That AI was trained on the GPLv2 Linux source code, which does have a driver for your Wi-Fi. How is this not copyright laundering?
[deleted]
FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
61–70 of 397 posts
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
True. But also -- how do humans do it? There are docs and there's other similar driver code. I wouldn't be surprised if Claude could build new driver code sight-unseen, given the appropriate resources
> But also -- how do humans do it?
Probably a mix of critical thinking, thinking from first principles, etc. You know, all things that LLM's are not capable of.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
That pesky GPL does not stop us anymore, cool.
What would the GPL have to do with this?
If the Linux driver is GPL and he made the new driver using AI to essentially copy it then claim that the result wasn't covered by the GPL... It's an area not settled by law yet.
Still not as bad as the guy who paid for a commercial license for some Linux driver, fed it into Claude to get it to update it to the latest Linux, and then released it as GPL! That's definitely not a grey area.
Absolutely mental behaviour for a business. What were they thinking?
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#64That AI was trained on the GPLv2 Linux source code, which does have a driver for your Wi-Fi. How is this not copyright laundering?
[dead]
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#65The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only dr…
Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?
Who is a competitor for Asahi? What would that even entail?
> Given that literally no one is enforcing this
Presumably Apple's lawyers would enforce it.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#67I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The driver used as inspiration is fully opensource
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/v6.18/drivers/net/wir...
I don't know why it has not been brought in the BSDs (maybe license), but they do are a bit more careful with what they include in the OS.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#68That AI was trained on the GPLv2 Linux source code, which does have a driver for your Wi-Fi. How is this not copyright laundering?
We'll know once these 51 cases have worked their way through the courts: https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/10/08/status-of-all...
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#69The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.
Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not
My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#70Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make use of this software without caution as expressed in the article. For most people the main difference will be: Will it run and solve my problem? Soon we will see malware being put into vibe coded software - who will wants to check every commit for write-only sof…
I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…
Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets.
Like what are we even doing here...