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.
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.
keithnz 7 minutes ago [-]
if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?
moralestapia 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
jimmaswell 1 hours ago [-]
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.
trueismywork 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
https://github.com/albfernandez/juniversalchardet
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.
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.