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Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

blog.codeberg.org

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Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#121

Post by lenkite »

arkwin wrote: post #120
lenkite wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source developer: I'm going to open source my software so the world can use it for whatever they want! No, you are describing a SPECIFIC License called the The Unlicense: https://opensource.org/license/unlicense This is ONLY ONE such OSS license and does not apply to all OSS.

US courts have ruled (for better or worse) that using code to train LLMs is a transformative piece of work and not subject to the original copyright.

US Supreme Court has yet to make any explicit ruling though. It The EU top court (CJEU) is currently hearing arguments. I guess we will know in 2027-28 globally.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#122

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

petcat wrote: post #56
conartist6 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if copyright was part of it, but their blog post didn't mention copyright. For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.

> People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output In the US at least, the PTO has not said this. They have said that artwork is not copyrightable if it was substantially "generated" with little human input. They have not said anything about software or other creative works. And certainly nothing about software that has been carefully "vibe engineered" with lots of human input, direction, and review…

> It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.

Why would they have different rules for one potentially copyrightable material versus another?

What the PTO (courts, actually) have not said is how much and what kinds of work a human must perform to transform a machine-generated work into a copyrightable work. It could be that this would be domain specific (i.e. different rules for software and art). But totally different rules entirely for software and art? Seems unlikely to me.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#123

Post by saltcured »

arkwin wrote: post #75
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are not creating software with the exact rules that I have made up in my head on how software should be made, so I'm going to build a wall and hate you and the code you make. The funny thing about this comment is out of the gate it screams the exact reason people don't want the LLM generated code in their zone. This reads similar to people who make prompt art getting upset that they're not taken seriously. Peop…

I can see the point you are trying to make, and I'll make a counterpoint to that. When you play the "didn't earn" card, you are really getting nowhere. It's a bad argument. It's putting up the gate, "I feel you didn't work hard enough for X result, but I did, so I must be better" I drive a manual car. Should I hate every automatic car driver? I have a master's degree in cybersecurity; should I shit on everyone who do…

Hiring a great F1 driver does not make a racing team owner a great driver.

Some of the people shoveling LLM slop seem to miss that point.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#124

Post by devmor »

graemep wrote: post #100
devmor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were sincerely meant to be for people's own good That is an incredibly offensive bastardization of history.

Its very rare for people do deliberately do bad things. Almost everyone thinks they are doing the right thing. My point (which I think should be apparent in my original comment) is that we should look at doing things "for their own good" has a very bad history. Now do you get it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

Your phrasing in the post I replied to is not the phrasing you are using now.

People frequently do bad things to people that they think are the right thing and that they still know are not “for [the victim’s] own good”. For example, removing an entire group of people from society is often presented as “for the good of everyone else”.

This is an incredibly important distinction when talking about the horrific ways gay people have been treated in the past couple centuries.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#125

Post by arkwin »

duped wrote: post #89
arkwin wrote: post #48

[flagged]

Developers who use LLMs: You are telling me that you have moral/ethical/practical issues with how I work but I'm going to ignore what you say to justify how I'm not at fault. That's what these replies sound like to me.

The moral/ethical high ground argument just spirals.

Oh you drive a car? You should justify that to me.

Oh you bought any piece of clothing, tech, etc where it was made in countries with cheap labor and bad labor laws? You should justify that to me.

Oh you use electricity? Idk some of that is made via non-renewable resources.

Oh you eat meat? So much animal suffering and land is being wasted.

I get using an LLM has some problems. But I find it ironic that for most people, they didn't have a problem with any of this until it started to affect their job and their expertise.. And their paycheck.

Where was your outcry for anything else? Or is it just performative?

I sure hope you are also only using products and services derived from union labor.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#126

Post by hombre_fatal »

arkwin wrote: post #118
hombre_fatal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The flippant nature of people expecting the same respect for some piece of work that was churned out by a machine, as someone who understands every part. > with people who have fully adopted claude in their work flows. They don't care about the code they push. This just isn't true and it's the cynnical self-limiting assumption the belies rules like the TFA. It's like when HN was full of people claiming that you wer…

Thank you; that is probably a better way to put into words what I am feeling. I've never called myself a developer. But I've been playing with Linux and looking at code for the better part of 20 years. I've done a lot of larger solution development. "Glue code," etc. I think I use LLMs quite well. I mean, on some level, I understand software architecture and system architecture. I've (before LLMs) had a master's degr…

And I'd just grant the fact that LLM enables more low quality, low effort spam. Just like how opening up the internet to more people instead of just the research/academic nerds led to the same thing.

But the problem is a low quality spam problem, not a "people use LLMs at all" nor a "people don't care about the code like real artisanal engineers" problem. Neither of which are something you can police btw since they can't be proven.

How do you build a platform that is resistant to spam and low quality submissions? If you want an honor system, why not set the self-policing bar at low quality content instead of what you feel is a proxy for it?

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#128

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

inigyou wrote: post #34
e2le wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hub of mostly human written software would be enough. It remains to be seen whether that results in measurably better quality code over the long term.

Think about all the random git repos you've probably created for little scripts. Codeberg doesn't want to be a dumping ground for those. It wants to be a hub for software that actually matters, at least a little bit.

I would love to see other people's random little scripts. Those things tend to go hard on usefulness per amount of code.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#129

Post by graemep »

devmor wrote: post #124
graemep wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very rare for people do deliberately do bad things. Almost everyone thinks they are doing the right thing. My point (which I think should be apparent in my original comment) is that we should look at doing things "for their own good" has a very bad history. Now do you get it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

Your phrasing in the post I replied to is not the phrasing you are using now. People frequently do bad things to people that they think are the right thing and that they still know are not “for [the victim’s] own good”. For example, removing an entire group of people from society is often presented as “for the good of everyone else”. This is an incredibly important distinction when talking about the horrific ways gay…

My meaning was clear. You are reading something I did not say into my comment. I have added to what I said, but my last comment does not contradict anything in my previous comment.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#130

Post by nazgulsenpai »

tptacek wrote: post #57

This makes sense. The largest project hosted on Codeberg today is, what, Zig? Zig is also openly hostile to LLM agents. It's a a clear identity for the site: a home for projects that identify as anti-LLM. I disagree with basically all of the logic they're using here, but that's the point: not every site needs to be for every person. Clearly there are quite a few software developers who agree vehemently with the stanc…

Tangential but one day when bored at work, I browsed the GitHub discussions for Helix, my main text editor, and the most active thread was regarding adopting an LLM policy for the repo[0]. The maintainer thought it would be beneficial to use an LLM policy similar to Ghostty which is AI friendly with human review. Now the whole topic is "brigaded" by a small number of extremely passionate anti-AI voices that immediately react positively to any pushback against AI usage and negatively to anyone who isn't staunchly anti-AI. Even when presented with, in my opinion, reasonable middle-ground such as only merging maintainable code, the counter-arguments are mostly against the harms of AI (mostly datacenter related) dismissing AI outright and refusal give an any ground.

It's a real impasse where the pro-AI or indifferent opinions seem to simply stop posting when they realize there is going to be no real debate, and the anti-AI individuals swarm on any new input.

My personal opinion is I don't care either way -- AI is a tool and if contributors use that tool to improve code or the product, I could care less. I just find this interesting.

[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/15408

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