281–290 of 388 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about jurisdictions where reverse engineering is an inalienable right?
Which are those?
Russia even allows to decompile object code if you have to solve private compatibility issues.
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…
Regardless of the legal interpretations, I think it's very worrying if an automated AI rewrite of GPLed code (or any code for that matter) could somehow be used to circumvent the original license. That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use.
1. File by file rewrite by AI (“change functions and vars a bit”)
2. One LLM writes a diff language (or pseudo code) version of each function that a diff LLM translates back into code and tests for input/output parity
The real danger is that this becomes increasingly undetectable in closed source code and can continue to sync with progress in the GPLed repo.
I don’t think any current license has a plausible defense against this sort of attack.
The README has clearly been touched by an LLM. Count the idiosyncrasies: “chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x” Do people not write anymore?
I finally had to mute r/isthisai on Reddit because there’s now a subset of people who see the hand of AI in everything. Could that be generated by a clanker? Sure, but it’s also exactly what I would write if I wanted a quick pitch for a library that addresses some immediate concerns. It’s also what I would focus on if the fact we had just finished a rebuild from scratch. As Freud famously said, sometimes an em dash i…
The em dash is just a bonus, the grammatical structure is the giveaway. I'd invite Blanchard to argue that it wasn't LLM-generated.
I use AI tooling all day every day and can easily pick out when something was written by most popular modern models. I welcome an agentic web; it's the inevitable future. But not like this. I want things to get better, not worse.
Wow that's hot. I was not aware that you need to be "untainted" by the original LGPL code. This could mean that... All AI generated code is tainted with GPL/LGPL because the LLMs might have been taught with it
Being completely untainted is the standard many reimplementations set for themselves to completely rule out legal trouble. For example ReactOS won't let you contribute if you have ever seen Windows code. Because if you have never seen it, there can be no allegation that you copied it. That is however stricter than what's actually legally necessary. It's just that the actual legal standard would require a court ruling…
I've heard this called in some circles "The curse of knowledge." The same thing applies to emulator developers, especially N64 developers (and now Nintendo emulator developers in general) after the Oman Archive and later Gigaleaks. There's an informal "If you read this, you can NEVER directly contribute to the development of that emulator, ever."
This comes to a head when a relatively unknown developer starts contributing oddly specific patches to an emulator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and then proceed to write a structurally identical novel with many of the same story beats and character types, it will not be difficult to convince a jury exposed to these facts that I’ve created a derivative work. On the other hand, if I can prove to the jury’s satisfaction that I’ve never been exposed to Puzo’s work in any form, it’s independent creation.
To the contrary, there have been many cases of very similar novels with largely identical plot points and settings that survive copyright allegations, even if the author was exposed to the original work. For a rather entertaining example (though raunchy, for a heads up): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhWWcWtAUoY&themeRefresh=1
Legal: How much are you willing to spend on litigation? The only real "protection" by copyright is in court.
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…
Regardless of the legal interpretations, I think it's very worrying if an automated AI rewrite of GPLed code (or any code for that matter) could somehow be used to circumvent the original license. That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use.
I'll trade that stick for what GenAI can do for me, in a heartbeat.
The question, of course, is how this attitude -- even if perfectly rational at the moment -- will scale into the future. My guess is that pretty much all the original code that will ever need to be written has already been written, and will just need to be refactored, reshaped, and repurposed going forward. A robot's job, in other words. But that could turn out to be a mistaken guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of the legal interpretations, I think it's very worrying if an automated AI rewrite of GPLed code (or any code for that matter) could somehow be used to circumvent the original license. That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use.
That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use. I'll trade that stick for what GenAI can do for me, in a heartbeat. The question, of course, is how this attitude -- even if perfectly rational at the moment -- will scale into the future. My guess is that pretty much all the original code that will ever need to be…
What happened to sticking up for the underdogs? For the goodness of well-made software in itself, for itself? Isn't that what gave you all the stuff you have now? Don't you feel at least a little grateful, if maybe not obliged? Maybe we can start there?