Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

> But this has never been a condition in the FOSS world, as far as I'm aware. I've only ever seen attribution requirements attach to redistribution of source, not usage of the software.

AGPL requires that even users using the software even across a network must be provided with a way to get the license (i.e. attribution) and source. Never mind that LLMs consume the source code instead of "using" the software anyway. (and of course things go more downhill for LLMs for licenses more restrictive than AGPL)

Otherwise, I'd say that, for many, the ideal condition for (copyleft) FOSS would be that anything that utilizes source code in any form also provides said source code and license/attribution. Sometimes that can even extend to outputs of software (and e.g. gcc takes time to explicitly state that its compiled code output does not count as being derived from gcc's code).

> whether training an LLM is redistribution of the underlying code

There's a funky side-note of whether LLM training can even be done on material with improperly-followed licensing; if you don't even have the permission to modify the material (as properly following MIT/GPL/etc would give you), it might be illegal to even tokenize it, never mind use it for training.

> That's literally all LLMs do. That's what tokenization is.

It's clearly not that simple, otherwise "split source into 10-char chunks, reverse that list, reverse it back, join this fun list we've gotten" would be enough to circumvent copyright.

> all you'll see on the LLM side is probability matrices representing correlations between decomposed units of knowledge aggregated across the entire dataset as an integrated whole.

Yeah, you need at least that, tokenization is irrelevant. But jury's out on this one - of course a good chunk is some form of "abstract knowledge", but other parts could be just encoding material in some compressed form (and surely gzipping a source code file doesn't circumvent copyright) that at the very least can apply to weights.

> The only intent ever in play is that of the user. LLMs are just software.

So my split-into-words-and-join-back is valid circumvention of copyright, if the user of some software doing that isn't informed that it's just effectively directly copying material. (I'll grant that perhaps, in such, the accidental-infringer might get a smaller penalty and/or get to defer punishment to whoever mismarketed the software to them,...but that wouldn't apply to anyone who knows that LLMs are very much just directly trained on copyrighted material. Don't know about legally derived, but surely mathematically derived)

Never mind that, for some things, learning some specific copyrighted code is the desired thing (humans do do this after all!), at which point at the very least the weights of the model are as copyright-infused as a gzipped source code file is.

If intent determination is on the user, and the user is aware that LLMs are very much technically capable of producing copyrighted works to some extent (which they better be), it would be on the user to ensure that any specific code they end up using is not, which is...a rather non-trivial task (a human that writes code can also reasonably-reason about whether they're infringing on whatever they learned from, but splitting into LLM writing + human checking fundamentally makes that basically infeasible).

That's just the licensing part. The license says something, but a license doesn't turn people into slaves. The desire or decision to produce software has to come first and only then does code with a license exist.

Before AI and in the early days of FOSS, people assumed that the primary recipient of code sharing were other FOSS enthusiasts, in the form of developers and users.

Then there was a wave of permissive licensing, which obviously brought with it corporate interests, however, this was easily foreseeable and many people who favored permissive licensing intentionally did so to appeal to corporate users, so the risk of them quitting due to perceived abuse was slim.

Now that LLMs are a thing, the primary recipient of a lone developer working on his project isn't really another human being. This human connection is now lost. Instead, your project is now laundered through the model and the model vendor can get away with ignoring your terms and conditions and let others write proprietary software.

In this transition period there were developers who thought that there was always going to be a human connection (even if part of a corporation), but then things changed and they realized their world view was wrong. Given the arrival of this new information, they obviously change their behavior in accordance to how the world actually is.

> designed to maximize source availability

Right. It depends on what you mean by "use"; GPL maximizes use in the sense that it prevents anyone from taking the code proprietary and thereby restricting future users' access. But it doesn't touch my actual point, which is that GPL explicitly permits commercial use, broad distribution, and also LLM training (none of which are restricted by the license). The source availability requirement is the condition, not a restriction on who can use the code.

> why would anyone pay if they can just use the source

Red Hat, Qt, and countless others have built commercial businesses on GPL code. So apparently there is a business and people willing to pay even if the source code is available. But that was not my point anyway.

It's his code and of course he can decide what to do with it. I just think it's a shame when people make hasty, ill-considered decisions based on misunderstandings and false assumptions. Copyright law is (unfortunately) much more complicated than most people realize. There's also an irony worth noting: many of the same developers who expect free access to compilers, libraries, and frameworks built by companies and use them without a second thought, are the ones loudest about 'exploitation' when the flow goes the other direction. Open source is a two-way street. Personally, I think it's great when people (both individuals and companies) use my software and I've been able to make a contribution to society through it.

Yes, I think the reaction is disproportionate. The philosophical concern is understandable, but withdrawing the project doesn't address it; it just removes something valuable from people who aren't responsible for the problem he perceives.

And companies are ultimately owned by people, including ordinary savers whose pension funds depend on them, and they employ people, so they contribute to society.