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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#21

Post by kshri24 »

himata4113 wrote: post #20

I mean in my opinion GPL licensed code should just infect models forcing them to follow the license. You can do this a lot by saying things like: complete the code " ". And if now the models are GPL licensed the problem of relicensing is gone since the code produced by these models should in theory be also GPL licensed. Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licens…

> Unfortunately, there is a dumb clause that computer generated code cannot be copyrighted or licensed to begin with.

Can you point to the clause? I have never seen it in any GPL license.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#22

Post by benob »

foota wrote: post #12

I think the more interesting question here would be if someone could fine tune an open weight model to remove knowledge of a particular library (not sure how you'd do that, but maybe possible?) and then try to get it to produce a clean room implementation.

I don't think this would qualify as clean room (the Library was involved in learning to generate programs as a whole). However, it should be possible to remove the library from the OLMO training data and retrain it from scratch.

But what about training without having seen any human written program? Coul a model learn from randomly generated programs?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#24

Post by nairboon »

anilgulecha wrote: post #16
nairboon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, GPL still holds even if you transform the source code from one language to another language.

That why I carved it out to just the specs. If they can be read as "facts", then the new code is not derived but arrived at with TTD. The thesis I propose is that tests are more akin to facts, or can be stated as facts, and facts are not copyright-able. That's what makes this case interesting.

I assumed that "tests" refers to a program too, which in this example is likely GPL. Thus GPL would stick already on the AI-rewrite of GPL test code.

If "tests" should mean a proper specification let's say some IETF RFC of a protocol, then that would be different.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#27

Post by anilgulecha »

mlaretallack wrote: post #18
anilgulecha wrote: post #3

This is precedent setting. In this case the rewrite was in same language, but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other? If yes, this in a sense allows a path around GPL requirements. Linux's MIT version would be out in the next 1-2 years.

Its very important to understand the "how" it was done. The GPL hands the "compile" step, and the result is still GPL. The clean Room process uses 2 teams, separated by a specification. So you would have to 1. Generate specification on what the system does. 2. Pass to another "clean" system 3. Second clean system implements based just on the specification, without any information on the original. That 3rd step is the…

1 is claude-code1, outputs tests as text.

2. Dumped into a file.

3. claude-code that converts this to tests in the target language, and implements the app that passes the tests.

3 is no longer hard - look at all the reimplementations from ccc, to rewrites popping up. They all have a well defined test suite as common theme. So much so that tldraw author raised a (joke) issue to remove tests from the project.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#29

Post by anilgulecha »

nairboon wrote: post #24
anilgulecha wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That why I carved it out to just the specs. If they can be read as "facts", then the new code is not derived but arrived at with TTD. The thesis I propose is that tests are more akin to facts, or can be stated as facts, and facts are not copyright-able. That's what makes this case interesting.

I assumed that "tests" refers to a program too, which in this example is likely GPL. Thus GPL would stick already on the AI-rewrite of GPL test code. If "tests" should mean a proper specification let's say some IETF RFC of a protocol, then that would be different.

Yes, I had not specified in my original comment. But in the SOTA LLM world code/text boundary is so blurry, so as to be non-existent.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#30

Post by kshri24 »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #15
kshri24 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can classify "public data in" as public domain. Public data could also include commercial licenses which forbid using it in any way other than what the license states. Just because the source is open for viewing does not necessarily mean it is OSL. That's the core issue here. All models are trained on ALL source code that is publicly available irrespective of how it was licensed. It is illegal but e…

Copyright is not a blacklist but an allowlist of things kept aside for the holder. Everything else is free game. LLM ingestion comes under fair use so no worries. If someone can get their hand on it, nothing in law stops it from training ingestion. We can debate if this law is moral. Like the GP I took agree public data in -> public domain out is what's right for society. Copyright as an artificial concept has gone o…

> LLM ingestion comes under fair use

I don't think so. It is no where "limited use". Entirety of the source code is ingested for training the model. In other words, it meets the bar of "heart of the work" being used for training. There are other factors as well, such as not harming owner's ability to profit from original work.

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