Perhaps software patents may play an even bigger role in the future.
Or, hopefully, even less of a role.
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
51–60 of 623 posts
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#52I don't think this part is correct: "If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms."
That's what something like AGPL does.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#53You can't put a copyright and MIT license on something you generated with AI. It is derived from the work of many unknown, uncredited authors.
Think about it; the license says that copies of the work must be reproduced with the copyright notice and licensing clauses intact. Why would anyone obey that, knowing it came from AI?
Countless instances of such licenses were ignored in the training data.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#54> Ronacher notes this as an irony and moves on. But the irony cuts deeper than he lets on. Next.js is MIT licensed. Cloudflare's vinext did not violate any license—it did exactly what Ronacher calls a contribution to the culture of openness, applied to a permissively licensed codebase. Vercel's reaction had nothing to do with license infringement; it was purely competitive and territorial. The implicit position is: r…
I'm failing to see what in the quoted text you took to be about AI rewrites specifically? It just reads as a slightly catty aside about the social reaction of rewrites in general (by implying the one example is generalizable.)
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyleft is a mirror of copyright, not a way to fight copyright. It grants rights to the consumer where copyright grants rights to the creator. Importantly, it gives the end-user the right to modify the software running on their devices. Unfortunately, there are cases where you simply can't just "re-implement" something. E.g., because doing so requires access to restricted tools, keys, or proprietary specifications.
These are words of Stallman: "So, I looked for a way to stop that from happening. The method I came up with is called “copyleft.” It's called copyleft because it's sort of like taking copyright and flipping it over. [Laughter] Legally, copyleft works based on copyright. We use the existing copyright law, but we use it to achieve a very different goal." https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/
> flipping it over.
i.e. mirroring it
> use it to achieve a very different goal."
"very different goal" isn't the same as "fundamentally destroying copyright"
the very different goal include to protect public code to stay public, be properly attributed, prevent companies from just "sizing" , motivate other to make their code public too etc.
and even if his goals where not like that, it wouldn't make a difference as this is what many people try to archive with using such licenses
this kind of AI usage is very much not in line with this goals,
and in general way cheaper to do software cloning isn't sufficient to fix many of the issues the FOSS movement tried to fix, especially not when looking at the current ecosystem most people are interacting with (i.e. Phones)
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("sizing"): As in the typical MS embrace, extend and extinguish strategy of first embracing the code then giving it proprietary but available extensions/changes/bug fixes/security patches to then make them no longer available if you don't pay them/play by their rules.
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Through in the end using AI as a "fancy complicated" photocopier for code is as much removing copyright as using a photocopier for code would. It doesn't matter if you use the photocopier blind folded and never looked at the thing you copied.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#56Broadly speaking, the “freedom of users” is often protected by competition from competing alternatives. The GNU command line tools were replacements for system utilities. Linux was was a replacement for other Unix kernels. People chose to install them instead of proprietary alternatives. Was it due to ideology or lower cost or more features? All of the above. Different users have different motivations.
Copyleft could be seen as an attempt to give Free Software an edge in this competition for users, to counter the increased resources that proprietary systems can often draw on. I think success has been mixed. Sure, Linux won on the server. Open source won for libraries downloaded by language-specific package managers. But there’s a long tail of GPL apps that are not really all that appealing, compared to all the proprietary apps available from app stores.
But if reimplementing software is easy, there’s just going to be a lot more competition from both proprietary and open source software. Software that you can download for free that has better features and is more user-friendly is going to have an advantage.
With coding agents, it’s likely that you’ll be able to modify apps to your own needs more easily, too. Perhaps plugin systems and an AI that can write plugins for you will become the norm?
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#57This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures: 1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not…
There’s an other option. The cost of copying existing software trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#58I believe it is a narrow view of the situation. If we take a look into the history, into the reasons for inventing GPL, we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights. The very name 'copyleft' is trying to convey the idea. What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated i…
> LLM as the main weapon LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation. Perhaps with time we…
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones
There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#59It's clear that we're entering a new era of copyright _expectations_ (whether we get new _legislation_ is different), but for now realise this: the people like me who like copyleft can do this too. We can take software we like, point an agent at it, and tell it to make a new version with the AGPL3.0-or-later badge on the front.
But the LLM contributions would likely be ruled public domain, so AGPL may not be enforceable on these.
Re: Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it. What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that…
if the actual text of the code isn't the same or obviously derivative, copyright doesn't apply at all.
What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.