No right to relicense this project • Hacker News Board

Re: No right to relicense this project

#51

Post by bo1024 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

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 agree that (while the ethics of this are a different issue) the copyright question is not obviously clear-cut. Though IANAL.

As the LGPL says:

> A "work based on the Library" means either the Library or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Library or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)

Is v7.0.0 a [derivative work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work)? It seems to depend on the details of the source code (implementing the same API is not copyright infringement).

Re: No right to relicense this project

#52

Post by justinclift » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

spoiler wrote: post #31

DarkmSparks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The standard way of "relicensing" a project is to contact all of the prior code contributors about it and get their ok.

Generally relicensing is done in good faith for a good reason, so pretty much everyone ok's it.

Trickiness can turn up when code contributors aren't contactable (ie dead, missing, etc), and I'm unsure of the legally sound approach to that.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#53

Post by orwin » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

actionfromafar wrote: post #39

p0w3n3d wrote: post #29

Wow that's hot. I was not aware that you need to be "untainted" by the original LGPL code. This could mean that... All AI generated code is tainted with GPL/LGPL because the LLMs might have been taught with it

[flagged]

I'm not lonely! And I stopped shouting that since 24, because you know :/

Re: No right to relicense this project

#54

Post by spoiler » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

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.

Ok since this is not really answered... Hypothetically, If I'm a maintainer of this project. I decided I hate the implementation, it's naive, horrible performance, weird edge cases. I'm wiser today than 3 years ago.

I rewrite it, my head full of my own, original, new ideas. The results turn out great. There's a few if and while loops that look the same, and some public interfaces stayed the same. But all the guts are brand new, shiny, my own.

Do I have no rights to this code?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#55

Post by vova_hn2 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:43 AM UTC

spoiler wrote: post #38

imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

I like to think about GPL as a kind of an artistic performance and an elaborate critique of the whole concept of copyright.

Like, "we don't like copyright, but since you insist on enforcing it and we can't do anything against it, we will invent a clever way to use your own rules against you".

Re: No right to relicense this project

#56

Post by senko » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #35

littlecranky67 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a very incorrect reading.

AI can't be the author of the work. Human driving the AI can, unless they zero-shotted the solution with no creative input.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#57

Post by oytis » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #49

oytis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it? This can be checked for (by the team with access to the code) and it's also quite unlikely at least. It's not trivial at all to have an LLM replicate their training verbatim: even when feasible (the Harry Potter case, a work that's going to be massively overweighted in training due to its popularity) it takes very s…

> That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it?

No, I don't think so. I hate comparing LLMs with humans, but for a human being familiar with the original code might disqualify them from writing a differently-licensed version.

Anyway, LLMs are not human, so as many courts confirmed, their output is not copyrightable at all, under any license.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#58

Post by spoiler » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #41

DarkmSparks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmm are we in a ship of Theseus/speciation area? Each individual step of refactoring would not cross the threshold but would a rewrite? Even if the end result was the same?

Let us also remember that certain architectural changes need to happen over a period of planned refractors. Nobody wants to read a 5000 line shotgun-blast looking diff

Re: No right to relicense this project

#59

Post by Orygin » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

spoiler wrote: post #38

imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

Wtf are these comments? A LGPL licensed project, guaranteed to be free and open source, being LLM-washed to a permissive license, and GPL is the problem here?

They are literally stealing from open source, but it's the original license that is the issue?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#60

Post by ShowalkKama » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

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…

If your backend is trivial enough to be implemented by a large language model, what value are you providing?

I know it's a provoking question but that answers why a competitor is not a competitor.