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Coding agents could make free software matter again

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Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#201

Post by 3form »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #173
j_bum wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if the analogy is yours, but the scribe note really struck a chord with me. I’m not a professionally trained SWE (I’m a scientist who does engineering work). LLMs have really accelerated my ability to build, ideate, and understand systems in a way that I could only loosely gain from sometimes grumpy but mostly kind senior engineers in overcrowded chat rooms. The legality of all of this is dubious, though…

Sharing for advancing humanity / benefit of society, and megacorps getting rich off it, is not either-or. On the contrary, megacorps are in part how the benefit to society materializes. After all, it's megacorps that make and distribute the equipment and the software stacks I am using to write code on, that you are using to do your research on, etc. I find the whole line of thinking, "I won't share my stuff because t…

LLMs are one thing, but when you bring ES in AWS example, as outlined in the article, the problem is not the software being used; it's being _made proprietary_. It's about free and open software remaining free and open. Especially to the end user.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#202

Post by Towaway69 »

A question I have for those doing Agentic coding - what is the development process used? How are agents organised?

Top down with a "manager" agent telling "coding" agents what to do? I.e. mirroring the existing corporate interpretation of "agile"/scrum development.

I was thinking and seeing the title of this article, it would be interesting to setup a agent environment that mirrors a typical open source project involving a discussion forum (where features are thrown around) and a github issue/PR (where implementation details are discussed) and then have a set of agents that are "mergers" - acting as final review instances.

I assume that agents can be organised in any form at all, it's just a matter of setting up the system prompt and then letting them go for it. A discourse forum could be set up where agents track the feature requests of users of the software and then discuss how to implement it or how to workaround it.

The reason I ask is because one could then do a direct comparison of development processes, i.e. the open source model versus the corporate top-down process. It would interest me to see which process performance better in terms of maintainability, quality and feature richness.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#203

Post by gf000 »

Grokify wrote: post #119
As1287 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we'll have 100 2-star repositories per software developer containing stolen code and that is somehow a good thing? It is completely delusional that these copied "works" will have any effect or be used by anyone but the most rabid AI proponents just to make a point.

If there's any stolen code generated by AI, it's certainly not intentional and a DMCA notice would be appreciated. It would be interesting to see how prevalent this is in AI generated code - is anyone doing a study? Stars will likely go up over time, but more than the stars it's the testing and maintenance over time that's valuable. There's little promotion right now, but there are already some stars, PRs, and issues…

Well, is slightly modified regurgitated code a copy or not? We have yet to have it answered in the age of AI, but e.g. I could not be selling Mickey Mouse merch with a simple color filter on for long.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#204

Post by pegasus »

latexr wrote: post #179
627467 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour. My 2c: - AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all…

> AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. No, no we are not. > the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago. I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong informat…

But LLMs can also explain code, in fact they're fantastic at that. They can also be used to build anti-censorship, surveillance-avoidance and fact-checking tools. We are all empowered by them, it's just up to us to employ them so as to nudge society towards where we'd like it to go. Instead of giving up prematurely.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#205

Post by 63stack »

archagon wrote: post #92
bluefirebrand wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrap…

Traditionally, large corporations have taken very conservative legal stances with regard to integrating e.g. A/GPL code, even when there's almost no risk. If my license explicitly says "any LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted," I feel like BigAICorp would be foolish to ignore it. Maybe I couldn't sue them today, but are they confident this will remain the case 5, 10, 20 years from now? Everywhere in th…

Github has posted that they will now train on everyone's data (even private) unless you opt out (until they change their mind on that). Anthropic has been training on your data on certain tiers already. Meta bittorrented books to train their models.

Surely if your license says "LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted", it is going to dissuade them.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#206

Post by Grokify »

gf000 wrote: post #203
Grokify wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's any stolen code generated by AI, it's certainly not intentional and a DMCA notice would be appreciated. It would be interesting to see how prevalent this is in AI generated code - is anyone doing a study? Stars will likely go up over time, but more than the stars it's the testing and maintenance over time that's valuable. There's little promotion right now, but there are already some stars, PRs, and issues…

Well, is slightly modified regurgitated code a copy or not? We have yet to have it answered in the age of AI, but e.g. I could not be selling Mickey Mouse merch with a simple color filter on for long.

Agree it will be interesting to see how things play out. There's enough permissive open-source licensed code available that using that only could be an option.

As for Mickey, is the difference from Oswald enough today?

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#207

Post by claud_ia »

est31 wrote: post #64

If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are: 1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos 2. the best models are proprietary 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going…

[dead]

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#208

Post by fsflover »

eru wrote: post #167
input_sh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem like the type of person that will believe anything as long as someone cites a case without looking into it. Bartz v Anthropic only looked at books, and there was still a 1.5 billion settlement that Anthropic paid out because it got those books from LibGen / Anna's Archive, and the ruling also said that the data has to be acquired "legitimately". Whether data acquired from a licence that specifically forbids…

As long as they don't distribute the model's weights, even a strict interpretation of the GPL should be fine. Same reason Google doesn't have to upstream changes to the Linux kernel they only deploy in-house.

How about AGPL?

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#209

Post by mr_toad »

advael wrote: post #145
tpmoney wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid…

Broadly speaking, GPL is a license that has specific provisions about creating derivative software from the licensed work, and just saying "fair use" doesn't exempt you from those provisions. More specifically, an advertised use case (in fact, arguably the main one at this stage) of the most popular closed models as they're currently being used is to produce code, some of which is going to be GPL licensed. As such, t…

> Broadly speaking, GPL is a license that has specific provisions about creating derivative software from the licensed work, and just saying "fair use" doesn't exempt you from those provisions.

Broadly speaking, yes it does. The whole point of fair use is that you don’t need a license.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#210

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

mapcars wrote: post #199
samiv wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work. His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone els…

> Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own These don't contradict each other though, you could "blatantly plagiarize someone else work" before as well. LLMs just add another layer in between.

Copyright violation would happen before LLMs yes, but it would have to be done by a person who either didn’t understand copyright (which is not a valid defence in court), or intentionally chose to ignore it.

With LLMs, future generations are growing up with being handed code that may or not be a verbatim copy of something that someone else originally wrote with specific licensing terms, but with no mention of any license terms or origin being provided by the LLM.

It remains to be seen if there will be any lawsuits in the future specifically about source code that is substantially copied from someone else indirectly via LLM use. In any case I doubt that even if such lawsuits happen they will help small developers writing open source. It would probably be one of the big tech companies suing other companies or persons and any money resulting from such a lawsuit would go to the big tech company suing.

IANAL, TINLA.

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