81–90 of 318 posts
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Buddy, I think it is time to not engage with these models for a bit, you seem to have lost your mind.
We're literally in a thread on converting legacy C projects to idiomatic Rust? It seems many people are working on this same problem.
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I suspect that the issue is more likely that the LLM code doesn't have an author and hence some parts of it can't be licenses, it's less likely that it's infringing on git's copyright for various reasons. (I am not a lawyer, but I do read copyright law for funsies).
why wouldn't it? If you run git through a compiler it's still copyright the git devs, same if you run it through an LLM.
Reimplementation is a particularly juicy target because it's easy to test. Imagine someone writing a better browser than Chrome from scratch in just a year.
Because of this moats around business due to difficulty of implementation are effectively gone.
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It probably would have been less bad if he had chosen MPL-2.0 or LGPL-2.1-or-later. But he chose MIT, which cuts at the core of the intent of licensing the project with a share-alike license.
Tell me, can I create a copyrighted video that's not GPL licensed using ffmpeg? Now tell me how creating a rust library using the git test suite is different?
That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...
But for the sake of argument: The test suite itself is copyrighted. To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly infringing. For example you might example that the agent would derive variable names, function names, structure sequence and organization of the code from the test suite. It might even copy comments wholesale. Those are copyrightable things. (Which is of course just the first step in analyzing if it is infringement, there would be interesting fair use, de-minimis copying, etc arguments following a conclusion that any of those were copyrighted. A product produced this way definitely could be infringing given the right facts though).
I’m all for memory safety and such but honestly what’s the use case for this? Showing off agentic development? In 10+ years git has never failed on a memory overflow or else. Sometimes software is “good as is” and I’m pretty confident git classifies as such. I’ve also never really hit the limitations of git, even with teams of 20+ developers and lots of binary artefacts. You got to really stretch git limitations, in…
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I don't think it's that clear cut. The functional parts probably aren't copyrightable, only the stylistic ones. It's going to be a mix of courts applying laws in new ways that hasn't been done before and fact specific questions about what actually persisted through the LLM if it goes to court. I'd be fascinated to see what happens if it does. Both in the analyses that we'd get of what the LLM did to the codebase and…
functional parts not being copyrightable means that you can't claim a program is a copyright violation based on the fact it does the exact same thing based on compatibility reasons (you can copy what the program does). E.g. git stores refs in .git/refs, so does grit, that's not a violation. You still can't copy the program.
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Tell me, can I create a copyrighted video that's not GPL licensed using ffmpeg? Now tell me how creating a rust library using the git test suite is different?
Medium, substitutibility, basics of copyright law.
Substitutibility probably doesn't apply here in the way you're implying and if it did it would likely be hampered by the 9th circuits findings about transformation in sony v connectix. Arguments here likely would look at rust not having a stable ABI, and hence not being inherently substitutable as a libray (grit-lib), less clear as an executable (grit-cli) on that side
basics of copyright law - the fundamental thing being protected is the expression... is a rust program's expression the same expression as a c program? I'd say generally not.
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functional parts not being copyrightable means that you can't claim a program is a copyright violation based on the fact it does the exact same thing based on compatibility reasons (you can copy what the program does). E.g. git stores refs in .git/refs, so does grit, that's not a violation. You still can't copy the program.
Yes... and now we get to the fact specific question of "did they copy the program". Or actually the answer to that is plainly "no" - they made something similar from it - and didn't run ctrl-c ctrl-v in an unlicensed manner, but "did they copy the relevant facets of the program into the new similar thing".
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Asking an LLM "here's a thing, rewrite it in Rust" is pretty clearly creating either a derivative work or a different form of the same work, just like asking a transpiler would.
There's no evidence that "here's a thing, rewrite it in Rust" is the technique Scott used here. "here's a test suite, write code in rust that makes that suite pass" is reasonably supported by the article. That would likely not be a derivative work.
IMO, IANAL, etc.
And we’ll ignore the question of what the fact the LLM has certainly seen the git code during training means.
But the test suite would have to stay under the original license. And if you use a GPL test suite as they kernel to develop a program from can you license it non-GPL? I’d question that personally. Same acronyms above apply.
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Tell me, can I create a copyrighted video that's not GPL licensed using ffmpeg? Now tell me how creating a rust library using the git test suite is different?
> using the git test suite That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou... But for the sake of argument: The test suite itself is copyrighted. To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly infringing. For example you might example that the agent would derive variable…
yeah fair - the "The canonical Git source code we're targeting to replicate the functionality of is in the git/ subdirectory." part makes this hard to argue against.
> To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly infringing
It's this bit that I have a problem with. If I run the test, it fails and reports a failure. Now I write code and run the test again. What is the theory there that code that I wrote infringes.
Simplify this down:
Assume the following is copyrighted:
fn test_sum() {
assert_eq!(sum(1, 1), 2);
}
fn sum(a: u8, b: u8) {
a + b
}