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No right to relicense this project

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Re: No right to relicense this project

#271

Post by red_admiral »

mgulick wrote: post #247
pocksuppet wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the right to use the code, and they have the right to use improvements that someone else made, and they have the right to get someone to make improvements for them.

They also have the guarantee that the code licensed under the GPL, and all future enhancements to it, will remain free software. The same is not true of the MIT license's weak-copyleft.

As far as I know, all the (L)GPL does is make sure that if A releases some code under it, then B can't release a non-free enhancement without A's permission. A can still do whatever they want, including sell ownership to B.

Neither GPL nor MIT (or anything else) protects you against this.

(EDIT) scenario: I make a browser extension and release v1 under GPL, it becomes popular and I sell it to an adtech company. They can do whatever they want with v2.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#273

Post by pocksuppet »

red_admiral wrote: post #269
pocksuppet wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Enabling more GPL software to become proprietary isn't exactly a service.

I think they moved chardet from GPL to MIT? If the maintainer made future versions proprietery, they'd surely be forked and then kicked out of the python package repo?

That's what MIT does. It lets downstream versions become proprietary.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#274

Post by dredmorbius »

orthoxerox wrote: post #101
senko wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?" DMCA. The EULA likely prohibits reverse engineering. If a competitor does that, hit'em with lawyers. Or, if you want to be able to sleep at night, recognize this as an opportunity instead of a threat.

What about jurisdictions where reverse engineering is an inalienable right?

Which are those?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#275

Post by dredmorbius »

nandomrumber wrote: post #30
Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

Maybe a better question is: How do our competitors protect themselves against us doing this?

Particularly if you're named "Google", "Amazon", "Microsoft", or "Apple".

Re: No right to relicense this project

#276

Post by schlauerfox »

kube-system wrote: post #270
Someone wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When there is similar code, the only defense possible to prove that you have not copied the original is to show that your process is a clean room re-implementation. Yes, but you do not have to prove that you haven’t copied the original; you have to prove you didn’t infringe copyright. For that there are other possible defenses, for example: - fair use - claiming the copied part doesn’t require creativity - arguing…

Courts have ruled that you can't assign copyrights to a machine, because only humans qualify for human rights. ** There is not currently a legal consensus on whether or not the humans using AI tools are creating derivative works when they use AI models to create things. ** this case is similar to an old case where a ~~photographer~~ PETA claimed a monkey owned a copyright to a photo, because they said a monkey took t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Specifically he claimed he owned the copyright on a photo he didn't directly take. PETA weighed in trying to say the monkey owned the copyright.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#277

Post by jdauriemma »

cardanome wrote: post #241
jdauriemma wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting and I'm not sure what to make of it. Devil's advocate: the person operating the AI also was "trained with the code," is that materially different from them writing it by hand vs. assisted by an LLM? Honestly asking, I hadn't considered this angle before.

If you worked at Microsoft and had access to the Windows source code you probably should not be contributing to WINE or similar projects as there would be legal risk. So for this case, not much different legally. Of course there is the practical difference just like there is between me seeing you with my own eyes and me taking a picture of you. "Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaph…

> "Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.

Maybe? But the design of the floppy disk is for data storage and retrieval per se. It can't give you your bits in a novel order like an LLM does (by design). From what I can tell in this case, the output is significantly differentiated from the source code.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#278

Post by amtamt »

Maintainers must not be able to change the license that original author chose, and based on which contributors made contributions. When one stepped up to be maintainer, it was a trustee role, not owner role.

It should be perfectly ok (by maintainer or anyone for that mater) to be inspired from a community project and build something from scratch hand-crafting/ AI sloping, as long as the imitation is given a new name/ identity.

What rubbed me off personally was maintainer saying "pin your dependncies to version 6.0.0 or 5.x.x", as if maintainer owns the project. maintainer role is more akin to serve the community, not rule.

If it is completely new, why not start a new project with new name? No one will object. And of course leave the old project behind to whoever is willing to maintain it. And if the new name project is better, people will follow.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#279

Post by kube-system »

schlauerfox wrote: post #276
kube-system wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts have ruled that you can't assign copyrights to a machine, because only humans qualify for human rights. ** There is not currently a legal consensus on whether or not the humans using AI tools are creating derivative works when they use AI models to create things. ** this case is similar to an old case where a ~~photographer~~ PETA claimed a monkey owned a copyright to a photo, because they said a monkey took t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Specifically he claimed he owned the copyright on a photo he didn't directly take. PETA weighed in trying to say the monkey owned the copyright.

Ah yeah you’re right I forgot it was PETA arguing that.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#280

Post by actsasbuffoon »

cubefox wrote: post #196
antirez wrote: post #116

I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…

If you let an LLM merely rephrase the codebase, that's like letting it rephrase the Harry Potter novels. Which, I'm pretty sure, would still be considered a copy under copyright law, not an original work, despite not copying any text verbatim.

But what if it didn’t summarize Harry Potter? What if it analyzed Harry Potter and came back with a specification for how to write a compelling story about wizards? And then someone read that spec and wrote a different story about wizards that bears only the most superficial resemblance to Harry Potter in the sense that they’re both compelling stories about wizards?

This is legitimately a very weird case and I have no idea how a court would decide it.

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