Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

blog.gitbutler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 318 posts

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#271

Post by thewebguyd »

20k wrote: post #220
spacechild1 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".

Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine

> if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine

That's pretty much what happened, isn't it? These concerns were all discussed in the beginning back in 2022, and I recall answers from many here on HN along the lines of "oh well, we can't stop it now or we'll risk falling behind China in AI development"

So yeah, the laws went out the window a long time ago the moment our government and the people decided to just look the other way willingly in the name of "progress."

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#272

Post by thewebguyd »

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.

s/open source/free software

They love open source when it means they can steal from the public and then privatize it later with their VC funded startup, much in the same way Microsoft "loves" Linux [when you run it on Azure, or in WSL]

What they are against is free/libre software that prevents their grifting.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#273

Post by conartist6 »

schacon wrote: post #210
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 copyrigh…

You know I think if you'd just committed to clean rooming it you'd be fine, but you didn't.

Now you're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: if the AI did no creative work, then you're definitely in violation of the original GPL license.

If the AI did do creative work that breaks GPL, you still didn't, which leaves you with the problem that you cannot in good faith license a thing which you don't own. No creative work? No ownership claim. There's precious little (if any) of your creativity in copy pasting 4000 tests and a link to the original source code and saying "copy this in Rust".

The flagrant display of cynicism you make in arguing that the ends justify the means (even if a result is the wholesale looting of open source) disgusts me, and if I could communicate to you only one thing it should be that you should not be surprised that other people are also disgusted by behavior like that even when it falls within the letter of the law (a claim I have not yet seen you rigorously defend).

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#274

Post by johnisgood »

thewebguyd wrote: post #272
johnisgood wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

s/open source/free software They love open source when it means they can steal from the public and then privatize it later with their VC funded startup, much in the same way Microsoft "loves" Linux [when you run it on Azure, or in WSL] What they are against is free/libre software that prevents their grifting.

Yeah, pretty much. :)

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#275

Post by cmrdporcupine »

conartist6 wrote: post #273
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…

You know I think if you'd just committed to clean rooming it you'd be fine, but you didn't . Now you're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: if the AI did no creative work, then you're definitely in violation of the original GPL license. If the AI did do creative work that breaks GPL, you still didn't, which leaves you with the problem that you cannot in good faith license a thing which you don't own . No…

Man, all they had to do was LGPL it and there'd be no ill will.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#276

Post by cmrdporcupine »

madeofpalk wrote: post #22
gdgghhhhh wrote: post #14

So, they "decided" it's not a derivative and thus can be listened under MIT instead of GPL....

Yeah, that's usually how contracts work. You decide whether you have followed it or not. The other party will decide if they agree. If in dispute, you go to a judge and they decide also.

Where's the crowdfunded lawsuit I can donate to?

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#277

Post by joshka »

Pay08 wrote: post #145
gpm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd challenge you here to think about this in terms of the legal aspects rather than reaching specifically for similarities as similar is often meaningless in the law or contracts when specific acts are codified rather than generalized ones.

I'd say what we're talking about here is probably a fair bit different to modding a game in most aspects.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#278

Post by joshka »

lelanthran wrote: post #149
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…

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.

Repetition isn't really a factor in deciding whether something is infringing or not - check the copyright law in your jurisdiction. Here if you look specifically at what an LLM's sampling stage is doing, it's choosing non infringing tokens (i.e. rust source code) over infringing ones (i.e. C source code). So it's making an intentional choice to do something similar rather than creating something that has the same expression. That doesn't seem like it's copyright infringement to me.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#279

Post by joshka »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #134
joshka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me, can I create a copyrighted video that's not GPL licensed using ffmpeg? Now tell me how creating a rust library using the git test suite is different?

A GPL tool that processes data doesn't virally transfer the license to its output. Copyrighted ffmpeg code isn't incorporated into the video output. The LLM didn't just conjure up equivalent behavior to git without ingesting the code and transforming it as new output. There is no other behavioral description that would reproduce all needed functionality.

> There is no other behavioral description that would reproduce all needed functionality.

Tests often are exactly the information necessary to understand exactly what the output should be. See https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/t/t0000-basic.sh for an example of how detailed these tests are.

It would be reasonable to point an LLM at these and use them with a basic knowledge of git to produce a rust version of git in a non-infringing manner.

If you did this manually it would take a long time.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#280

Post by esafak »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #257
gspr wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this an answer to the question? Good thing you aren't in government. Who would so much as bother to write a book?
Post reply on HN