Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#91

Post by bmitch3020 »

1. AI training companies don't care about your license, they'll still train on your software regardless.

2. Your software needs to be distributed with a license that is compatible with your dependencies. You can't add restrictions if your dependencies forbid that.

3. No one will use your project if it doesn't have an OSI license. It's not worth the time and effort to read every license and get it approved for use by the legal team. If you're doing anything useful, someone will make an alternative with an OSI license and the community will ignore your project.

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#93

Post by archagon »

NoraCodes wrote: post #12

You - and many other commentors in this thread - misunderstand the legal theory under which AI companies operate. In their view, training their models is allowed under fair use, which means it does not trigger copyright-based licenses at all. You cannot dissuade them with a license.

Having a license that specifically disallows a legally dubious behavior could make lawsuits much easier in the future, however. (And might also incentivize lawyers to recommend avoiding this code for LLM training in the first place.)

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#94

Post by archagon »

hollow-moe wrote: post #50

AI scrappers are dumb web crawlers, just use any open source license you want and make people fill a simple form to get it. AI is in public and won't leave any time soon. Time to create closed gardens keeping them out.

Most open source licenses will not prohibit someone else from dumping your gatekept code onto Github, though.

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#95

Post by hollow-moe »

archagon wrote: post #94
hollow-moe wrote: post #50

AI scrappers are dumb web crawlers, just use any open source license you want and make people fill a simple form to get it. AI is in public and won't leave any time soon. Time to create closed gardens keeping them out.

Most open source licenses will not prohibit someone else from dumping your gatekept code onto Github, though.

Indeed and we don't want to restrict the license. But one good thing about closed gardens is the ability for screening to enter and throw "bad actors" out. Don't ask me the details about "yes but one bad actor and the code is out" or "but how would you check for id at signup", at least the forges aren't DDoS'd, "vibecoders" can be put to the door, it's harder for AI companies to steal stuff around the code in the forge or code updates, hell even put docs behind the wall I wouldn't even care, as we say here "Aux grands maux, les grands remèdes".

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#96

Post by CrazyStat »

hkt wrote: post #42
CrazyStat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal premise of training LLMs on everything ever written is that it’s fair use. If it is fair use (which is currently being disputed in court) then the license you put on your code doesn’t matter, it can be used under fair use. If the courts decide it’s not fair use then OpenAI et al. are going to have some issues.

Presumably the author is working on the basis that it is not fair use and wants to license accordingly.

Quite possibly. If they care a great deal about not contributing to training LLMs then they should still be aware of the fair use issue, because if the courts rule that it is fair use then there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any code that they publish, under any license whatsoever, would then be fair game for training and almost certainly would be used.

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#97

Post by dkdcio »

pessimizer wrote: post #59
dkdcio wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that would be “source available” software, and it’s not a random initiative there is disagreement on exactly what “open source” means, but generally clear boundaries between open source and source available software in licensing and spirit of the given project. e.g. MIT and Apache 2.0 are open source, BSL is source available. edit: PERSONALLY, I think if you don’t welcome outside contributions, it isn’t open source;…

> PERSONALLY, I think if you don’t welcome outside contributions, it isn’t open source It's not a question of belief. Maybe words don't mean anything anymore, but certainly legal contracts and licenses do. "Open Source" is a class of licenses approved by the OSI. There are no spirits involved.

meh…I consider an open source license distinct from an open source project. obviously legal contracts can define their own static terms; language is dynamic

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#98

Post by zephen »

techjamie wrote: post #68

If you publish to GitHub, also mind that you grant them a separate license to your code[1] which grants them the ability to do things, including "[...] the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers [...]" They don't mention training Copilot explicitly, they might throw training under "analyzing…

Maybe; I'm not even going to bother parsing all that tonight.

OTOH, if I create software and publish it on gitlab, and I'm not a github user, and someone else copies it to github, that doesn't scrub my license off or give github any rights at all to my software, no matter what their agreement with whoever uploaded the software was.

Re: Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

#99

Post by zephen »

bmitch3020 wrote: post #91

1. AI training companies don't care about your license, they'll still train on your software regardless. 2. Your software needs to be distributed with a license that is compatible with your dependencies. You can't add restrictions if your dependencies forbid that. 3. No one will use your project if it doesn't have an OSI license. It's not worth the time and effort to read every license and get it approved for use by…

> 2. Your software needs to be distributed with a license that is compatible with your dependencies. You can't add restrictions if your dependencies forbid that.

This is certainly what the FSF wants you to believe, but if you're not shipping the dependencies yourself, it's unlikely to be true.

You are coding to an _interface_, and if there's one thing that we have learned from a long series of court cases starting with Baker v Selden, continuing with Lotus v Borland, and including the brutally fought decade-long Oracle v Google, it is that the functional elements of an interface are simply not copyrightable.

Now to your point about no one using your project, that may or may not be true, but it is somewhat orthogonal to OSI licensure -- it is certainly possible to have your code under the OSI-approved GPL v2 (like the linux kernel) and a dependency that is under GPL v3, which might prevent you, yourself, from shipping them together.

It _may_ be that that incompatibility would be enough to keep your software off any possible linux distributions, but it certainly doesn't implicate you in any copyright infringement, as long as you don't ship the dependency yourself.

Post reply on HN