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Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

blog.gitbutler.com

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Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#221

Post by gspr »

xiphias2 wrote: post #216
gspr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm terrified that this somehow seems acceptable to a large group of people. I'm baffled that other IP holders (say those who own valuable pieces of proprietary software, or music, or movies, or even the LLMs themselves) don't think leopards will come eat their faces next. This erosion of IP has to stop, or anyone who does any intellectual work will be absolutely screwed. If that only meant FOSS people, I'd be worrie…

Of course they are afraid of it, haven't you seen Dario being angry of Chinese companies paying for Claude access (tokens = test cases) and training their own model from those?

Well exactly!

I'm well aware of situations of potentially upending changes where the rich and powerful stand to gain, and the little guy's worries are ignored.

This, however, is clearly a potentially upending change where also lots of the rich and powerful – including those who control the very technology driving the change – have everything to lose. I'm surprised, to say it mildly, that nothing seems to be happening. Does Dario really believe that a strict ToS and stern words will keep his IP protected without appealing to the legal system? (I guess that is par for the course for the people who "solve" world problems with bunkers and armed guards…)

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#222

Post by Pet_Ant »

dayjaby wrote: post #218
schacon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's lots of really interesting opinions here from a lot of armchair lawyers. To clarify, my stance on this is that the reimplementation did not copy protected expressions (Jplag reports less than 1.8% max similarity between the codebases), it's done in good faith, and it's what's best for the broader Git ecosystem (assuming Grit even becomes usable, which it's currently not purported to be). From a copyrigh…

Hey AI, please change my stolen code in a non-breaking way so that jplag reports less than 1,8% similarity.

I mean ”hey artist, take this stolen character and make them legally distinct” is already a common thing.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#223

Post by bcjdjsndon »

20k wrote: post #220
spacechild1 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".

Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine

Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#224

Post by Pet_Ant »

spacechild1 wrote: post #219
20k wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)

That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".

> If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation.

That is the difference between necessary and sufficient. Clean-room is sufficient to guarantee avoiding copyright, but it is not necessary. The line legally is south of there, but that position was chosen because they didn’t want to crossing and it was easier to argue for legally in court.

tl;dr: clean room is overkill for avoiding copyright infringement

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#225

Post by bcjdjsndon »

spwa4 wrote: post #193
jbotz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case…

Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. 1) re-implementation for compatibility (which was quickly "reestablished" through use of copyright-protecting encryption. In other words: do you get to write software that connects to MS/Apple/Google/Facebook servers without authorization from those companies? Yes. Do you get to copy an encryption key from their software t…

> Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled.

When copyright law was established, not many poor people owned printing presses. That is to say, copyright law is a PROTECTION to the very rich, not an inconvenience

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#226

Post by fg137 »

schacon wrote: post #110
gpm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd seem weird to plan to use this until the readme stops saying > it has been nearly entirely written by agents and has not been used for realsies. It's probably currently unusably slow or completely broken in ways that are not exercised in the test suite. Right now it's someone else's experiment that is still in the "might or might not pan out" stage. There are a bunch of projects using the similar (not vibe coded…

I would not use this except to help us test it if interested. I'm announcing it because it's interesting and a milestone in the breadth of test coverage it can pass. It almost certainly cheated on a bunch of those tests and is not feature complete yet. The author of gitoxide is also working on GitButler (who worked on this project) and we're pushing both projects forward and actively using and developing Gitoxide as…

> because it's interesting and a milestone in the breadth of test coverage it can pass.

Sorry, no. Let me be candid and point out that this has achieved exactly nothing except lighting $8k on fire.

Put it this way: if I suggest to my boss, "I want to spend $8k of company money to port git to Rust to just see how many tests can pass in that project, even though I don't plan to develop new features with the project, and I don't care about adoption", he is going to shot down the idea in half a second and seriously question my competence.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#227

Post by saidnooneever »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #222
dayjaby wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey AI, please change my stolen code in a non-breaking way so that jplag reports less than 1,8% similarity.

I mean ”hey artist, take this stolen character and make them legally distinct” is already a common thing.

there are event exact measurements to take into account, for visual art, music etc. 'what is legally not stealing'.

Art, however, is a little different than code. code is a thing, but it also produces things.

It weirds me out there is a measure of code similarity but not a measure of if code is semantically the same. for example implementing a protocol could be done in many ways, but ultimately whats talked between clients/servers on the network is the same. so it's semantically the same despite being totally different code.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#228

Post by trumpdong »

joshka wrote: post #112
MBCook wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

test_sum is assumedly relatively trivial. So as a lay person I’d expect some sort of obviousness test to apply. Like so much of the stuff in the Google/Oracle lawsuit. But if you take all the individual tests used to test git as a whole, that seems far more unique. Seems like at that point you’re really having to duplicate the actual git internals, and that seems like it should be covered.

> test_sum is assumedly relatively trivial. So as a lay person I’d expect some sort of obviousness test to apply. Like so much of the stuff in the Google/Oracle lawsuit. Feel free to extrapolate to the threshold where it's not and at that point apply. > you’re really having to duplicate the actual git internals Copyright covers the expression, not the method. So the Rust function: fn sum(a: u8, b: u8) { a + b } is di…

That's not copyrightable because it's trivial.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#229

Post by spwa4 »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #225
spwa4 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. 1) re-implementation for compatibility (which was quickly "reestablished" through use of copyright-protecting encryption. In other words: do you get to write software that connects to MS/Apple/Google/Facebook servers without authorization from those companies? Yes. Do you get to copy an encryption key from their software t…

> Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled. When copyright law was established, not many poor people owned printing presses. That is to say, copyright law is a PROTECTION to the very rich, not an inconvenience

true but as the exception for model training (which can only be done by very, very rich people and organizations) shows, there's some new rich and they want new rules.

Against the will of the people, as evidenced by the court cases and protests online ...

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