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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

#201

Post by NietTim »

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.

This is not a proper black-box reimplementation, I doubt they can get away with that. And that's not mentioning all other obvious ethical concerns of course.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#202

Post by keybored »

schacon wrote: post #169
rockmeamedee wrote: post #161

I don’t understand. Gitoxide exists and is great. It might have missing pieces, but it’s easier to vibecode any needed networking additions to Gitoxide (which is maintained) than to just go and burn tokens trying to clone all of git again. Git wants to add Rust. Gitoxide is a multi year project that’s going to be more maintained than an ad-hoc “it says it passes the test” vibeclone. I’m not even against vibecloning t…

As mentioned, we also work on the Gitoxide project and Byron is a member of our team. We are well aware of all large community efforts and we're also cohosting the Git Merge conference this year. There is a recent effort to vibe-loop more Git into Gitoxide, which is interesting: https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide/pull/2538 I still think that this is a project that can have value with a little more work. This an…

> Also, I am the exec involved and I've done quite a lot for the Git community over the years. I would never try to have my "own copy" of it, that's ridiculous. I wrote and open sourced the Pro Git book (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2) and Git community book before it (https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/index.html), I created the official Git website (https://git-scm.com), I cofounded GitHub which hosts nearly all open source in the world, I have evangelized and supported the Git ecosystem for almost 20 years now. I restarted and funded development of libgit2 15 years ago, which you could similarly argue was an exec trying to have our "own copy" of Git under a more permissive license and would have been a similarly ridiculous argument.

This "I am Scott Chacon" part doesn't matter. 95% of people here already know.

People are critiquing your current actions.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#203

Post by rcxdude »

20k wrote: post #194
anilgulecha wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> translation. It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.

Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)

> Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)

Are you sure? LLMs are in some way a compressed version of their input but it's a pretty lossy compression (arguably this makes them more like a compression algorithm than a compressed version of the data). I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#204

Post by rcxdude »

NietTim wrote: post #201
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.

This is not a proper black-box reimplementation, I doubt they can get away with that. And that's not mentioning all other obvious ethical concerns of course.

black-box/clean-room isn't necessarily required, though. It does make it a lot harder to argue in court, of course.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#205

Post by rcxdude »

gspr wrote: post #174
beacon294 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that is already how it is done with numerous multi-decade open rewrites of closed games. They usually require the asset pack. I don't know how this squares with law, but Oracle v Google gave a very valuable judgment to the public that an API is not copywritable. If we take the LLM out of it, that's all we are talking about in the pure case. Of course, we can't take the LLM out, but it is the starting point.

> Well that is already how it is done with numerous multi-decade open rewrites of closed games Serious such rewrites don't start with the code of the closed game! > I don't know how this squares with law, but Oracle v Google gave a very valuable judgment to the public that an API is not copywritable. If we take the LLM out of it, that's all we are talking about in the pure case. Not at all. The LLM used to write grit…

>Serious such rewrites don't start with the code of the closed game!

No, but they often involve reverse engineering the binary pretty heavily.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#206

Post by silon42 »

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.

An idea...

Take this (assuming it's not slop), relicence as GPL, submit upstream (imagine it's accepted for a moment...).

If they proceed with license washing then from the Rust version, it's certainly derived work.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#207

Post by rcxdude »

gspr wrote: post #175
GreenDolphinSys wrote: post #162

This is simply plagiarism of GPL-licensed code, and license-washing as well. I can understand working backwards from a test suite, but this literally just reads the original source: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou... LLM users seem to live in another world where stealing everything that isn't bolted down, and passing it off as their own work, is acceptable.

I'm terrified that this somehow seems acceptable to a large group of people. I'm baffled that other IP holders (say those who own valuable pieces of proprietary software, or music, or movies, or even the LLMs themselves) don't think leopards will come eat their faces next. This erosion of IP has to stop, or anyone who does any intellectual work will be absolutely screwed. If that only meant FOSS people, I'd be worrie…

The people doing the intellectual work are usually not the primary beneficiaries of IP laws. In fact it often constrains them unnecessarily.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#209

Post by gspr »

rcxdude wrote: post #207
gspr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm terrified that this somehow seems acceptable to a large group of people. I'm baffled that other IP holders (say those who own valuable pieces of proprietary software, or music, or movies, or even the LLMs themselves) don't think leopards will come eat their faces next. This erosion of IP has to stop, or anyone who does any intellectual work will be absolutely screwed. If that only meant FOSS people, I'd be worrie…

The people doing the intellectual work are usually not the primary beneficiaries of IP laws. In fact it often constrains them unnecessarily.

> The people doing the intellectual work are usually not the primary beneficiaries of IP laws. In fact it often constrains them unnecessarily.

In the sense that most people doing intellectual work do that work for someone else (say, a company) that you consider the primary beneficiary of IP law? Sure, fine – but this applies to almost any other type of work and the legal constructs that are in use there too, so it's not really a very useful distinction to make, even if technically correct.

Or do you mean something else?

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#210

Post by schacon »

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.

Well, there's lots of really interesting opinions here from a lot of armchair lawyers.

To clarify, my stance on this is that the reimplementation did not copy protected expressions (Jplag reports less than 1.8% max similarity between the codebases), it's done in good faith, and it's what's best for the broader Git ecosystem (assuming Grit even becomes usable, which it's currently not purported to be).

From a copyright standpoint, however, only the first argument there is relevant. Grit is an independently authored implementation of Git-compatible behavior, with negligible similarity to Git source code.

I think antirez summarized the situation quite well and I broadly agree with his position: https://antirez.com/news/162

I think that those in the community who know me and have worked with me in the Git and open source communities for the last 20 years know that my intentions are to contribute, share and foster innovation and learning. Many of the main authors of the Git source code are friends of mine and I have no intention to steal anything from anyone, only to make their great ideas more broadly useful.

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