> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it.
I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels. The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free market.
After cloning a test suite you're still left with ongoing maintenance and development, maintaining feature parity etc. There's a lot more than passing a test suite. If the rewrite is truly superior it deserves to become the new Ship of Theseus. But e.g. I doubt anyone's AI rewrites of SQLite will ever put a dent in its marketshare.
In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.
And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.
If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.
I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.
hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon it
IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"
(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)
ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP
>Something related, but different, happened with chardet. The current maintainer reimplemented it from scratch by only pointing it to the API and the test suite.
Only "pointing it". But the LLM, who can recite over 90% of a book in its training set verbatim *, would have also have had trained on the original code.
The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore.
Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have explicit permission to train on.
What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.
it can be, depending on if it is different enough to convince a jury that it is not a copyright violation. See the lawsuits from Marvin Gaye's family to see how that can be unpredictable.
Of course not, because everyone making these arguments wants people to have some magic sauce so they get to ignore all the rules placed on the "artificial" thing.
If you genuinely believe that you are not above a literal text completion algorithm and do not deserve any more rights than it, that says more about you than anything else.
>I personally have a horse in the race here because I too wanted chardet to be under a non-GPL license for many years.
Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of software licenses.
"But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out.
> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.
> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.
Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.
So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.
Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.
And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.
But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.
And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).
"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"
This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the clear regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like the Linux kernel.
The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code. Because then it is still a copyright. Just becsuse you drew mickey mouse from memory doesnt above you if it looks close enough to original hickey mouse.
> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it.
I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels. The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free market.
After cloning a test suite you're still left with ongoing maintenance and development, maintaining feature parity etc. There's a lot more than passing a test suite. If the rewrite is truly superior it deserves to become the new Ship of Theseus. But e.g. I doubt anyone's AI rewrites of SQLite will ever put a dent in its marketshare.
In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.
And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.
If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.
I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.
>Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of
So with "Real AI" you actually mean artificial superintelligence.
> b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior.
This is not always true, for an extreme example see Indistinguishability obfuscation.
hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon it
IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"
(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)
ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP
>Something related, but different, happened with chardet. The current maintainer reimplemented it from scratch by only pointing it to the API and the test suite.
Only "pointing it". But the LLM, who can recite over 90% of a book in its training set verbatim *, would have also have had trained on the original code.
Maybe "the slop of Theseus" is a better title.
* https://the-decoder.com/researchers-extract-up-to-96-of-harr...
Maybe, but the LLM did not recite the chardet source code so that argument does not appear to apply here.
Translate an alternative?
https://github.com/albfernandez/juniversalchardet
The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore.
Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have explicit permission to train on.
What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.
if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?
it can be, depending on if it is different enough to convince a jury that it is not a copyright violation. See the lawsuits from Marvin Gaye's family to see how that can be unpredictable.
If you copy and paste one line from a thousand different GPL projects, is the resulting program GPL?
Let's be honest about what's happening here.
Of course not, because everyone making these arguments wants people to have some magic sauce so they get to ignore all the rules placed on the "artificial" thing.
If you genuinely believe that you are not above a literal text completion algorithm and do not deserve any more rights than it, that says more about you than anything else.
>I personally have a horse in the race here because I too wanted chardet to be under a non-GPL license for many years.
Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of software licenses.
"But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out.
> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.
> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.
Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.
So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.
>Licenses exists for a reason
Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.
And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.
But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.
And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).
"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"
This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the clear regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like the Linux kernel.
This reminds me of people crying over toybox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox#Controversy
The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code. Because then it is still a copyright. Just becsuse you drew mickey mouse from memory doesnt above you if it looks close enough to original hickey mouse.
> The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code.
I have looked at the project earlier today there is effectively no resemblance other than the public API.