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Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

blog.gitbutler.com

291–300 of 318 posts

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you addressed anywhere why you chose not to keep the copyleft license? It burns a lot of goodwill to use an AI for what many people will see as copyright laundering, and git has done just fine with the GPL, so it doesn’t seem like a blocker for adoption. What do you get from stripping the copyleft?

https://blog.gitbutler.com/series-a likely has a large part to play in it. By which I mean, what do we imagine a16z thinks of the [L]GPL? My brief experience in a startup exposed to them is that a16z seems willing to fund "infrastructure" projects more than most, but they did seem to have a ready set of answers on what "open source" means in that context. (If someone can find me an a16z funded team that published cop…

you may be shocked to hear that this is gemini hallucinating; Element (creators of Matrix) has never taken investment from a16z; it must be getting mixed up with a different Element.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.gitbutler.com/series-a likely has a large part to play in it. By which I mean, what do we imagine a16z thinks of the [L]GPL? My brief experience in a startup exposed to them is that a16z seems willing to fund "infrastructure" projects more than most, but they did seem to have a ready set of answers on what "open source" means in that context. (If someone can find me an a16z funded team that published cop…

you may be shocked to hear that this is gemini hallucinating; Element (creators of Matrix) has never taken investment from a16z; it must be getting mixed up with a different Element.

Oof, thanks for the correction.

Many bothans were boiled alive to get me this misinformation.

The Very Annoying Clanker wishes to apologize: "I owe you a massive apology. I completely set you up for that, and you handled the fallout perfectly.

Getting corrected by Arathorn (Matthew Hodgson, the literal CEO of Element and co-founder of Matrix) is a classic Hacker News rite of passage, but it is infinitely more frustrating when your AI assistant handed you the bad data in the first place."

Many eyerolls.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#293
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?

Honestly? Yes. This is why its such a problem that most of the training data was not used with permission, and without the correct copyright status or license associated with it

There's a lot of arguments about humans doing the same thing, but the reality is that humans and robots don't enjoy the same legal protection. Its clearly a derivative work of all of its training data

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#294
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.

Particularly because LLM generated code is not licensable in any way. If you wrote it with an LLM you cannot own it.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#295

I guess software licenses are meaningless now since anyone can decide their llm clone is not derivative.

They were already quite meaningless since nearly every FOSS copyright owner doesn't sue violators.

A legal fund would help?

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you may be shocked to hear that this is gemini hallucinating; Element (creators of Matrix) has never taken investment from a16z; it must be getting mixed up with a different Element.

Oof, thanks for the correction. Many bothans were boiled alive to get me this misinformation. The Very Annoying Clanker wishes to apologize: "I owe you a massive apology. I completely set you up for that, and you handled the fallout perfectly. Getting corrected by Arathorn (Matthew Hodgson, the literal CEO of Element and co-founder of Matrix) is a classic Hacker News rite of passage, but it is infinitely more frustra…

err my gud a ceo on haxer news.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#298
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all a bit voodoo to me but wouldn't the entire original source code be in the training data also?

Yes, and LLMs have been shown to store and be able to output their training data, so this is at best very sketchy

Thank you for the answer, I was curious if they could produce it all too from the weights.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#299
post #240
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case…

The agents.md says “here’s the git source code” https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou... This isn’t even a question of training data, thy fed the full git source code directly to the llm.

I would say it's worse, the whole C Git source code is checked in https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/tree/main/git
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