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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

#251

Post by witx »

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

And what issues did GPL impose on the community all these 21 years of git existence?

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#252

Post by johnisgood »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #231
schacon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 copyrigh…

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others. It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software? I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C. I cannot understand any legitimate concer…

GPL makes sure that the code remains open. Seems like these new gen devs are against open source.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#253

Post by Yokohiii »

wongarsu wrote: post #158
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…

A lot of their IP has been leaked over the years anyways. Source code of Windows XP is easily available, and there was the 2022 leak that contained the sources of Bing, Bing Maps, Cortana, etc

Yes but it's illegal to replicate it.

A different story if LLMs lift license restrictions.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#254

Post by yusefnapora »

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)

As mentioned in another comment, it's even more clear cut in this case. They actually put the original git sources in their project repo and instructed the agent to use it as the "source of truth".

Simple thought experiment. If you handed this same agents.md file (https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...) to a human software developer and let them work on exactly the same goal, would their output be considered a derivative work?

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#255

Post by cmrdporcupine »

johnisgood wrote: post #252
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others. It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software? I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C. I cannot understand any legitimate concer…

GPL makes sure that the code remains open. Seems like these new gen devs are against open source.

It pisses me off because I'm also the author of a rewrite-in-Rust project (though it's more than that, and yes I now use agents though I didn't at the start) and I specifically chose [A|L]GPL for it to protect the IP of the asset and because it felt like the most ethical choice.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#256

Post by bryanlarsen »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #231
schacon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 copyrigh…

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others. It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software? I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C. I cannot understand any legitimate concer…

The original git had a command line interface. It's widely assumed that using a GPL'd program in your program through the command line does not cause the GPL to "infect" your program.

OTOH, one of the major reasons for grit is to provide a library interface. If they kept it GPL, anything that used grit through the library interface would have to also become GPL.

This could be the "legitimate concern" you're asking for.

But the LGPL was also an option -- it addresses that arguably legitimate concern and keeps the spirit of the original license.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#257

Post by Brian_K_White »

gspr wrote: post #198
Brian_K_White wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might even be fine with the loss of IP if everyone lost it.

How does intellectual work happen (beyond doing it for leisure) in a world without IP? In a utopian world of abundance where we could all be the independently wealthy nobles of the 18th and 19th century who did intellectual work for fun: great. In the world of today where people need to be compensated for their work: what happens?

Any way anyone who wants, wants, that doesn't rely on legal control of information. There are infinite uncopyrightable things that never the less get done and make people a lot of livings.

I only said "might" and the point was obviously not the immediate surface idea but to point out how the tool of IP is not applied to everyone's benefit equally, but used only against some and only for some, with a side of "You know, fuck it, if they insist on making it worse, it becomes less crazy to consider just burning the house down".

But What are you so afraid of that you react only to the hypothetical as though it were the worst danger?

We'd actually manage to get yoked and abused by the same people no matter what the rules were, don't worry.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#258

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #256
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others. It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software? I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C. I cannot understand any legitimate concer…

The original git had a command line interface. It's widely assumed that using a GPL'd program in your program through the command line does not cause the GPL to "infect" your program. OTOH, one of the major reasons for grit is to provide a library interface. If they kept it GPL, anything that used grit through the library interface would have to also become GPL. This could be the "legitimate concern" you're asking fo…

I mean, yes, clearly, LGPL is the explicitly obvious answer here. And they rejected it.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#259

Post by absintini »

galangalalgol wrote: post #247
absintini wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we’re almost there with Mythos/Fable so there ya go. In two years bye bye rust.

Did you create this account just to lament rust hype? I mean, it is excessive. But I also don't think it is manufactured. We are more like some mostly benign evangelical denomination trying to get everyone to see the joys of Ferris.

Honestly, if the language actually looked nicer, great. But I mean the source code looks like a steaming pile of crate-includes. We can do better, seriously.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#260

Post by tstansel »

The section about handoffs being frustrating is the same thing ive experienced and why i built https://github.com/TStansel/handoff.

Goal is to be able to transfer context from one agent to another when switching which provider is being used. So when i hit usage limits on claude i can can run handoff claude codex and codex is given a md file to start from and continuing working.

Still early but ive found it useful in my daily flows already!

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