4 ms·

Isn’t the real danger now not the ability to find security vulnerabilities, but rather, the ability of anyone to ask an LLM agent to rewrite your open source pr

by dom96 6mo ago

Isn’t the real danger now not the ability to find security vulnerabilities, but rather, the ability of anyone to ask an LLM agent to rewrite your open source project in another language and thus work around whatever license your project has?

short_sells_poo 6mo ago
This is happening quite a lot actually. People just feed an existing project into their agent harness and have it regenerate more or less the same with a few tweaks and then they publish it. I'm not sure how this works in the legal sense. A human could ostensibly study an existing project and then rewrite it from scratch. The original work's license shouldn't apply as long as code wasn't copy & pasted, right? What happens when an automated tool does the same? It's basically just a complicated copy & paste job.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  > A human could ostensibly study an existing project and then rewrite it from scratch. And likely there would be enough similarities that the rewrite would be considered a derived work under copyright law. > The original work's license shouldn't apply as long as code wasn't copy & pasted, right? You don't need to do a literal copy & paste for it to be copyright infringement. > What happens when an automated tool does the same? It's basically just a complicated copy & paste job. Sounds like copyright infringement to me.
bluGill 6mo ago
You can do the same for closed source projects. There are real limitations of course.
micromacrofoot 6mo ago
A lot of open source projects already have licenses that allow forking and selling the fork, it hasn't been a problem most of the time... there's a lot more to operating open source as a business beyond just shipping the code
- kelnos 6mo ago
  > A lot of open source projects already have licenses that allow forking and selling the fork If we go by the OSI's definition, a project that doesn't allow this is not "open source". So all open source projects -- not just "a lot" -- allow this.

by dom96 6mo ago

short_sells_poo 6mo ago

This is happening quite a lot actually. People just feed an existing project into their agent harness and have it regenerate more or less the same with a few tweaks and then they publish it. I'm not sure how this works in the legal sense. A human could ostensibly study an existing project and then rewrite it from scratch. The original work's license shouldn't apply as long as code wasn't copy & pasted, right? What happens when an automated tool does the same? It's basically just a complicated copy & paste job.

kelnos 6mo ago
> A human could ostensibly study an existing project and then rewrite it from scratch. And likely there would be enough similarities that the rewrite would be considered a derived work under copyright law. > The original work's license shouldn't apply as long as code wasn't copy & pasted, right? You don't need to do a literal copy & paste for it to be copyright infringement. > What happens when an automated tool does the same? It's basically just a complicated copy & paste job. Sounds like copyright infringement to me.

bluGill 6mo ago

You can do the same for closed source projects. There are real limitations of course.

micromacrofoot 6mo ago

A lot of open source projects already have licenses that allow forking and selling the fork, it hasn't been a problem most of the time... there's a lot more to operating open source as a business beyond just shipping the code

kelnos 6mo ago
> A lot of open source projects already have licenses that allow forking and selling the fork If we go by the OSI's definition, a project that doesn't allow this is not "open source". So all open source projects -- not just "a lot" -- allow this.