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Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The

Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I wish I could be provided a dividend or royalty, however small, for my contribution to these LLMs but that will never happen. I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that. I'm guessing that such a license would not be enforceable because I am not in the US, but at least it would be nice to declare my intent and who knows what the future looks like.

bluefirebrand 7mo ago
> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrapeable, train their models, exactly like they have so far. Then it will be up to you to chase them down and try to sue or whatever. And good luck proving the license violation I dunno. I just don't really believe that many tech companies these days are behaving even remotely ethically. I don't have much hope that will change anytime soon
- apatheticonion 7mo ago
  I wonder if there is a "loaded" lawsuit here that could be a win-win for license enforcement case law in LLMs. Take a litigious company like Nintendo. If one was to train an LLM on their works and the LLM produces an emulator, that would force a lawsuit. If Nintendo wins, then LLMs are stealing. If Nintendo loses, then we can decompile everything.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    You're forgetting the option where the LLM companies pay Nintendo a silly amount of money for permission and Nintendo's executives take that as a win
- archagon 7mo ago
  Traditionally, large corporations have taken very conservative legal stances with regard to integrating e.g. A/GPL code, even when there's almost no risk. If my license explicitly says "any LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted," I feel like BigAICorp would be foolish to ignore it. Maybe I couldn't sue them today, but are they confident this will remain the case 5, 10, 20 years from now? Everywhere in the world?
  - 63stack 7mo ago
    Github has posted that they will now train on everyone's data (even private) unless you opt out (until they change their mind on that). Anthropic has been training on your data on certain tiers already. Meta bittorrented books to train their models. Surely if your license says "LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted", it is going to dissuade them.
    - archagon 7mo ago
      No, it won’t dissuade them. But when we finally get the chance to legally beat the shit out of these companies, I want to reserve my place in line. Alternatively, they can learn to trust me on this and simply exclude/evict my code from the training corpus.
advael 7mo ago
I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Of course, it also seems clear in the present landscape that the law often depends more on the convenience of the powerful than its actual construction and intent, but I would love to be proven wrong about that, and this kind of outcome would help
- BobbyJo 7mo ago
  If the rise of Draft Kings and Polymarket/Kalshi have taught me anything, it's that the law becomes meaningless at scale. Sad.
  - advael 7mo ago
    Sure, but that's more a result of policy decisions than an inevitable result of some natural law. Corporate lawlessness has been reined in before and it can be again
- apatheticonion 7mo ago
  I'm struggling to parse the double negative in that statement, haha. Are you saying that you believe that untested but technically; models trained on GPL sources need to distribute the resulting LLMs under GPL?
  - advael 7mo ago
    Yes. Double negative intended for emphasis here, but apologies if it's confusing
    - eru 7mo ago
      Well, most companies never distribute their models. So GPL doesn't kick in.
jonahss 7mo ago
I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.
- __loam 7mo ago
  I can't eat good feelings
- faksr 7mo ago
  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The cannibalistic $trillion companies profit from it all and no one opted in. There are also people who want to be eaten by a literal cannibal. I say, no thanks.
- apatheticonion 7mo ago
  Me too, and I use LLMs often for personal and professional work. Knowing that colleagues are burning through $700/day worth of tokens, and a small fraction of those tokens were likely derived from my work while I get made redundant is a bit shite.
  - manwe150 7mo ago
    I’d been hoping to finally train a replacement and code myself out of a job for years. I just didn’t know I was the replacement too, working with AI.
  - dbetteridge 7mo ago
    $700 a day of tokens can't possibly be sustainable right? That's 2X the salary of a lot of the world's software developers
    - apatheticonion 7mo ago
      AUD* - so $450 USD But yes, that's very expensive and surprising to me.
      - 7mo ago
phendrenad2 7mo ago
I wish Anthropic or someone would take a leadership role and re-train their models without any GPL code, or at least stop doing so in the future tense.
- worthless-trash 7mo ago
  What would they learn from then ?
  - phendrenad2 7mo ago
    Non-GPL code?
    - worthless-trash 7mo ago
      And where would they get that ?
      - phendrenad2 7mo ago
        Is this a serious question?
        worthless-trash 7mo ago
        How many propriatary solutions do you think will hand over the code for them to train, thats the point that i'm trying to make. Opensource has provided training data, closed source code not so much. They will have a bad time learning.
        phendrenad2 6mo ago
        Um, not all open-source code is GPL. Or even MIT/BSD, for that matter. There's plenty of Creative Commons (CC) code out there to train on. And on top of that, there are reams of public documentation pages that are effectively CC. And more recently, LLMs have shown increased ability things that they weren't explicitly trained on, so if, for example, we can't find a ton of Rust codebases that are open for training, it's not really a big deal.
reactordev 7mo ago
If you use GitHub, you’re automatically opted into having your code used for training. Private repo or not. You have to actually opt out and even then, will they honor that? No…
- Waterluvian 7mo ago
  They’ll just keep “accidentally” resetting the option over time.
otras 7mo ago
The foreman had pointed out his best man - what was his name? - and, joking with the puzzled machinist, the three bright young men had hooked up the recording apparatus to the lathe controls. Hertz! That had been the machinist's name - Rudy Hertz, an old-timer, who had been about ready to retire. Paul remembered the name now, and remembered the deference the old man had shown the bright young men. Afterward, they'd got Rudy's foreman to let him off, and, in a boisterous, whimsical spirit of industrial democracy, they'd taken him across the street for a beer. Rudy hadn't understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he'd liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape. And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon - Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who . . . What else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now - or in his second childhood in Homestead. Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand of the shafts. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
archagon 7mo ago
> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that. Personally, I want a viral (GPL-style) license that explicitly prohibits use of code for LLM training/tuning purposes — with the asterisk that while current law might view LLM training as fair use, this may not be the case forever, and blatant disregard of the terms of the license should make it easier for me to sue offenders in the future. Alternatively, this could be expressed as: the output of any LLM trained on this code must retain this license.
rpdillon 7mo ago
My personal take is that LLMs are so transformative that they are likely not going to qualify under derivative works and therefore GPL wouldn't hold sway. There's already some evidence that courts will consider training on copyrighted material fair use, so long as it is otherwise obtained legally, which would be the case with software licensed under GPL. I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it is best because it's a weakener interpretation of copyright law, which is overall a good thing in my view.
- apatheticonion 7mo ago
  I wonder if that would extend to training LLMs on decompiled firmware. A new clean room method unlocked?
- hparadiz 7mo ago
  You can train models locally now and use open source ones and there's a robust community of people training, retraining, and generally pulling data from anywhere. And then new models get trained on old models. The models in use now are already several generations deep even further trained on code freely given by the entire industry. It's like complaining about being 1/100000th of a soup with no real proof you're even in it. Can you provide proof that a model used your code? It's like a remix of a remix of a remix.
  - whattheheckheck 7mo ago
    The fact that github copilot had an option to block generated code that matched public examples and the fact that the llms can regenerate Harry Potter books verbatim means the training data is definitely "stored in a digital system of retrieval" but Goodluck actually having common sense win vs trillionaire incentive group stealing from everyone
  - Nursie 7mo ago
    > It's like complaining about being 1/100000th of a soup with no real proof you're even in it. I love a good analogy, especially one that takes a complex situation in which esoteric, unusual conditions are distilled and related back to common experiences held by the reader, such that all can understand. Next time I'm a small part of a soup I'll think of this.
visarga 7mo ago
> it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works You can own the works, but not the vibes. If everyone owned the vibes we would all be infringing others. In my view abstractions should not be protected by copyright, only expression, currently the abstraction-filtration-comparison standard (AFC) protects abstractions too, non-literal infringement is a thing. Trying to own the vibes is like trying to own the functionality itself, no matter the distinct implementation details, and this is closer to patents than copyrights. But patents get researched for prior art and have limited duration, copyright is automatic and almost infinite duration.
birdfood 7mo ago
These companies pirated their training material and reached settlements with the copyright holders. I imagine they’d do the same with software licenced under Not For Training terms too. It’d be up to you to find out it is happening and then pursue them legally for compensation.
627467 7mo ago
> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour. My 2c: - AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago. - It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. In a world of autonomous agents and open-weight models, control is decentralized.inference costs continue to drop, you dont need to be running on megacorp stacks. Millions (billions?) of agents finding and sharing among themselves. How will megacorps stop? - I see the advent of LLMs like the spread of literacy. Scribes once held a monopoly on the written word, which felt like a "loss" to them when reading/writing became universal. But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."
- heyethan 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - 627467 7mo ago
    Cheap books too hundreds of years to be accessible. Already we have models that run on "legacy" hardware. Just like large scale publishing never disappeared large scale models and infra also wont. But does it mean that simple paper and pen was pointless to be distributed?
- j_bum 7mo ago
  I’m not sure if the analogy is yours, but the scribe note really struck a chord with me. I’m not a professionally trained SWE (I’m a scientist who does engineering work). LLMs have really accelerated my ability to build, ideate, and understand systems in a way that I could only loosely gain from sometimes grumpy but mostly kind senior engineers in overcrowded chat rooms. The legality of all of this is dubious, though, per the parent. I GPL licensed my FOSS scientific software because I wanted it to help advance biomedical research. Not because I wanted it to help a big corp get rich. But then again, maybe code like mine is what is holding these models back lol.
strogonoff 7mo ago
> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. This is increasingly common, and I don’t think it’s questionable that LLMs that software engineers help train are contributing to the obsolescence of software engineers. Large companies that operate these LLMs both 1) benefit from the huge amount of open-source software and at the same time 2) erode the very foundation that made open-source software explode in popularity (which happened thanks to copyright—or, more precisely, the ability to use copyright to enforce copyleft and thus protect the future of volunteer work made by individual contributors). GPL was written long before this technology started to be used this way. There’s little doubt that the spirit of GPL is violated at scale by commercial LLM operators, and considering the amount of money that got sunk into this it’s very unlikely they would ever yield to the public the models, the ability to mass-scrape the entire Internet to train equivalent models, the capability to run these models to obtain comparable results, etc. The claim of “democratising knowledge” is disingenuous if you look deeper into it—somehow, they themselves will always be exempt from that democratisation and free to profit from our work, whereas our work is what gets “democratised”. Somehow, this strikes me personally more as expropriation than democratisation.
thn-gap 7mo ago
You can't avoid big corps training on your data if it's available, because "fair use". But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.
samiv 7mo ago
The other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work. His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship. Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.
- mapcars 7mo ago
  > Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own These don't contradict each other though, you could "blatantly plagiarize someone else work" before as well. LLMs just add another layer in between.
  - QuantumNomad_ 7mo ago
    Copyright violation would happen before LLMs yes, but it would have to be done by a person who either didn’t understand copyright (which is not a valid defence in court), or intentionally chose to ignore it. With LLMs, future generations are growing up with being handed code that may or not be a verbatim copy of something that someone else originally wrote with specific licensing terms, but with no mention of any license terms or origin being provided by the LLM. It remains to be seen if there will be any lawsuits in the future specifically about source code that is substantially copied from someone else indirectly via LLM use. In any case I doubt that even if such lawsuits happen they will help small developers writing open source. It would probably be one of the big tech companies suing other companies or persons and any money resulting from such a lawsuit would go to the big tech company suing. IANAL, TINLA.
  - ozim 7mo ago
jacquesm 7mo ago
And even if it would be enforceable, would you be able and willing to go through the energy and monetary expenses to enforce it? Especially against a big corporation willing to fight you.
snarfy 7mo ago
It shouldn't be needed. I would argue that is more than "against the spirit" and should not be considered fair use. Instead of creating a derivative work, they created a machine that creates derivative works.
mike_hearn 7mo ago
FWIW, a lot of open source caused other people to lose their jobs too, all pre AI. So what goes around comes around. The Free Software movement was from day one built on cloning proprietary programs - UNIX was a commercial OS that AT&T sold, the early Linux desktop environments all looked exactly like a mashup of Windows 95 and commercial DEs, etc. Every commercial UNIX got wiped out except Apple, do you think that didn't lead to layoffs? Because it very much did. Nor did it ever really change. SystemD started out as "heavily inspired" by Launch Services. Wayland is basically the same ideas as SkyLight in macOS, etc. And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits. So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.
- mghackerlady 7mo ago
  Fwiw, AIX and to a far lesser extent Solaris still exist. I'm not exactly sure why people are using them (AIX I can maybe understand because "no one got fired for buying IBM" or whatever but there really isn't any excuse to be running Solaris nowadays since ZFS runs on Linux and and 2 of the BSD based systems and oracle seems desperate to let it die)
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Solaris in SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging. Something that some security conscious folks care about.
    - mghackerlady 7mo ago
      Does OpenBSD not do that? That feels like something OpenBSD could do, given their near paranoid level of exploit reduction and theos hardon for SPARC
      - pjmlp 7mo ago

bluefirebrand 7mo ago

> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrapeable, train their models, exactly like they have so far. Then it will be up to you to chase them down and try to sue or whatever. And good luck proving the license violation I dunno. I just don't really believe that many tech companies these days are behaving even remotely ethically. I don't have much hope that will change anytime soon

apatheticonion 7mo ago
I wonder if there is a "loaded" lawsuit here that could be a win-win for license enforcement case law in LLMs. Take a litigious company like Nintendo. If one was to train an LLM on their works and the LLM produces an emulator, that would force a lawsuit. If Nintendo wins, then LLMs are stealing. If Nintendo loses, then we can decompile everything.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  You're forgetting the option where the LLM companies pay Nintendo a silly amount of money for permission and Nintendo's executives take that as a win
archagon 7mo ago
Traditionally, large corporations have taken very conservative legal stances with regard to integrating e.g. A/GPL code, even when there's almost no risk. If my license explicitly says "any LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted," I feel like BigAICorp would be foolish to ignore it. Maybe I couldn't sue them today, but are they confident this will remain the case 5, 10, 20 years from now? Everywhere in the world?
- 63stack 7mo ago
  Github has posted that they will now train on everyone's data (even private) unless you opt out (until they change their mind on that). Anthropic has been training on your data on certain tiers already. Meta bittorrented books to train their models. Surely if your license says "LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted", it is going to dissuade them.
  - archagon 7mo ago
    No, it won’t dissuade them. But when we finally get the chance to legally beat the shit out of these companies, I want to reserve my place in line. Alternatively, they can learn to trust me on this and simply exclude/evict my code from the training corpus.

advael 7mo ago

I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Of course, it also seems clear in the present landscape that the law often depends more on the convenience of the powerful than its actual construction and intent, but I would love to be proven wrong about that, and this kind of outcome would help

BobbyJo 7mo ago
If the rise of Draft Kings and Polymarket/Kalshi have taught me anything, it's that the law becomes meaningless at scale. Sad.
- advael 7mo ago
  Sure, but that's more a result of policy decisions than an inevitable result of some natural law. Corporate lawlessness has been reined in before and it can be again
apatheticonion 7mo ago
I'm struggling to parse the double negative in that statement, haha. Are you saying that you believe that untested but technically; models trained on GPL sources need to distribute the resulting LLMs under GPL?
- advael 7mo ago
  Yes. Double negative intended for emphasis here, but apologies if it's confusing
  - eru 7mo ago
    Well, most companies never distribute their models. So GPL doesn't kick in.

jonahss 7mo ago

I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.

__loam 7mo ago
I can't eat good feelings
faksr 7mo ago
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The cannibalistic $trillion companies profit from it all and no one opted in. There are also people who want to be eaten by a literal cannibal. I say, no thanks.
apatheticonion 7mo ago
Me too, and I use LLMs often for personal and professional work. Knowing that colleagues are burning through $700/day worth of tokens, and a small fraction of those tokens were likely derived from my work while I get made redundant is a bit shite.
- manwe150 7mo ago
  I’d been hoping to finally train a replacement and code myself out of a job for years. I just didn’t know I was the replacement too, working with AI.
- dbetteridge 7mo ago
  $700 a day of tokens can't possibly be sustainable right? That's 2X the salary of a lot of the world's software developers
  - apatheticonion 7mo ago
    AUD* - so $450 USD But yes, that's very expensive and surprising to me.
    - 7mo ago

phendrenad2 7mo ago

I wish Anthropic or someone would take a leadership role and re-train their models without any GPL code, or at least stop doing so in the future tense.

worthless-trash 7mo ago
What would they learn from then ?
- phendrenad2 7mo ago
  Non-GPL code?
  - worthless-trash 7mo ago
    And where would they get that ?
    - phendrenad2 7mo ago
      Is this a serious question?
      - worthless-trash 7mo ago
        How many propriatary solutions do you think will hand over the code for them to train, thats the point that i'm trying to make. Opensource has provided training data, closed source code not so much. They will have a bad time learning.
        phendrenad2 6mo ago
        Um, not all open-source code is GPL. Or even MIT/BSD, for that matter. There's plenty of Creative Commons (CC) code out there to train on. And on top of that, there are reams of public documentation pages that are effectively CC. And more recently, LLMs have shown increased ability things that they weren't explicitly trained on, so if, for example, we can't find a ton of Rust codebases that are open for training, it's not really a big deal.

reactordev 7mo ago

If you use GitHub, you’re automatically opted into having your code used for training. Private repo or not. You have to actually opt out and even then, will they honor that? No…

Waterluvian 7mo ago
They’ll just keep “accidentally” resetting the option over time.

otras 7mo ago

The foreman had pointed out his best man - what was his name? - and, joking with the puzzled machinist, the three bright young men had hooked up the recording apparatus to the lathe controls. Hertz! That had been the machinist's name - Rudy Hertz, an old-timer, who had been about ready to retire. Paul remembered the name now, and remembered the deference the old man had shown the bright young men. Afterward, they'd got Rudy's foreman to let him off, and, in a boisterous, whimsical spirit of industrial democracy, they'd taken him across the street for a beer. Rudy hadn't understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he'd liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape. And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon - Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who . . . What else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now - or in his second childhood in Homestead. Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand of the shafts. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

archagon 7mo ago

> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that. Personally, I want a viral (GPL-style) license that explicitly prohibits use of code for LLM training/tuning purposes — with the asterisk that while current law might view LLM training as fair use, this may not be the case forever, and blatant disregard of the terms of the license should make it easier for me to sue offenders in the future. Alternatively, this could be expressed as: the output of any LLM trained on this code must retain this license.

rpdillon 7mo ago

My personal take is that LLMs are so transformative that they are likely not going to qualify under derivative works and therefore GPL wouldn't hold sway. There's already some evidence that courts will consider training on copyrighted material fair use, so long as it is otherwise obtained legally, which would be the case with software licensed under GPL. I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it is best because it's a weakener interpretation of copyright law, which is overall a good thing in my view.

apatheticonion 7mo ago
I wonder if that would extend to training LLMs on decompiled firmware. A new clean room method unlocked?
hparadiz 7mo ago
You can train models locally now and use open source ones and there's a robust community of people training, retraining, and generally pulling data from anywhere. And then new models get trained on old models. The models in use now are already several generations deep even further trained on code freely given by the entire industry. It's like complaining about being 1/100000th of a soup with no real proof you're even in it. Can you provide proof that a model used your code? It's like a remix of a remix of a remix.
- whattheheckheck 7mo ago
  The fact that github copilot had an option to block generated code that matched public examples and the fact that the llms can regenerate Harry Potter books verbatim means the training data is definitely "stored in a digital system of retrieval" but Goodluck actually having common sense win vs trillionaire incentive group stealing from everyone
- Nursie 7mo ago
  > It's like complaining about being 1/100000th of a soup with no real proof you're even in it. I love a good analogy, especially one that takes a complex situation in which esoteric, unusual conditions are distilled and related back to common experiences held by the reader, such that all can understand. Next time I'm a small part of a soup I'll think of this.

visarga 7mo ago

> it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works You can own the works, but not the vibes. If everyone owned the vibes we would all be infringing others. In my view abstractions should not be protected by copyright, only expression, currently the abstraction-filtration-comparison standard (AFC) protects abstractions too, non-literal infringement is a thing. Trying to own the vibes is like trying to own the functionality itself, no matter the distinct implementation details, and this is closer to patents than copyrights. But patents get researched for prior art and have limited duration, copyright is automatic and almost infinite duration.

birdfood 7mo ago

These companies pirated their training material and reached settlements with the copyright holders. I imagine they’d do the same with software licenced under Not For Training terms too. It’d be up to you to find out it is happening and then pursue them legally for compensation.

627467 7mo ago

> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour. My 2c: - AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago. - It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. In a world of autonomous agents and open-weight models, control is decentralized.inference costs continue to drop, you dont need to be running on megacorp stacks. Millions (billions?) of agents finding and sharing among themselves. How will megacorps stop? - I see the advent of LLMs like the spread of literacy. Scribes once held a monopoly on the written word, which felt like a "loss" to them when reading/writing became universal. But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

heyethan 7mo ago
[flagged]
- 627467 7mo ago
  Cheap books too hundreds of years to be accessible. Already we have models that run on "legacy" hardware. Just like large scale publishing never disappeared large scale models and infra also wont. But does it mean that simple paper and pen was pointless to be distributed?
j_bum 7mo ago
I’m not sure if the analogy is yours, but the scribe note really struck a chord with me. I’m not a professionally trained SWE (I’m a scientist who does engineering work). LLMs have really accelerated my ability to build, ideate, and understand systems in a way that I could only loosely gain from sometimes grumpy but mostly kind senior engineers in overcrowded chat rooms. The legality of all of this is dubious, though, per the parent. I GPL licensed my FOSS scientific software because I wanted it to help advance biomedical research. Not because I wanted it to help a big corp get rich. But then again, maybe code like mine is what is holding these models back lol.

strogonoff 7mo ago

> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. This is increasingly common, and I don’t think it’s questionable that LLMs that software engineers help train are contributing to the obsolescence of software engineers. Large companies that operate these LLMs both 1) benefit from the huge amount of open-source software and at the same time 2) erode the very foundation that made open-source software explode in popularity (which happened thanks to copyright—or, more precisely, the ability to use copyright to enforce copyleft and thus protect the future of volunteer work made by individual contributors). GPL was written long before this technology started to be used this way. There’s little doubt that the spirit of GPL is violated at scale by commercial LLM operators, and considering the amount of money that got sunk into this it’s very unlikely they would ever yield to the public the models, the ability to mass-scrape the entire Internet to train equivalent models, the capability to run these models to obtain comparable results, etc. The claim of “democratising knowledge” is disingenuous if you look deeper into it—somehow, they themselves will always be exempt from that democratisation and free to profit from our work, whereas our work is what gets “democratised”. Somehow, this strikes me personally more as expropriation than democratisation.

thn-gap 7mo ago

You can't avoid big corps training on your data if it's available, because "fair use". But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.

samiv 7mo ago

The other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work. His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship. Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.

mapcars 7mo ago
> Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own These don't contradict each other though, you could "blatantly plagiarize someone else work" before as well. LLMs just add another layer in between.
- QuantumNomad_ 7mo ago
  Copyright violation would happen before LLMs yes, but it would have to be done by a person who either didn’t understand copyright (which is not a valid defence in court), or intentionally chose to ignore it. With LLMs, future generations are growing up with being handed code that may or not be a verbatim copy of something that someone else originally wrote with specific licensing terms, but with no mention of any license terms or origin being provided by the LLM. It remains to be seen if there will be any lawsuits in the future specifically about source code that is substantially copied from someone else indirectly via LLM use. In any case I doubt that even if such lawsuits happen they will help small developers writing open source. It would probably be one of the big tech companies suing other companies or persons and any money resulting from such a lawsuit would go to the big tech company suing. IANAL, TINLA.
- ozim 7mo ago

jacquesm 7mo ago

And even if it would be enforceable, would you be able and willing to go through the energy and monetary expenses to enforce it? Especially against a big corporation willing to fight you.

snarfy 7mo ago

It shouldn't be needed. I would argue that is more than "against the spirit" and should not be considered fair use. Instead of creating a derivative work, they created a machine that creates derivative works.

mike_hearn 7mo ago

FWIW, a lot of open source caused other people to lose their jobs too, all pre AI. So what goes around comes around. The Free Software movement was from day one built on cloning proprietary programs - UNIX was a commercial OS that AT&T sold, the early Linux desktop environments all looked exactly like a mashup of Windows 95 and commercial DEs, etc. Every commercial UNIX got wiped out except Apple, do you think that didn't lead to layoffs? Because it very much did. Nor did it ever really change. SystemD started out as "heavily inspired" by Launch Services. Wayland is basically the same ideas as SkyLight in macOS, etc. And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits. So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.

mghackerlady 7mo ago
Fwiw, AIX and to a far lesser extent Solaris still exist. I'm not exactly sure why people are using them (AIX I can maybe understand because "no one got fired for buying IBM" or whatever but there really isn't any excuse to be running Solaris nowadays since ZFS runs on Linux and and 2 of the BSD based systems and oracle seems desperate to let it die)
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Solaris in SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging. Something that some security conscious folks care about.
  - mghackerlady 7mo ago
    Does OpenBSD not do that? That feels like something OpenBSD could do, given their near paranoid level of exploit reduction and theos hardon for SPARC
    - pjmlp 7mo ago