Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

blog.gitbutler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 318 posts

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#131

Post by joshka »

jhayward wrote: post #123
Philpax wrote: post #11

> In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead. Hmm. That's going to be interesting.

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but it seems pretty clear to me you can't wash a license using an LLM. [US jurisdiction]: Anything in the result written by the LLM can not be copyright by anyone. Anything in the result written by a human can be, and if it was all emitted by the LLM then that portion originally written by a human carries its own copyright. As a work of an LLM, the entirety presumably can not be copyright,…

> [US jurisdiction]: Anything in the result written by the LLM can not be copyright by anyone.

This is a bit stronger than the actual report where this has been discussed finds. See part 2 in https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ for details, but TL;DR, parts where humans have control over the expression may be copyrightable. But working out which parts those are is likely a difficult question (would likely require proof of provenance across many of those LLM sessions)

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#134

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

joshka wrote: post #59
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A GPL tool that processes data doesn't virally transfer the license to its output. Copyrighted ffmpeg code isn't incorporated into the video output. The LLM didn't just conjure up equivalent behavior to git without ingesting the code and transforming it as new output. There is no other behavioral description that would reproduce all needed functionality.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#135

Post by dakolli »

Yokohiii wrote: post #64
squidsoup wrote: post #43

I guess software licenses are meaningless now since anyone can decide their llm clone is not derivative.

Currently some act like it is fine to translate a project and change the license. Recently Casey Muratori said in a adjacent context that the microsoft AI push may be related to the fact that they have a long standing and elaborate codebase. A large historic software company could have advantages to train models. They could provide extra value with their IP. Now their IP is potentially in their models and accessible…

No one is training their models on their closed sourced proprietary code. They own github, why would they need to do this.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#136

Post by dakolli »

dstanko wrote: post #129

In 15+ years of using Git, I have not had a single crash. What problem are you solving???

This is a problem with people with LLM psychosis who now think they have superpowers, they are completely unaware and just do things naively, they've lost all ability to think for themselves. The LLMs that are thinking for them certainly aren't going to tell them doing X is a bad idea, they're there to produce as many tokens as possible for their owners.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#137

Post by nomel »

joshka wrote: post #57
nextaccountic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they would be just wrong. I hope someone with standing sues

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).

https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html

> It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.

Well that's interesting.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#138

Post by xiaoyu2006 »

Philpax wrote: post #11

> In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead. Hmm. That's going to be interesting.

Obligatory: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#139

Post by thewebguyd »

Philpax wrote: post #11

> In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead. Hmm. That's going to be interesting.

Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software and releasing under permissive licenses. Also why I'm not a fan of UUtils nor Canonical's early adoption of it in Ubuntu.

The intent here is extraction of all the value provided by copyleft projects without the obligation to give back. Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#140

Post by uecker »

ianm218 wrote: post #92
uecker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the risks of a rewrite - especially when using AI - are far more problematic than memory safety. In the long run those C projects will be memory safe in the next five years using memory safe C implementations.

My perspective is that it is good to have a beta in a lot of directions. No one really knows what the endgame of software security looks like. So some people should try the port to rust angle, some should focus on hardening the C, some should explore more exotic options like formally provable languages etc

There is nothing wrong with trying different things. But the fundamental problem here is that projects and their communities are social projects and need to be to fulfill their purposes and to ensure long term maintenance. In a free software context, rewrites just like forks (1) are fundamentally an asocial (2) activity because they fragment the community (if successful) and then increase overall maintenance burden if not able to replace the original project completely (rarely the case). Disrespect the license choice of the original authors makes this worse.

1) There may be situation were are fork makes sense (e.g. because one project can not serve different use cases well): 2) Which is why usually a "higher goal" is used to justify this, e.g. authors pretend (or lie to themselves, or may be be stupid enough to actually believe this) that some improvement in memory safety is really that important.

Post reply on HN