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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#31

Post by spoiler »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #15
spoiler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.

So effective, LGPL means you freely give all copyright for your work to the license holder? Even if the license holder has moved on from the project?

What if I decide to make a JS or Rust implementation of this project and use it as inspiration? Does that mean I'm no longer doing a "clean room" implementation and my project is contaminated by LGPL too?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#33

Post by actionfromafar »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #9
mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL). Edit: my understanding of "clean room…

I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice , I’m not sure it’s wrong . A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know. I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ appr…

I thought we were debating if it was legal, not if it's wrong. The law is about creativity. Was this creative or a more mechanical translation?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#34

Post by IanCal »

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…

You might be interested in the dark factory work here https://factory.strongdm.ai/

They do something very similar for some of their work. It’s hard to use external services so they replicate them and the cost of doing so has come down from “don’t be daft, we can’t reimplement slack and google drive this sprint just to make testing faster” to realistic. They run the sdks against the live services and their own implementations until they don’t see behaviour differences. Now they have a fast slack and drive and more (that do everything they need for their testing) accelerating other work. I’m dramatically shifting my concept of what’s expensive and not for development. What you’re describing could have been done by someone before, but the difficulty of building that backend has dropped enormously. Even if the application was closed you could probably either now or soon start to do the same thing starting with building back to core user stories and building the app as well.

You can view some of this as having things like the application as a very precise specification.

Really fascinating moment of change.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#35

Post by bandrami »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #28
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.

OTOH as of yesterday the output of the LLM isn't copyrightable, which makes licensing it difficult

Re: No right to relicense this project

#36

Post by mytailorisrich »

klustregrif wrote: post #3
mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL). Edit: my understanding of "clean room…

It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to pr…

> “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite”

This is not a good analogy.

A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#37

Post by scosman »

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

The courts decided that wasn’t true for IBM, Java and many other cases. API typography describes functionality, which isn’t copyrightable (IANAL).

Re: No right to relicense this project

#40

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

If the platform is so trivial that it can be reverse engineered by an AI agent from a dumb frontend, what's there to protect against? One has to assume that their moat is not that part of the backend but something else entirely about how the service is being provided.

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