Torvalds' statement was incredibly disingenuous and rather sad. Every single commit is making a legal and political claim. Each commit is saying "this code is my original copyrighted work, and I am licensing it to the world per the requirements of the GNU GPLv2" (or "this code is someone else's work which was licensed under a compatible license, and I am integrating it into this GNU GPLv2 project"). That's not social…
> LLM generated code is a ticking time bomb, and is going to poison projects. Given the recent Anthropic ruling and OAI settlements, and the general stance of courts to look the other way when it comes to LLM use, I think an exemption for LLM-based software will be handwaved into existence (to my regret.)
I don't want to accuse the courts of intentionally siding with big corporations (I have no evidence to support such a claim anyway), but the only other option I see is that the courts are uninformed on either (A) the technology at play, or (B) the requirements of many software licenses.
Though, this should also apply to works licensed under variants of the Creative Commons (with Attribution), since once again, you can end up using parts of a work that requires attribution without even knowing that it's someone else's work (or at least without knowing its license requirements). There might be a better argument for generative AI images being transformative (though I think still a weak argument since you could almost certainly produce a 1:1 reproduction of a piece of training data, much like LLMs have already been pushed to doing with snippets from books).