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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#21

Post by scosman »

spoiler wrote: post #12
hu3 wrote: post #4

I torn on where the line should be drawn. If the code is different but API compatible, Google Java vs Oracle Java case shows that if the implementation is different enough, it can be considered a new implementation. Clean room or not.

That whole clean room argument makes no sense. Project changed governance and was significantly refactored or reimplemented... I think the maintainers deserve to call it their own. Original-pre MIT release can stay LGPL. I don't think this is a precedent either, plenty of projects changed licenses lol. I keep kind mixing them up but the GPL licenses keep popping up as occasionally horror stories. Maybe the license is…

Governance change or refactoring don’t give you a right to relicense someone else’s work. It needs to be a whole new work, which you own the copyright to.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#22

Post by q3k »

> 12-stage detection pipeline

What is this recent (clanker-fueled?) obsession to give everything fancy computer-y names with high numbers?

It's not a '12 stage pipeline', it's just an algorithm.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#23

Post by fergie »

scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

Answer: probably not, as API-topography is also a part of copyright

Edit: this is wrong

Re: No right to relicense this project

#24

Post by oytis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #16
scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

This seems right to me. If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in al…

It requires the original project to not be in the training data for the model for it to be a clean room rewrite

Re: No right to relicense this project

#25

Post by fzeroracer »

charcircuit wrote: post #10
Radle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the ai copy pasted the existing project. How can such a procedure not fall under copyright? Especially now that ai can do this for any kind of intellectual property, like images, books or sourcecode. If judges would allow an ai rewrite to count as an original creation, copyright as we know it completely ends world wide. Instead whats more likely is that no one is gonna buy that shit

>the ai copy pasted the existing project. The change log says the implementation is completely different, not a copy paste. Is that wrong? >Internal architecture is completely different (probers replaced by pipeline stages). Only the public API is preserved.

It's up to them to prove that a) the original implementation was not part of whatever data set said AI used and b) that the engineers in question did not use the original as a basis.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#26

Post by Tiberium »

fergie wrote: post #23
scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

Answer: probably not, as API-topography is also a part of copyright Edit: this is wrong

Didn't the Google - Oracle case about Java APIs in Android https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_.... directly disprove this?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#27

Post by Keyframe »

fergie wrote: post #23
scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

Answer: probably not, as API-topography is also a part of copyright Edit: this is wrong

Wasn't Oracle vs Google about all of that?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#28

Post by littlecranky67 »

Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

Interesting case, IANAL but sounds legal and legit. The AI did not have expose to the backend it re-implemented. The API itself is public and not protectable.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#30

Post by nandomrumber »

Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

Maybe a better question is:

How do our competitors protect themselves against us doing this?

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