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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

#141

Post by jamesfinlayson »

jordand wrote: post #60
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quake III in Python Probably doable - I remember most of Natural Selection 2 was Lua and it's more than a decade old at this point.

For Natural Selection 2, it was mainly the gameplay logic that was Lua, all running on their bespoke C++ game engine called Spark. But yeah, modern Python and Lua can be pushed to high performance. Link: https://unknownworlds.com/en/news/spark-engine-questions-and...

Ah my mistake - I know they ditched Source to pursue their own engine and thought they were going all in on Lua, but doing the whole engine in Lua would have been a struggle I think.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#142

Post by Ar-Curunir »

thewebguyd wrote: post #139
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.

That’s explicitly not what’s happening with uutils; they have contributed fixes and test cases back to upstream

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#143

Post by 201984 »

schacon wrote: post #121
ewy1 wrote: post #37

pretty dystopian to ask a robot to recreate your favorite software just so you can relicense it for your business venture

We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community. Our goal is a linkable library, which makes GPL impossible. If we had chosen to go with LGPL or GPL with linking exception (like libgit2), it would have the same issue of changing the license, so we went with whatever was the most permissive so everyone could use it for anything if they wish. This has nothing to do with business - I hope I can get the p…

>We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community.

What a weaselly way to put it.

A GPL library, as I'm sure you know, is perfectly usable by anyone including jujutsu and anyone else. They just have to also license under the GPL and this is no barrier to open source projects.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#144

Post by jmyeet »

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.

Knowing what you don't know is such an important skill in life and your career. And I 100% agree with you that the author is, well, off their rocker.

Let me give an example: I could take Goldeneye from the N64, extract the binary and then run it through an LLM to disassemble it and possibly rewrite it in a modern higher-level language. Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.

ingesting the source code and producing output in another language is quite clearly a derivative work. You don't need to be an IP lawyer to figure that out.

Now, if you went to Calude and gave it documentation and told it to produce something that was compatible, would that be a derivative work and thus covered by the GPL? I would guess probably. But I'm not 100% sure anymore. I wouldn't risk it however.

Here's another thought experiment: what if someone takes this supposedly MIT licensed source tree, plugs it into another LLM and asks it to produce the output in C? Now how is it licensed? It might be very similar. After all, there are only so many ways to produce a SHA1 hash and so many ways to do a command line parser.

But this then makes it an interesting legal issue. In the Oracle v. Google court case, this was a key issue. Google successfully argued there's only so many ways to write a loop so just because a loop is similar to the source, that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement (as Oracle argued).

Anyway, it's a crazy position to take.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#145

Post by Pay08 »

gpm wrote: post #96
joshka wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou ... yeah fair - the "The canonical Git source code we're targeting to replicate the functionality of is in the git/ subdirectory." part makes this hard to argue against. > To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly inf…

Writing fn sum(a: u8, b: u8) { a + b } Doesn't infringe upon copyright period, because there's no creative element in that work. Imagine a more substantial example though. Perhaps you have a test that checks that some file written in a binary format is correct, and gives names (creative elements) to each field of the format that it prints when you mess up the field, and has comments describing why the bytes are laid…

That's essentially the same thing as modding a game, though. I know there have been lawsuits to stop modding, but I don't think any were successful.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#146

Post by Yokohiii »

dakolli wrote: post #135
Yokohiii wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More is better.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#147

Post by trimbo »

thewebguyd wrote: post #139
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.

> Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software > Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

GNU was originally developed to "clean" UNIX from the AT&T license.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#148

Post by kstenerud »

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

You won't get anywhere pressing your case here. This group has already found you guilty, and no argument will change their minds.

You've been caricatured into a blind AI-follower rust-rewriter-just-because type, and that's the surface they'll continually attack (you're wasting time, hurting the community, v2-itis, bikeshedding, premature optimization, copyright violation, moustache-twirling-evil-intent-rug-pull-later, etc etc etc).

Just continue in your work. It's good, and we need people like you.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#149

Post by lelanthran »

joshka wrote: post #90
gpm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using the git test suite That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou... But for the sake of argument: The test suite itself is copyrighted. To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly infringing. For example you might example that the agent would derive variable…

> That's not actually the case at hand here - the agents were given the original source to reference: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou ... yeah fair - the "The canonical Git source code we're targeting to replicate the functionality of is in the git/ subdirectory." part makes this hard to argue against. > To the extent the resulting work is a derivative of the test suite it is possibly inf…

If you did it in a loop until the test passed, maybe?

Your result is essentially impossible without the original. With ffmpeg, your result does not depend on ffmpeg specifically - you can use any video creation tool.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#150

Post by jraph »

schacon wrote: post #121
ewy1 wrote: post #37

pretty dystopian to ask a robot to recreate your favorite software just so you can relicense it for your business venture

We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community. Our goal is a linkable library, which makes GPL impossible. If we had chosen to go with LGPL or GPL with linking exception (like libgit2), it would have the same issue of changing the license, so we went with whatever was the most permissive so everyone could use it for anything if they wish. This has nothing to do with business - I hope I can get the p…

> Our goal is a linkable library, which makes GPL impossible

Not impossible. It forces the code using the library to be under a GPL-compatible license and requires the binary to be released under the GPL license.

The distinction is quite important. It's only impossible in the mind of someone who wants to release proprietary software. Even for people releasing software under permissive license it's not impossible, just highly inconvenient (and the LGPL is always an option in this case).

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