation (and an interface description). I.e. you give the AI access to running the program, but not to looking into the insides of it. I really don't think they did it as even with AI it's a huge pain as you normally can't just brute force all combinations of inputs and instead need to have a scientific model=>test=>refine loop (which AI can do, but can take long and get stuck, so you want it human assisted, and the human can't have inside knowledge about the program). 2. then generate a new program from specification, And only from it. No git history, no original source code access, no program access, no shared AI state or anything like that. Also for the extra mile of legal risk avoidance do both human assisted and use unrelated 3rd parties without inside knowledge for both steps. While this does majorly cut cost of a clean room approach, it still isn't cost free. And still is a legal mine field if done by a single person, especially if they have enough familiarity to potentially remember specific peaces of code verbatim.
    • nicole_express 7mo ago
      Well sure they didn't do the dance, but you don't have to do the dance. The reason to do it is that it's a good defense in a lawsuit. Like you say, all of this is a legal minefield. So my understanding was that the original code was specifically not fed into Claude. But was almost certainly part of its training data, which complicates things, but if that's fair use then it's not relevant? If training's not fair use and taints the output, then new-chardet is a derivative of a lot of things, not just old-chardet... This is all new legal ground. I'm not sure if anyone will go to court over chardet, though, but something that's an actual money-maker or an FSF flagship project like readline, on the other hand, well that's a lot more likely.
• grahamlee 7mo ago
  It's clear that we're entering a new era of copyright _expectations_ (whether we get new _legislation_ is different), but for now realise this: the people like me who like copyleft can do this too. We can take software we like, point an agent at it, and tell it to make a new version with the AGPL3.0-or-later badge on the front.
  • anonymous_sorry 7mo ago
    But the LLM contributions would likely be ruled public domain, so AGPL may not be enforceable on these.
  • armchairhacker 7mo ago
    The point of GPL is to restrict distribution. If there’s already an MIT version, it’s useless.
    • grahamlee 7mo ago
      but the point of an EULA is to restrict distribution, so AGPL3 can help there.
    • enriquto 7mo ago
      > The point of GPL is to restrict distribution. no, it isn't. The point of the GPL is to grant users of the software four basic freedoms (run, study, modify and redistribute). There's no restriction to distribution per se, other than disallowing the removal of these freedoms to other users.
• largbae 7mo ago
  This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures: 1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all. 2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.
  • anonymous_sorry 7mo ago
    There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".
    • dathinab 7mo ago
      it's more complicated, the ruling was that AI can't be an author and the thing in question is (de-facto) public domain because it has no author in context of the "dev" claim it was fully build by AI but AI assisted code has an author and claiming it's AI assisted even if it is fully AI build is trivial (if you don't make it public that you didn't do anything) also some countries have laws which treat it like a tool in the sense that the one who used it is the author by default AFIK
    • aoeusnth1 7mo ago
      You could reimplement it as public domain on your machine, and then edit it by hand and copyleft your own edits.
  • sarchertech 7mo ago
    There’s an other option. The cost of copying existing software trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.
• t43562 7mo ago
  Why does anyone need his new library? They can do what he did and make their own. I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.
  • warkdarrior 7mo ago
    Why would I make my own? The new library is released under MIT license and faster than the old one.
    • t43562 7mo ago
      If you decide to improve it in any way to fit your needs you can merely tell your own AI to re-implement it with your changes. Then it's proprietary to you.
  • wvenable 7mo ago
    Consider it an LLM cache. The result has already been cached so you don't have to generate it again.
• righthand 7mo ago
  I think what is happening is the collapse of the “greater good”. Open source is dependent upon providing information for the greater good and general benefit of its readers. However now that no one is reading anything, its purpose is for the great good of the most clever or most convincing or richest harvester.
• szundi 7mo ago
  [dead]
• sayrer 7mo ago
  I don't think this part is correct: "If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms." That's what something like AGPL does.
• kazinator 7mo ago
  You can't put a copyright and MIT license on something you generated with AI. It is derived from the work of many unknown, uncredited authors. Think about it; the license says that copies of the work must be reproduced with the copyright notice and licensing clauses intact. Why would anyone obey that, knowing it came from AI? Countless instances of such licenses were ignored in the training data.
  • moralestapia 7mo ago
    Courts have already ruled that AI-generated work belongs to the public domain. So, even the MIT license does not apply.
  • harshreality 7mo ago
    When learning is sufficiently atomized and recombined, creations cease to be "derived from" in a legal sense. A lego sculpture is copyrighted. Lego blocks are not. The threshold between blocks and sculpture is not well-defined, but if an AI isn't prompted specifically to attempt to mimic an existing work, its output will be safely on the non-copyrighted side of things. A derivative work is separately copyrightable, but redistribution needs permission from the original author too. Since that usually won't be granted or would be uneconomical, the derivative work can't usually be redistributed. AI-produced material is inherently not copyrightable, but not because it's a derivative work.
    • kazinator 7mo ago
      Token prediction is a form of "learning" that is reinforced by the goal of reproducing the correct next token of the work, rather that acquiring ideas and concepts. For instance, given the prefix "Four score and seven years", the weights are adjusted until "ago" is correctly predicted, which is a fancy way of saying that it was stored in the model in a lossy way. The model "learned" that "ago" follows "four score and seven years" exactly the way your hard drive "learns" the audio and video frames of a movie when you download a .mp4 file. I dispute the idea that token sequences reproduced from the model are not derived works. I predict, no pun intended, that a time is coming when the idea that it's not a derived work will be challenged in mainstream law. The slop merchants are getting a free ride for the time being.
• skybrian 7mo ago
  Broadly speaking, the “freedom of users” is often protected by competition from competing alternatives. The GNU command line tools were replacements for system utilities. Linux was was a replacement for other Unix kernels. People chose to install them instead of proprietary alternatives. Was it due to ideology or lower cost or more features? All of the above. Different users have different motivations. Copyleft could be seen as an attempt to give Free Software an edge in this competition for users, to counter the increased resources that proprietary systems can often draw on. I think success has been mixed. Sure, Linux won on the server. Open source won for libraries downloaded by language-specific package managers. But there’s a long tail of GPL apps that are not really all that appealing, compared to all the proprietary apps available from app stores. But if reimplementing software is easy, there’s just going to be a lot more competition from both proprietary and open source software. Software that you can download for free that has better features and is more user-friendly is going to have an advantage. With coding agents, it’s likely that you’ll be able to modify apps to your own needs more easily, too. Perhaps plugin systems and an AI that can write plugins for you will become the norm?
  • jacquesm 7mo ago
    > Was it due to ideology or lower cost or more features? It was due to access.
• casey2 7mo ago
  If the model wasn't trained on copyleft, if he didn't use a copyleft test suite and if he wasn't the maintainer for years. Clearly the intent here is copyright infringement. If you have software your testsuite should be your testsuite, you do dev with a testsuite and then mit without releasing one. Depending on the test-suite it may break clean room rules, especially for ttd codebases.
• strongpigeon 7mo ago
  I feel like the licenses that suffer the most isn't the GPL, but the ones like SSPL. If your code can be re-implemented easily and legally by AWS using an LLM, why risk publishing it? It does feel like open source is about to change. My hunch is that commercial open source (beyond the consultation model) risks disappearing. Though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
• kccqzy 7mo ago
  > When GNU reimplemented the UNIX userspace, the vector ran from proprietary to free. Stallman was using the limits of copyright law to turn proprietary software into free software. […] The vector in the chardet case runs the other way. That’s just your subjective opinion which many other people would disagree. I bet Armin Ronacher would agree that an MIT licensed library is even freer than an LGPL licensed library. To them, the vector is running from free to freer.
• bjt 7mo ago
  > If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Blanchard's own claim—that he worked only from the test suite and API without reading the source—is, paradoxically, an argument for protecting that test suite and API specification under copyleft terms. This is an interesting reversal in itself. If you make the specification protected under copyright, then the whole practice of clean room implementations is invalid.
• dleslie 7mo ago
  IMHO, the API and Test Suite, particularly the latter, define the contract of the functional definition of the software. It almost doesn't matter what that definition looks like so long as it conforms to the contract. There was an issue where Google did something similar with the JVM, and ultimately it came down to whether or not Oracle owned the copyright to the header files containing the API. It went all the way to the US supreme court, and they ruled in Google's favour; finding that the API wasn't the implementation, and that the amount of shared code was so minimal as to be irrelevant. They didn't anticipate that in less than half a decade we'd have technology that could _rapidly_ reimplement software given a strong functional definition and contract enforcing test suite.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• mwkaufma 7mo ago
  A lot of untagged IANAL takes here today.
• ineedasername 7mo ago
  This article is setting up a bit of a moving target. Legal vs legitimate is at least only a single vague question to be defined but then the target changes to “socially legitimate” defined only indirectly by way of example, like aggressive tax avoidance as “antisocial”— and while I tend to agree with that characterization my agreement is predicated on a layering of other principals. The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be coherent and consistent. You can’t just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things you don’t like and feel “off” to you in some way- not if you’re trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less others. You don’t have to land on a conclusion either. By all means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall apart if you haven’t done the harder work of replacing the framework of law with that of another conceptual structure. You need to at least be asking “to what ends? What purpose is served by the rule?” Otherwise you’re stuck in things where half the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and edge cases reached. If you’re asking, essentially, “is the spirit of the rule still there?” You’ve got to stop and fill in what that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void to their own ends.
• kelseyfrog 7mo ago
  In the corporate world, we've started using reimplementation as a way to access tooling that security won't authorize. Sec has a deny by default policy. Eng has a use-more-AI policy. Any code written in-house is accepted by default. You can see where this is going. We've been using AI to reimplement tooling that security won't approve. The incentives conspired in the worst outcome, yet here we are. If you want a different outcome, you need to create different incentives.
  • kemitchell 7mo ago
    Not Invented Here's long, slow mutagenic march toward full antibiotic resistance continues apace. There is a fundamental corpo-cognitive dissonance, to boot. If "AI" is cheap enough and good enough to implement security-relevant software from `git init` repeatedly, why isn't it also cheap enough and good enough to assess and approve the security of third-party software at pace with internal adoption? Is there some basis to believe LLMs' leverage on production differs from its leverage on analysis of existing code?
• ticulatedspline 7mo ago
  Surprised they don't mention Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. Seems a bit myopic to condone the general legality while arguing "you can only use it how I like it". It also doesn't talk about the far more interesting philosophical queston. Does what Blanchard did cover ALL implementations from Claude? What if anyone did exactly what he did, feed it the test cases and say "re-implement from scratch", ostensibly one would expect the results to be largely similar (technically under the right conditions deterministically similar) could you then fork the project under your own name and a commercial license? when you use an LLM like this, to basically do what anyone else could ask it to do how do you attach any license to it? Is it first come first serve? If an agent is acting mostly on its own it feels like if you found a copy of Harry Potter in the fictional library of Babel, you didn't write it, just found it amongst the infinite library, but if you found it first could you block everyone else that stumbles on a near-identical copy elsewhere in the library? or does each found copy represent a "Re-implementation" that could be individually copyrighted?
• danbruc 7mo ago
  Why are people even having problems with sharing their changes to begin with? Just publishing it somewhere does not seem too expensive. The risk of accidentally including stuff that is not supposed to become public? Or are people regularly completely changing codebases and do not want to make the effort freely available, maybe especially to competitors? I would have assumed that the common case is adding a missing feature here, tweaking something there, if you turn the entire thing on its head, why not have your own alternative solution from scratch?
• PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
  If Blanchard is claiming not to have been substantively involved in the creation of the new implementation of chardet (i.e. "Claude did it"), then the new implementation is machine generated, and in the USA cannot be copyright and thus cannot be licensed. If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.
  • sigmar 7mo ago
    >then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original. The "clean room rewrite" is just an extreme way to have a bulletproof shield against litigation. Not doing it that way doesn't automatically make all new code he writes derivative solely because he saw how the code worked previously.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
      If the clean room re-write was done entirely by Claude, then the result cannot be copyright in the USA, and thus there is no license at all. And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet without the result being derivative.
      • serial_dev 7mo ago
        So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think about working on something similar in my life?
        • vbarrielle 7mo ago
          There's a difference between "I've read a LGPL code once, maybe I could do something similar" and "I've been reading this LGPL code for 12 years and now I'm going to do exactly the same thing".
• hexyl_C_gut 7mo ago
  I'm less concerned about AI eroding copyleft and more exited about AI eroding copy right.
• AndriyKunitsyn 7mo ago
  There's a Japanese version of that page, written in classical text writing direction, in columns. Which is cool. Makes me wonder, though - how readable is it with so many English loanwords which should be rotated sideways to fit into columns?
  • ddellacosta 7mo ago
    Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic conversion added by someone not really familiar with common practices for presenting Japanese on the web.
    • tmp10423288442 7mo ago
      He also has a Korean vertical layout that lays out Latin-character words the same way. Is this common in Korea when vertical layout is used? The author seems to be Korean. Looks like Wikipedia has an example of Traditional Chinese vertical layout with the Latin letters rotated as in TFA's layout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts#/media/File:Hebei_Wen'an_jin_fasheng_dizhen_-_Beijing_you_zhengan.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writin...)
• Khaine 7mo ago
  Someone be brave, and do this to ZFS. Poke the Oracle bear!
  • krater23 7mo ago
    Please don't. I don't trust AI code when we talk about my filesystem and data.
    • Khaine 7mo ago
      I meant it as a joke, given that oracle is famously litigious. It would solve the legal questions
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• mh2266 7mo ago
  Buried in here: Mark Pilgrim suddenly reappearing after his sudden disappearance years ago! Has he been up to anything since then?
• moralestapia 7mo ago
  That's a non-sequitur. chardet v7 is GPL-derived work (currently in clear violation of the GPL). If xe wanted it to be a different thing xe should've published as such. Simple as.
• svilen_dobrev 7mo ago
  i've been following this for a while.. and the trend for copyright (of any form - books code pictures music whatever) being laundered by reinventing the "same" thing in-some-way.. is kind-of clear. But what happens with the new things? Has the era of software-making (or creating things at large) finished, and from now on everything will be re-(gurgitated|implemented|polished) old stuff? Or all goes back to proprietary everything.. Babylon-tower style, noone talks to noone? edit: another view - is open-source from now on only for resume-building? "see-what-i've-built" style
• t43562 7mo ago
  It seems that this chap didn't go and implement a new library, he reimplemented an existing one and became sole-controller of it. i.e. he seems to have taken its reputation, brand whatever you call it away from the contributors and entirely to himself. Their work of establishing it as a well known solution is no longer recognised. So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if it's not easy to put one's finger on it.
• zmmmmm 7mo ago
  The really interesting question to me is if this transcends copyright and unravels the whole concept of intellectual property. Because all of it is premised on an assumption that creativity is "hard". But LLMs are not just writing software, they are rapidly being engineered to operate completely generally as knowledge creation engines: solving math proofs, designing drugs, etc. So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.
  • palmotea 7mo ago
    > So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints. I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP protections (at least not without substantial later human modification). IP protections are solely reserved for human work. And I'm fine with that: if a person put in the work, they should have protections so their stuff can't be ripped off for free by all the wealthy major corporations that find some use for it. Otherwise: who cares about the LLMs.
    • robmccoll 7mo ago
      I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.
      • palmotea 7mo ago
        > In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time. Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is also literally the only thing that protects the little guy's work in many cases. Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to me, almost like they're the remnants of some propaganda campaign. It's constructed to appeal to the defense of the little guy, but the actual effect would be to disempower him and further empower the wealthy major corporations with "big enough warchest[s]." I mean, one thing I think the RIAA would love is to stop paying royalties to every artist ever. And the only thing they'd be worried about is an even bigger fish (like Amazon, Apple, or Spotify) no longer paying royalties to them. But as you said, they have a big enough war chest that they probably could force a deal somehow. All the artists without a war chest? Left out in the cold.
• mbgerring 7mo ago
  See also "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence), and what a goofy, naive, misguided disaster that early internet optimism turned into. No, AI does not mean the end of either copyright or copyleft, it means that the laws need to catch up. And they should, and they will.
• munk-a 7mo ago
  I think the missing thing here is that the license violation already happened. Most of the big models trained on data in a manner that violated terms of service. We'll need a court case but I think it's extremely reasonable to consider any model trained on GPL code to be infected with open licensing requirements.
  • NewsaHackO 7mo ago
    I agree there has to be a court case about it. I think the current argument, however, is that it is transformative, and therefore falls under fair use.
    • munk-a 7mo ago
      Yea, a finding that training is transformative would be pretty significant and it's likely that the precedent of thumbnail creation being deemed transformative would likely steer us towards such a finding. Transformative is always a hard thing to bank on because it is such a nebulous and judgement based call. There are excellent examples of how precise and gritty this can get in audio sampling.
      • NewsaHackO 7mo ago
        Didn't know about thumbnails being fair use. In that case, I just don't see an argument that genAI training on source code is less transformative than thumbnails.
    • jazzyjackson 7mo ago
      You don’t get to simply claim fair use based on how transformative your derivative work is. “”” Section 107 calls for consideration of the following four factors in evaluating a question of fair use: Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts look at how the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. This does not mean, however, that all nonprofit education and noncommercial uses are fair and all commercial uses are not fair; instead, courts will balance the purpose and character of the use against the other factors below. Additionally, “transformative” uses are more likely to be considered fair. Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work. Nature of the copyrighted work: This factor analyzes the degree to which the work that was used relates to copyright’s purpose of encouraging creative expression. Thus, using a more creative or imaginative work (such as a novel, movie, or song) is less likely to support a claim of a fair use than using a factual work (such as a technical article or news item). In addition, use of an unpublished work is less likely to be considered fair. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole: Under this factor, courts look at both the quantity and quality of the copyrighted material that was used. If the use includes a large portion of the copyrighted work, fair use is less likely to be found; if the use employs only a small amount of copyrighted material, fair use is more likely. That said, some courts have found use of an entire work to be fair under certain circumstances. And in other contexts, using even a small amount of a copyrighted work was determined not to be fair because the selection was an important part—or the “heart”—of the work. Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: Here, courts review whether, and to what extent, the unlicensed use harms the existing or future market for the copyright owner’s original work. In assessing this factor, courts consider whether the use is hurting the current market for the original work (for example, by displacing sales of the original) and/or whether the use could cause substantial harm if it were to become widespread. “”” https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
• arjie 7mo ago
  Well, the license change sounds pretty strange, but to be honest if I were to use this software I would use it without adhering to the MIT. It's machine-created content which is not, in general, copyrightable. You can assert whatever license you want on such content, but I am not going to adhere to it. For example, I declare you may use the following under the Elastic License The
  • wvenable 7mo ago
    I wonder how one proves that the software is machine created.
• iberator 7mo ago
  Easy solution for now: Add something like this to NEW gpl /bsd/mit licenses: 'you are forbidden from reimplementing it with AI' or just: 'all clones, reimpletetions with ai etc must still be GPL'
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• foresto 7mo ago
  From the article: > He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. From GPL2: > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. Is a project's test suite not considered part of its source code? When I make modifications to a project, its test cases are very much a part of that process. If the test suite is part of this library's source code, and Claude was fed the test suite or interface definition files, is the output not considered a work based on the library under the terms of LGPL 2.1?
  • tty456 7mo ago
    Google v. Oracle ruled that use of APIs are fair game and could be argued that test cases are strictly a use of APIs and not implementation.
    • vbarrielle 7mo ago
      Google vs Oracle ruled that APIs fall under copyright (the contrary was thought before). However, it was ruled that, in that specific case, fair use applied, because of interoperability concerns. That's the important part of this case: fair use is never automatic, it is assessed case by case. Regarding chardet, I'm not sure "I wanted to circumvent the license" is a good way to argue fair use.
  • crazygringo 7mo ago
    It's transformative, so no. Legally, using the tests to help create the reimplementation is fine. However, it seems possible you can't redistribute the same tests under the MIT license. So the reimplementation MIT distribution could need to be source code only, not source code plus tests. Or, the tests can be distributed in parallel but still under LGPL, not MIT. It doesn't really matter since compiled software won't be including the tests anyways.
    • 7mo ago
• animitronix 7mo ago
  LPGL is dead, long live the AI rewrites of your barely open source code
• kanemcgrath 7mo ago
  without discussing copyright, I don't believe any of this is copied. Which I think should be the argument that actually matters. I downloaded both 6.0 and 7.0 and based on only a light comparison of a few key files, nothing would suggest to me that 7.0 was copied from 6.0, especially for a 41x faster implementation. It is a lot more organized and readable in my armature opinion, and the code is about 1/10th the size.
• Gigachad 7mo ago
  Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.
  • Aboutplants 7mo ago
    I’ve often thought that the key to fighting this is through this exact method. Turn the tool against them
  • robmccoll 7mo ago
    As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.
    • Gigachad 7mo ago
      AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.
      • reverius42 7mo ago
        For copyright purposes I think there is an important legal distinction between training data (fed in once, ahead of time, and can in theory no longer be recovered as-is) and context window data (stored exactly for the duration of the model call). I'm not sure there should be, but I think there is.
      • NewsaHackO 7mo ago
        That's why he is saying it's not equivalent. For it to be the same, the LLM would have to train on/transform Minecraft's source code into its weights, then you prompt the LLM to make a game using the specifications of Minecraft solely through prompts. Of course it's copyright infringement if you just give a tool Minecraft's source code and tell it to copy it, just like it would be copyright infringement if you used a copier to copy Minecraft's source code into a new document and say you recreated Minecraft.
• miggol 7mo ago
  Wow, it feels like this argument rewired my brain. When I first read about the chardet situation, I was conflicted but largely sided on the legal permissibility side of things. Uncomfortably I couldn't really fault the vibers; I guess I'm just liberal at heart. The argument from the commons has really invoked my belief in the inherent morality of a public good. Something being "impermissible" sounds bad until you realize that otherwise the arrow of public knowledge suddenly points backwards. Seeing this example play out in real life has had retroactive effects on my previously BSD-aligned brain. Even though the argument itself may have been presented before, I now understand the morals that a GPL license text underpins better.
  • crdrost 7mo ago
    FWIW I like to explain it to folks like this: ignore all of your moral baggage around licensing and just focus on the fact that licensing is a legal tool of art that pretty much only becomes relevant in the context of threatening lawsuits. BSD-type stuff is very simple because it says "here is this stuff. you can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I promise not to sue you too." Very simple. GPL-type stuff is intrinsically more complex because it's trying to use the threatening power of lawsuits, to reduce overall IP lawsuits. So it has to say "Here is this stuff. You can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I am only going to sue you, if you start pretending like you have the right to sue other folks over this stuff or anything you derive from it. You don't have the right to sue others for it, I made it, so please stop pretending and let's stop suing each other over this sort of thing." Getting the entire legal nuance around that sort of counterfactual "I will only sue you if you try to pretend that you can sue others" is why they're more complex. And the simplest copyleft licenses like the Mozilla Public License have a very rigid notion of what "the software" is, so like for MPL it's "this file is gonna never be used in a lawsuit, you can edit it ONLY as long as you agree that this file must never be used by you to sue someone else, if you try to mutate it in a way that lets you sue someone else then that's against our agreement and we reserve the right to sue you." Whereas for GPL it's actually kind of nebulous what "the software" is -- everything that feeds into the eventual compiled binary, basically -- and so the license itself needs to be a little bit airy-fairy, "let's first talk about what conveying the software means...", in various ways. The interesting thing here is that as far as the courts are initially ruling, these from-scratch reimplementations are not human works and therefore are not copyrightable, which makes them all kind of public domain. Slapping the MIT license on it was an overstep. If that's how things go then Free Software has actually won its greatest sweep with LLM ubiquity.
• lukev 7mo ago
  I agree with the thrust of this article, that norms and what we perceive as good or desirable extend considerably beyond the minimum established by law. But a point that was not made strongly, which highlights this even more, is that this goes in every direction. If this kind of reimplementation is legal, then I can take any permissive OSS and rebuild it as proprietary. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as permissive. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as my own proprietary software. Either the law needs to catch up and prevent this kind of behavior, or we're going to enter an effectively post-copyright world with respect to software. Which ISN'T GOOD, because that will disincentivize any sort of open license at all, and companies will start protecting/obfuscating their APIs like trade secrets.
  • integralid 7mo ago
    It goes in one direction only. Companies can take open-source software and make a proprietary reimplementation. You can't take a proprietary software and make an open source GPL version. I am absolutely certain that if you tried you would be sued to oblivion. But big company screwing up open source is not even news anymore. In fact I (still) believe that the fact that even though LLMs were trained on tons of GPL and AGPL or even unlicensed software it's considered ok to use LLM code in proprietary projects is example of just that.
    • lukev 7mo ago
      From a strictly legal perspective the two are equivalent. The fact that there are structural injustices in the system is true, but that's not a question that any answer to "what should be legal" can fix.
  • martin-t 7mo ago
    I've been thinking this for over two years, that's why I stopped contributing to open source at that time - my work was only gonna be exploited to make rich people richer regardless of the license. Crazy that only now we're seeing a bunch of articles coming to the same conclusion now. I think copyright should still apply, but if it doesn't, we need new laws - ones which protect all human work, creative or not. Laws should serve and protect people, not algorithms and not corporations "owning" those algorithms. I put owning in quotes because ownership should go to the people who did the work. Buying/selling ownership of both companies and people's work should be illegal just like buying/selling whole humans is. Even if it took thousands of years to get here. Money should not buy certain things because this is the root cause of inequality. Rich people are not getting richer at a faster rate by being more productive than everyone else but by "owning" other people's work and using it as leverage to extract even more from others. Maybe LLM and mass unemployment of white collar workers will be the wakeup call needed for a reform. Or revolution. Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution and that's how communism got popular. We should do better this time because this is the last revolution which might be possible.
• winstonwinston 7mo ago
  > Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. That’s a weird statement while releasing the new version of the same project. Maybe just release it as a new project, chardet-ai v1.0 or whatever.
• martin-t 7mo ago
  1) Legality and morality are obviously different and unrelated concepts. More people should understand that. 2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of work. The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make them. Figuring out and understanding the problem you're trying to solve, whether it's a complex mathematical problem or a customer's need. And then evaluating solutions until you find the right one. (One constrains being how much time you can spend on it.) All that work is incredibly valuable but once the solution exists, it's each easier to copy without replicating or even understanding the thought process which led to it. But that thought process took time and effort. The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation. And he deserves it transitively, if his work is used to build other works - proportional to his contribution. The hard part is quantifying it, of course. But a lot of people these days benefit from throwing their hands up and saying we can't quantify it exactly so let's make it finders keepers. That's exploitation. 3) Both LLM training and inference are derivative works by any reasonable meaning of those words. If LLMs are not derivative works of the training data then why is so much training data needed? Why don't they just build AI from scratch? Because they can't. They just claim they found a legal loophole to exploit other people's work without consent. I am still hoping the legal people take time to understand how LLMs work, how other algorithms, such as synonym replacement or c2rust work, decide that calling it "AI" doesn't magically remove copyright and the huge AI companies will be forced to destroy their existing models and train new ones which respect the licenses.
  • wvenable 7mo ago
    > If LLMs are not derivative works of the training data then why is so much training data needed? If you went to school for 12-16 years, that's a lot of training. Does that mean anything you produce is a derivative work?
    • martin-t 7mo ago
      I see this argument sometimes and it's annoying because: 1) People phrase it as a question even when they've already made up their mind (whether that's your case or not). 2) It implicitly assumes that humans and algorithms are the same. They are not - humans have rights and free will, algorithms don't. Humans cannot be bought or sold, etc. To your question: a) If you're asking whether teachers should get compensated according to how good a job they do, I think so. They are very often undervalued, especially the good ones - but of course that means the job attracts people who do it because they enjoy it (and are therefore more likely to be good at it) rather than those who chose jobs according to money and then do the bare minimum. b) There's a critical difference - consent. Teachers consented to their knowledge being used by those they taught. I did not consent to my code being used for training LLMs. In fact I purposefully chose a licence (AGPL) which in any common sence interpretation prohibits this used unless the resulting model is licensed under the same license - you can use my work only if you give back. Maybe there's a hole in the law - then it should be closed. I am now gonna pose a question to you in turn. Do you think people should be compensated for the full transitive value of their work?
• palata 7mo ago
  > an argument for protecting that test suite and API specification under copyleft terms. If we protect API under copyright, it makes it easier to prevent interoperability. We obviously do NOT want that. It would give big companies even more power. Now in the US, the Supreme Court that the output of an LLM is not copyrightable. So even a permissive licence doesn't work for that reimplementation: it should be public domain. Disclaimer: I am all for copyleft for the code I write, but already without LLMs, one could rewrite a similar project and use the licence they please. LLMs make them faster at that, it's just a fact. Now I wonder: say I vibe-code a library (so it's public domain in the US), I don't publish that code but I sell it to a customer. Can I prevent them from reselling it? I guess not, since it's public domain? And as an employee writing code for a company. If I produce public domain code because it is written by an LLM, can I publish it, or can the company prevent me from doing it?
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• josalhor 7mo ago
  I think the direction we are going, the GPL is going to fade away. I think people will look at this like writing a book and claiming the ideas in the book cannot be copied. This debate is not that different from the ones going on in the music industry. I open sourced my latest software as Apache 2.0 after debating a lot about this. Unless the FSF wins in court in the next <=2-3 years, there is no coming back from this.
• makerofthings 7mo ago
  If an AI can license-wash open source software like this then the licenses become meaningless. Which is fascinating. Commercial software cloning that is simple enough for an average person to drive is next and the ultimate form of piracy, see an app for $10? Don’t fancy paying? Just ask ChatGPT for a clone. Future is going to be wild.
  • paxys 7mo ago
    You've just described why every SaaS stock has taken a beating in the last 6 months.
    • makerofthings 7mo ago
      How long until this thing is good enough to clone photoshop? Or Skyrim? I think all bets are off for the software world.
      • pphysch 7mo ago
        Automatic QA/testing becomes the main challenge, so probably a ways off. How do you "specify" Skyrim?
        • makerofthings 7mo ago
          There are lots of playthroughs on YouTube, I would expect at some point you can ask it to watch them and the “generate a game like that”.
  • j-bos 7mo ago
    > ultimate form of piracy Nothing was stolen, not even copied, lamest piracy I've heard of.
    • makerofthings 7mo ago
      I take your point, but if the re-implementation looks the same, I would say it’s a form of copying. (Which I don’t think is a problem, I don’t think you should be able to own sequences of numbers.)
• jrochkind1 7mo ago
  > If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control. The implications will not end up being anti-large-corporation or pro-sharing. If you can prevent someone from re-implementing a spec or building a client that speaks your API or building a work-a-like, it will be the large corporations that exersize this power as usual.
  • alterom 7mo ago
    >Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it Our "foreparents" weren't competing with corporations with unlimited access to generative AI trained on their work. The times, they're-a-changin'. You're rehashing the argument made in one of the articles which this piece criticizes and directly addresses, while ignoring the entirety of what was written before the conclusion that you quoted. If anyone finds themselves agreeing with the comment I'm responding to, please, do yourself a favor and read the linked article. I would do no justice to it by reiterating its points here.
    • salawat 7mo ago
      I mean. Yeah. GPL's genius was that it used Copyright, which proprietary enterprise wouldn't dare dismantle, to secure for the public a permanent public good. Pretty sure no one, (but me anyway) saw overt theft of IP by ignoring IP law through redefinition coming. Admittedly I couldn't articulate for you capital would skill transfer and commoditize it in the form of pay to play data centers, but give me a break, I was a teenager/twenty something at the time.
    • hathawsh 7mo ago
      I believe the GP post is saying that if we react to the new AI-enabled environment by arbitrarily strengthening IP controls for IP owners, the greatest benefactors will almost certainly be lawyer-laden corporations, not communities, artists, or open source projects. That seems like a reasonable argument. It seems like the answer is to adjust IP owner rights very carefully, if that's possible. It sounds very hard, though.
• randyrand 7mo ago
  It doesn't matter if it's legitimate. The people that use it don't care. They just find it online and click download. This is the reality.
• stagger87 7mo ago
  I'm probably spitting in the wind, but stuff like this is why I removed all my hosted open source projects. I manage several niche projects that I have now converted to binary only releases (to almost no push back). It's niche enough that it's not very hard to get LLMs to output chunks of code that it managed to scrape before I took it offline. I don't see many people talking about this angle, but LLMs ripping off my work killed my open source efforts.
  • alterom 7mo ago
    >I don't see many people talking about this angle, but LLMs ripping off my work killed my open source efforts. This is exactly what the article is talking about.
• panny 7mo ago
  Both sides are wrong on this actually. Computer generated code has no copyright protection. >The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and federal courts have consistently ruled that AI-generated works—where the expressive elements are determined by the machine, even in response to a human prompt—lack the necessary human creative input and therefore cannot be copyrighted. All this code is public domain. Your employees can publish "your" AI generated code freely and it won't matter how many tokens you spent generating it. It is not covered by copyright.
• api 7mo ago
  It also erodes copyright. A decent amount of commercial software can be AI cloned with no copyright violation. A lot of SaaS too, especially if AI can run a simple deploy. We might be approaching a huge deflationary catastrophe in the cost of a lot of software. It’s not a catastrophe for the consumer but it is for the industry.
• hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  I largely agree with the author that AI can't just magically remove license agreements by rewriting code. However, I take issue with his version of history: >The history of the GPL is the history of licensing tools evolving in response to new forms of exploitation: GPLv2 to GPLv3, then AGPL. GPLv3 set open source backwards: it wasn't an evolution to protect anything, it was a an overly paranoid failure. Don't believe me? Just count how many GPL3 vs. how many GPL2 projects have been started since GPL3 dropped. Again, I'm very pro-OSS, but let's not pretend the community has always had a straight line of progress forward; some stuff is crazy Stallman stuff that set us back.
• aplomb1026 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• ajross 7mo ago
  This take, which I've seen in a few different places now, seems 100% bonkers. A world where anyone can cheaply reimplement anyone else's software and use it on hardware of their own choosing in their own designs and for their own purposes is a free software utopia. This isn't a problem, this is the goal. GNU was born when RMS couldn't use a printer the way he wanted because of an unmodifiable proprietary driver. That kind of thing just won't happen in the vibe coded future.
  • duskdozer 7mo ago
    It's not going to be like that for proprietary software. All this future ends with is "totally free" software that companies will leech off of in their "totally locked down" software. I guarantee you that people wouldn't have had this reaction if someone had instead replicated Windows from leaked source. Well, other than Microsoft owners/employees.
• ball_of_lint 7mo ago
  Would software be more or less free in a world without copyright? I argue more free. EULAs and restrictions on how+for what software can be used, like DRM, typically use copyright as their legal backing. GPL licenses turn that on it's head but that doesn't redeem the original, flawed, law. This seems to follow the letter but not the spirit of the license. If this does pass legal muster, we can do the same to whatever proprietary software we wish, which makes a dramatically different but IMO better ecosystem in the end.
  • duskdozer 7mo ago
    It will be disproportionately hard to do it to proprietary software though. The imbalance of power is sort of what the GPL was there for
• humannutsack 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jongjong 7mo ago
  There is a definite issue in terms of legitimacy and I also think there are some issues in the wording of certain open source licenses like MIT which give rights to 'Any person obtaining a copy of this software'. Firstly, an AI agent is not a person. Secondly, the MIT license doesn't offer any rights to the code itself; it says a 'copy of the software' - That's what people are given the right to. It says nothing about the code and in terms of the software, it still requires attribution. Attribution of use and distribution of the software (or parts) is required regardless of the copyright aspect. AI agents are redistributing the software, not the code. The MIT license makes a clear distinction between code and software. It doesn't cede any rights to the code. And then, in the spirit of copyright; it was designed to protect the financial interests of the authors. The 'fair use' carve-out was meant for cases which do not have an adverse market impact on the author which it clearly does; at least in the cases highlighted in this article.
• effank 7mo ago
  My view is that the current discourse surrounding AI reimplementation is trapped in an antiquated, atomistic model of authorship. What is fundamentally lacking in this debate is a systemic framework for trust, transparency, and the effective traceability of value creation. Our legal and ethical frameworks including both copyleft and permissive licenses operate under the illusion of discrete, bounded attribution. They assume we can draw a clean perimeter around 'the code' and its 'author.' In reality, software production is a highly complex socio-technical network characterized by deep epistemic opacity. We are arguing over who holds the title to the final output while completely ignoring the vast, distributed network of inputs that made it possible. Furthermore, because end-users face massive transaction costs and a general lack of incentive to evaluate the granular utility of their consumption, we have no reliable market mechanism to signal value back up the supply chain. Consequently, we fail to effectively compensate the true chain of biological and artificial contributors that facilitate downstream consumption. In a rigorously mapped value-system, attribution would not stop at the keyboard; it would extend to all nodes of enablement. This includes what sociologists and economists term 'reproductive labor' or 'invisible labor' such as the developer’s partner who cooked them breakfast, thereby sustaining the biological and cognitive infrastructure necessary for the developer to contribute to the repository in the first place. The AI model is merely another node of aggregated external labor in this exact same web - both by its upward 'training' and downward utilization. Until we develop an economic and technological ontology capable of tracing and rewarding this entire ecosystem of adjacent contributions, our debates over LGPL versus MIT will remain myopic. We are trying to govern a distributed, interconnected web of collective labor using property tools designed for solitary craftsmen.
• joshjob42 7mo ago
  "If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms. This is not a restriction on sharing. It is a condition placed on sharing: if you share, you must share in kind." -- This is, on any plain reading, a restriction on sharing. "You can share only under these conditions" is plainly more restrictive than "sure do whatever you want". You can argue that it's a restriction that ultimately leads to more sharing overall. But it is a restriction on sharing in any given case of sharing nevertheless.
  • zakki 7mo ago
    I guess because our freedom is not unlimited.
  • duskdozer 7mo ago
    It's just considering "sharing" or "freedom" out an extra step. "Total freedom" results in freedom for those who can protect it and no freedom for those who can't.
  • dataflow 7mo ago
    Yeah, he lost me there. It's like saying "if you share this you must give me a million dollars -- that's not a restriction, it's a condition!"
• 0x457 7mo ago
  > Antirez does not address this directional difference. He invokes the GNU precedent, but that precedent is a counterexample to his conclusion, not a supporting one. Morally - yes, technically - no. I think it's odd to be mad at someone doing the exact thing you praise in another case just because license isn't copyleft within license allowance. Make a better copyleft license?
• smsm42 7mo ago
  > Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. I don't see how it matters what he looked at. If I took a copyrighted code and run it through a script that replaces all variable names, and then claimed copyright on the result because it's an entirely new work and I did not look on the original work, I'd be ridiculed and sued, and would lose that lawsuit. AI is a more complex machine, but still a machine. If you feed somebody'd work into a machine, what comes out is a derivative work. Test suite is a part of copyrighted code, is it not? If he used just the API description, preferably from a copyright-clean source, then we could claim new work (regardless of how it was produced, by using Claude or trained pigeons or by consuming magic mushrooms). But once parts of the copyrighted code had been used, it becomes derivative work.
  • metalcrow 7mo ago
    > AI is a more complex machine, but still a machine. If you feed somebody'd work into a machine, what comes out is a derivative work. I'm not sure that's true, legally speaking. If you fed it into a PRNG, the output seems to me like it would not be an obviously derivative work (i doubt you could copyright it but that's a separate question). So we have 1 machine that can transform something into non-derivative work, and another that leaves the result derivative. The line isn't likely going to be drawn as "did a machine do it or not", but on a fuzzy human line of how close the output seems to be to the original (IANAL).
    • smsm42 7mo ago
      PRNG is not intended to use information sent into it in a substantive way (in other words, for PRNG does not matter if what you feed into is is Shakespeare's sonnets or white noise). Sure, if your machine is an electronic analogue of a shredder, then yes, the result is not a derivative work in any sensible meaning. But LLMs are not that kind of a machine.
      • metalcrow 7mo ago
        I agree! But that's exactly my point: 1 type of machine is ok, another isn't, so it is not just a matter of all machines make derivative work. To draw the line more carefully is an open question. I would be surprised if a machine that "uses information sent into it in a substantive way" is a perfect deliminator. OTTOMH musicians might present some compelling objections.
• justinclift 7mo ago
  > The dispute drew responses from two prominent figures in the open source world. Sure, but neither of those is an IP Lawyer. The actual IP Lawyer who turned up and tried to engage, Richard Fontana, had his issue closed: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334 Richard's point was this (quoted below): --- FWIW, that case is not really relevant to what we are/were talking about here. The question is whether you are truly an "author", or whether there was no (human) author. The general legal consensus has been that generative AI output is not copyrightable (without some special facts of some sort, perhaps). > If all of this code was somehow not copyrightable because someone wrote a prompt instead of directly editing the code, that would have pretty huge implications. That's exactly it. Your act of applying the MIT license with your copyright notice to code that you did not "directly edit" has enormous implications.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 7mo ago
    I don't think Fontana's reasoning holds up. I think it is more like photography. The case law is that a camera can't own a copyright, but a human can, even though all the pixels were produced by the camera with very little involvement at the pixel level by the human.
    • waterTanuki 7mo ago
      A camera doesn't use unlicensed IP from other sources to produce an image. The makers of the camera explicitly gave you a right to own the photograph taken with the parts used to assemble the camera.
    • ryukoposting 7mo ago
      Actually yes, Fontana's reasoning does hold up, and the USSC seems to agree: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de... Prompting generally does not constitute authorship under US law.
      • 7mo ago
• Sleaker 7mo ago
  Isn't the whole thing sidestepping another issue? If the code was rewritten with an AI, then it becomes a non-copyrightable work? Hasn't this already gone through the courts? So isn't the resulting library de facto public domain, even if the maintainer wants to try and attach a license to it? Edit: looks like an IP lawyer had this exact issue on the GitHub and it was closed.
• internet2000 7mo ago
  I stopped reading here: > The ethical force of that project did not come from its legal permissibility—it came from the direction it was moving, from the fact that it was expanding the commons. That is why people cheered. How is this not just relitigating GPL vs MIT? By now you know which side of that argument you are in. The AI component is orthogonal.
• tzs 7mo ago
  The GPL's conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms. Offering as a networked service is not distribution. That was why they had to make AGPL to put conditions on use in networked services.
  • tzs 7mo ago
    Oops…the first paragraph is a quote from the article but I somehow forgot the “>”.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• keeda 7mo ago
  A large part of our industry is experiencing significant cognitive dissonance and articles like this are a symptom of that. AI is not really changing things, it's simply forcing us to question a lot of things we took for granted. One of those things is that we assumed that the code embodied most of the value it offered. That it was the code that contained the creativity and expressiveness and usefulness. And we thought only we could write code. And so we thought we only needed to protect the code to protect our efforts and investments. Which is also why we accepted copyright as an appropriate legal protection for software, or of enforcing an ethos of sharing, as with copyleft. But the code itself was never the valuable aspect; it was the functionality it provided. And now AI is making that starkly apparent, while undermining a lot of other presumptions. Including about copyright. Copyright protection for software is a historical hack because people didn’t want to figure out an appropriate legal framework from scratch. You “wrote” books, you "wrote" code, let’s shoehorn software into copyright and go get lunch! Completely overlooking the fact that copyright explicitly does not cover functional aspects (that is the realm of patents) which is the entire raison d'etre of code. Sure, copyright covers “expressive elements”, but again those are properties of the source code, not the functionality. In fact, expressiveness is BAD for code (cf “code should be boring”)! Copyright will protect whether you used a streams API or a for-loop for iteration, which is absolutely irrelevant to the technical functionality that actually solves user problems, which has always been the only thing users really cared about. In fact, if you look at significant copyright-related cases for software now (e.g. Oracle vs Google), you'll realize they have twisted themselves into knots trying to apply laws intended for expressive creativity to issues that were essentially about technical creativity. I have no hopes that we will figure out an appropriate IP framework for software, so I expect people will move towards other things like patents, trade secrets and trademarks. Which have their own problems, but at least they already exist and are more suitable than copyright, especially in the age of AI.
• daemin 7mo ago
  One main thing that this brings to mind is if an LLM can ever actually create a clean room implementation of a piece of open source software, given that there is a near certainty that the software was used in its training data. Therefore it has seen it and remembered it, and could if appropriately prompted recreate the code verbatim. This can also apply to people, either if they have seen the code previously and therefore are ineligible to write the code for a clean-room implementation, or it gets murky when the same person writes the same code twice from their own knoeldge, as in the Oracle Java case. Coming from a professional programming perspective I can totally see the desire to have more libraries written in permissive licences like BSD or MIT, as they allow one like myself to include them in commercial closed-source products without needing to open source the entire codebase. However I find myself agreeing with the article in so far as this LLM generated implementation is breaking the social contract for a GPL/LGPL based library. The author could have easily implemented the new version as a separate project and there would not have been an outcry, but because they are replacing the GPL version with this new one it feels scummy to say the least.
• derangedHorse 7mo ago
  > Blanchard's own claim—that he worked only from the test suite and API without reading the source—is, paradoxically, an argument for protecting that test suite and API specification under copyleft terms. Ridiculous. I don't want specifications for proprietary APIs to be protected, and I don't want the free ones to be either. The software community seemed pretty certain as a whole that this would be very bad for competition [1]. Morally, I don't think there's anything wrong with re-implementing a technology with the same API as another, or running a test suite from a GPL licensed codebase. The code wasn't stolen, it was capitalized on. Like a business using a GPL code editor to write a new one. > This is not a restriction on sharing. It is a condition placed on sharing Also this doesn't make any logical sense. A condition on sharing cannot exist without corresponding restrictions. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mklieg/supreme_court_in_a_62_ruling_in_google_v_oracle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mklieg/supreme_cou...
• ori_b 7mo ago
  If you can prove the LLM was not trained on the code it is reproducing, and has never seen the code as part of a spec to follow, I don't see a problem. Proving this is going to be hard with current "open source" models.
  • eschaton 7mo ago
    Indeed, you have to prove that the LLM is generating code from a specification. Right now they don’t do that; what they do is regurgitate portions of their training data based on correlations with input tokens. Put the programmer’s reference for the Digital Equipment DEQNA QBus Ethernet adapter in your favorite slop tool and tell it to make a C or C++ implementation for an emulator, and you know what you get? Code from SIMH. That’s not “generating,” that’s “copying.”
• colmmacc 7mo ago
  The four essential freedoms of the Free Software movement are ... 1. The freedom to run the program as you wish 2. The freedom to study how it works and modify it (which requires access to source code) 3. The freedom to redistribute copies to help others 4. The freedom to distribute modified versions, so the whole community benefits from your improvements To my mind ... GenAI coding make all of these far more realizable, especially for "normal people", than CopyLeft ever has. Let's go through them ... Want to run a program as you wish? Great! It's easier than ever to build a replacement. Proprietary or non-free software is just as vulnerable to reimplementation as Copyleft is. Want to study a how a program works and to modify it? This is now much more achievable. Want the freedom to redistribute copies to help others? Build your own version! It may not even be copyrightable if it's 100% generated (IANAL). Want to distribute modified versions? yes! see previous. I dunno; seems like generative coding can be as much a liberator as any kind of problem.
  • alterom 7mo ago
    Sorry, but this seems to be so off-base (as well as naively optimistic) that I am having difficulty responding to this. But I'll try nevertheless. - >Want to run a program as you wish? Great! It's easier than ever to build a replacement. Non-sequitur. Building a replacement does nothing for being able to run a program as you wish. Nobody else is able to run your program as they wish unless you release it with a Copyleft license. - >Want to study a how a program works and to modify it? This is now much more achievable. Reverse engineering is more achievable. Modifying a program, without having its source code, documentation, and a legal right to do so guaranteed by the license is (and always be) easier compared to not having those things. - >Want the freedom to redistribute copies to help others? Build your own version! It may not even be copyrightable if it's 100% generated (IANAL). So, that's not about redistributing copies. That's about building an alternative option. I can download an Ubuntu image and get Libre Office on it with a click. Go vibe-code me a Microsoft Excel running on Windows 11, please, and tell me it's easier. - >Want to distribute modified versions? yes! see previous. You're not even trying here. One can't legally modify and redistribute copyrighted works without explicit permission to do so. You keep saying "...but vibe coding allows anyone to create something else entirely instead and do whatever with it!" as if that is a substitute for checking out a repo, or simply downloading FOSS software to use as you wish. - >I dunno; seems like generative coding can be as much a liberator as any kind of problem. Now, that statement I fully agree with. Generative coding is a liberator as much as any kind of problem is. Headache, for example, is generally a problem. It's not a great liberator. Neither is generative coding. Now, you probably didn't intend to say what you wrote. And that's exactly why generative coding is not a panacea: the only way to say things that you mean to say is to write precisely what you mean to say. Vibe-coding (like any vibe-writing) simply can't accomplish that, by design.
• tw1984 7mo ago
  Claude must be trained on chardet already, it worked on chardet's code to optimize or rewrite it to be much better. This is the textbook definition of derivative works.
  • krater23 7mo ago
    There is fewer then 2% of code a copy of chardet. When the developer of chardet had done it without AI, whats then? He is trained on the same code too.
• antonio-mello 7mo ago
  The practical tension I see: I build open source tools and use AI heavily in the process (Claude as a coding assistant). Every commit has "Co-Authored-By: Claude" in it. The code is MIT-licensed and genuinely mine in terms of architecture and intent, but the line-by-line generation is clearly AI-assisted. This creates an odd situation where the "reimplementation via AI" concern cuts both ways. If someone feeds my MIT repo to an LLM and gets a copyleft-violating derivative, that's one problem. But if I use an LLM trained on copyleft code to write my MIT-licensed tool, am I the one laundering licenses without knowing it? I think the article's core point holds: legitimacy and legality are diverging fast. The open source community built norms around intent and reciprocity, and those norms are now being stress-tested by tools that can reimplement anything from a spec. No license text can fully encode "don't be a free rider."
• blurbleblurble 7mo ago
  If specifications become IP? Reboot the pirate parties. Authoritarianism is what it is. The exploitation isn't coming from the tools, it's coming from the economic structures and forces of exploitation being brought to their natural limits. We should learn from the luddites, the actual luddites. They weren't anti-technology, they were against the insane consolidation of power. This proposal might seem radical but all it would really do is reify intellectual property at exactly the wrong moment, a game over moment. Feed local LLMs. Feed peoples' movements around these technologies, so that people bring agency into how we use the tech, so that we don't get dominated by the laws that form around it.
• jillesvangurp 7mo ago
  There's a long history of people creating clean room implementations of other people's software based on specifications, reverse engineering, etc. A lot of that software is even distributed under GPL. Most drivers in the Linux kernel are good examples. There are things like Dosbox. Databases, video encoders, etc. So, you could argue that people are using double standards here a bit. It's fine when people take proprietary software and create GPL versions of it. But it's not OK when people take GPL software and create permissively licensed or proprietary versions of it. That's of course not how copyright actually works. The reason all of this is OK is that copyright allows you to do this thing. This isn't some kind of loophole that needs closing but an essential feature of copyright. The friction here, and common misunderstanding about how copyright works is that you don't copyright ideas but the form or expression of something. Making a painting of a photograph is not a copyright violation. Same idea, different expression. Patents are for protecting ideas. Trademarks are for protecting brands. Some companies have managed to trademark certain color codes even, which is controversial. There's a lot of legal history for interpretation of what is and isn't "fair use" under copyright of course. It gets much more complicated if you also consider international law and how copyright works in different countries. But people being able to make reasonable use of copyrighted material always was essential to the notion of having it to begin with. The reason we can have music that uses samples from other people's music without that being a copyright violation is exactly this fair use. In the same way, you can quote from books and create funny memes based on movie fragments. Or create new theater plays, movies, etc. reinterpreting works of others. All legal, up to a point. If you copy too much it stops being fair use and starts being plagiarism. With software copyright violations, you have to prove that substantial parts of the software were lifted verbatim. Lawyers and judges look at this in terms of how they would apply it to a plagiarism case. Literally - software doesn't get special treatment under copyright. Copyright long predates the existence of software and computers and did not change in any material way after that was invented.
• _zagj 7mo ago
  > creator of Redis, published a broader defense of AI reimplementation, grounding it in copyright law and the history of the GNU project Has anyone else lost almost all respect for Antirez because of stuff like this?
• eduction 7mo ago
  Despite the tech layoffs and rise of AI, programmer hubris is alive and well, that is heartening. Here we see three engineers writing — at length! — about a hugely complicated matter of law. No one outside your bubble cares what you think. You are unqualified and your opinions irrelevant. You might as well be debating open heart surgery techniques.
• waterproof 7mo ago
  You ask Gemini to make an Elsa and Anna Frozen-themed coloring book page. It says no, that would be copyright infringement. So you ask it to make something as close as possible but without infringing. It happily obliges.
• xbar 7mo ago
  Oracle v Google concluded that APIs could not be protected by either copyright or copyleft. It seemed to me at the time that most here supported that decision. Has anything changed?
  • vbarrielle 7mo ago
    No, APIs fall under copyright, but the Supreme Court found that Google's reimplementation of Java's API was falling under fair use. Fair use is decided case by case, one cannot use that decision as a precedent.
• jongjong 7mo ago
  I've been thinking about the erosion of copyright as well. It's basically making software worthless. Already, the IP protections which exist for software suck. Patents are expensive and you can't even use them for software most of the time anyway. Copyright doesn't protect innovative ideas or architectures; if someone can just copy your code, mix it with a bunch of other code (no functionality changes) and then use it as their own; then copyright provides no protection at all... If this is the case, then why should anyone bother to write any quality software at all? It has no value since anyone can just appropriate any essential functionality that they didn't create for themselves. What's to prevent an employee from taking their employer's source code, rewriting it with an LLM (same functionally) and generate a clone of their company's software to use as their own to compete against their employer? Without any IP protections, anyone who writes software becomes a complete loser. There's 0 benefit. One software developer would be doing all the work and then some marketing expert or someone with good social connections could just steal their work and sell it for billions... The software developer gets NOTHING.
• niemandhier 7mo ago
  Look at sqllite. They have a good example going how code can be open and you still have a product. For SQLite the actual product is the test-suite and the audits. Sure you can use the code all you like, but you only ever get past quality gates if you use the audited and provably tested version. This becomes just more relevant in the age of ai coding, where an agent might be able to reimplement your specs. Keep your code open, but consider moving your tests.
• primenum 7mo ago
  I'm a bit shocked by how people are equating recreating from copyright with recreating from copyleft. It's not the same thing... copyleft code is out in the open on purpose, with the condition that you share back in kind. People are latching onto the intellectual property angle of this article, but the point is way simpler than that: "The terms of that compact were: if you take this and build on it, you share back under the same terms."
• motbus3 7mo ago
  To me, there is a confusion of what "copying" and "using" means. You can copy the idea and not use the source code. This has been ruled ok many times already and would be quite dangerous if that was not the case. But this is not what this is. To generate the new program, another program, the AI, must have an input which then becomes part of the program itself. It does not really matter much if the generation does not contain the source code itself or a similar reimplementation. One could rewrite a full version of the Lord of the Rings changing all the words but having the same elements, it would still be plagiarism. No reason to think this is not the case here. It is evident that the source code was the base, hence, this is a derived work.
• pu_pe 7mo ago
  If anyone can go in, take a GPL project like chardet and reimplement it using LLMs, then the current maintainer just saved everyone time by making their implementation publicly available. Our legal framework wasn't built for a situation where reimplementing complex software is trivial, much less almost completely automated.
• rob74 7mo ago
  > Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. The resulting code shares less than 1.3% similarity with any prior version, as measured by JPlag. His conclusion: this is an independent new work, and he is under no obligation to carry forward the LGPL. Mark Pilgrim, the library's original author, opened a GitHub issue to object. The LGPL requires that modifications be distributed under the same license, and a reimplementation produced with ample exposure to the original codebase cannot, in Pilgrim's view, pass as a clean-room effort. Another question which as far as I can see isn't addressed in the article: even if you accept that the AI-driven reimplementation is an independent new work, can you (even as a maintainer) simply "hijack" the old LGPL-licensed project and overwrite it (if the new code is 98,7% different from the existing code, it's essentially overwriting) with your MIT-licensed code? You're free to start a new MIT-licensed project with your reimplementation, but putting the new code into the old project like some kind of cuckoo's egg seems wrong to me...
• wiz21c 7mo ago
  within 20 years, everyone will be developing software which will be copyrighted partly by AI and be behind walled gardens. Sure you'll be able to do things locally but everything (security clearance, walled garden, government's control etc) but it will forever remain at the level of "tinkering". If you are 50 years old or more, the computing you were born with (you own the computer, you own the programs) will be gone. Copyleft only makes sense if you own the computer. That makes me sad.
• krater23 7mo ago
  In Germany we call this 'Beißreflex'. It's all good, when someone reimplements something in Rust, no one asks for the license, but as soon someone uses AI to reimplement something, the search for something to complain about begins.
• orthoxerox 7mo ago
  One thing I don't understand is what was so bad about having an LGPL license. You are allowed to do `import chardet` in a MIT-licensed or a proprietary program.
  • spiffyk 7mo ago
    That is also my understanding. My personal theory is that many corporate compliance departments (or whoever is in charge of this at a particular place) just disallow any *GPL use in their company, regardless of whether it would actually cause problems, so this is an attempt to "unblock" the library for those. Instead of, you know, educating people about the nuances of different copyleft licenses.
    • orthoxerox 7mo ago
      Perhaps you are right. I work for a company right now that has a smarter than average legal4IT department and they ask sensible questions about every piece of FLOSS code you want to bring in: - what is the license? - is it a program or a library? - do you plan to use it as-is or modify it? - do you plan to include it in our products or is it for internal use only? But I have also worked for a company that simply had "if MIT, BSD, Apache, ISC, MPL, zlib then OK else notOK" as a policy.
• pie_flavor 7mo ago
  While no fan of AI slop, is there any difference between this and musl/busybox/etc, minus the addition of AI? Did anyone get mad at busybox before AI?
• jFriedensreich 7mo ago
  I wonder what value gpl even has in a world where i can trivially reimplement whatever a company builds on a permissive license and does not share. I see still a place for things that are low level, algo heavy, real world test heavy and critical eg. kernel, cryptography, storage engine, filesystems all the rest of userland and web not so much
• youknownothing 7mo ago
  Theseus ship, anyone?
• jpauline 7mo ago
  I'm specifically worried about gating trained data where publicly accessible information is blocked/opted-out. If we're opening up Pandora's Box with genAI and training data, we may as well give it what is accessible to the average user. Its going to end up having the same issues a user with implicit knowledge or memories would have anyway.
• waffletower 7mo ago
  I am appreciating the return of the meme "information wants to be free".
• Storylinn 7mo ago
  [dead]
• sombragris 7mo ago
  I'm firmly in favor of copyleft. But I get what chardet's maintainer has done: reimplement a piece of software. This has been done a lot of times. Musl reimplementing glibc, llvm reimplementing gcc, etc., all of them with non-copyleft licenses. However, the purported reimplementations did not usurp the names of the reimplemented product. Reimplement chardet using AI and insisting in calling the product the same as old chardet with a new version number and a new license is, I think, not exactly honest. At least he should have used something like "chardet-ng", "chardet-fresh", or whatever, and a completely different source tree.
• nickcoffee 7mo ago
  The practical question I keep coming back to: if the output is meaningfully different and faster, at what point does the reimplementation argument become less about the code and more about the reputation and distribution the original project built? That seems like the harder thing to replicate, and the harder thing to protect.