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Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

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Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#311

Post by xorcist »

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

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

Ever since the early 2010s when companies were started with the business idea "unlicensed hotels" and "unlicensed taxis" and made the owners really, really rich, this is said pretty much out loud. Look for words like "regulatory risks" and similar.

Maybe it started with the unlicensed gambling fad before that? That also made a lot of people filthy rich. Every time you have something under special license, or insuance requirements, then of course there is a margin for you if you can skimp on the license and hire gig workers instead.

The LLM situation with copyright and derived works in the 2020s is similar. Someone is likely to be rich, but there is a clear regulatory risk to it.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#312

Post by xorcist »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #222
dayjaby wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey AI, please change my stolen code in a non-breaking way so that jplag reports less than 1,8% similarity.

I mean ”hey artist, take this stolen character and make them legally distinct” is already a common thing.

It also mostly doesn't work, and even if it does work it's terribly expensive and time consuming enough to scare people off.

Go on, make a derivative of Mickey Mouse and sell it. See how it goes. Similar enough to be "compatible" (whatever that would mean in the animated cartoon space) but distinct enough not to run afoul of Disney lawyers. Then come back and tell us.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#313

Post by xorcist »

thewebguyd wrote: post #139
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.

Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software and releasing under permissive licenses. Also why I'm not a fan of UUtils nor Canonical's early adoption of it in Ubuntu. The intent here is extraction of all the value provided by copyleft projects without the obligation to give back. Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

It is also rather ungrateful. The only reason we have Linux desktops today, and the only reason companies like Red Hat and Canonical has a billion dollar business model is the GPL.

The BSDs had a head start, and were superior in almost every way for the better part of a decade at least, but have remained niche compared to Linux. It's not even close. Now, there may be many other reasons to this, including the personalities and culture of the Linux developers, but you simply can't ignore the impact of the license which have kept all the commercial Linux products inside the fold.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#314

Post by xorcist »

ianm218 wrote: post #34
jabwd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I got one, why? You aren't learning anything, you are just copying code from other codebases and smashing it together to make some nginx-rust thingie... for what actual goal?

Well the biggest goal was to be useful. Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched, so a drop in replacement would be a big deal in that world. But in terms of learning I'm learning relatively little about how to type Rust into an editor but a lot about how to set…

> the biggest goal was to be useful

Please excuse me for being unnecessarily harsh for a moment, but web servers are a dime a dozen. Quite literally. The reason nginx is successful is because it is maintained. Unless you plan on maintaining your nginx-clone as well as nginx itself, it will not be useful.

Perhaps you do, in which case I am more than happy to be wrong, but sometimes people think the act of writing software itself is useful and that other people will happily swarm over it and maintain it in their absence, but that is usually not the case.

The world has tens of thousands of http daemons, increasing that number by one is not useful in itself. The act of maintaining software over time and keeping it useful for many people however, absolutely can be.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#315

Post by wwallrust »

schacon wrote: post #305
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Relicensing under any other license, including the LGPL, is exactly the same thing. Either the reimplementation copies protected expression, in which case it would be required to be GPL-2.0-only, or it does not, in which case we can choose the most fitting license. If you believe that using an MIT license is not correct, then you defacto also believe that using an LGPL license is not correct.

> Relicensing under any other license, including the LGPL, is exactly the same thing. Either the reimplementation copies protected expression, in which case it would be required to be GPL-2.0-only, or it does not, in which case we can choose the most fitting license.

Using LGPL could help the argument that the project was in good faith, making it more likely to be accepted as non-derivative. Its arguable that the relicinsing would be required to make the project work as a library and so LGPL would be the best choice since that (I assume) preserves most of the terms and intention of the original license. This makes it much easier to show that the license was changed solely to allow other projects to use it as a library.

By using the MIT license its much easier to argue that the project is in bad faith (and potentially derivative), since the license change can be seen as a deliberate choice to remove the protections of the original license. Its harder to argue that the license change was only so the project can be used a library because then you would have used LGPL instead.

(BTW im not a lawyer)

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#316

Post by Pet_Ant »

xorcist wrote: post #312
Pet_Ant wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean ”hey artist, take this stolen character and make them legally distinct” is already a common thing.

It also mostly doesn't work, and even if it does work it's terribly expensive and time consuming enough to scare people off. Go on, make a derivative of Mickey Mouse and sell it. See how it goes. Similar enough to be "compatible" (whatever that would mean in the animated cartoon space) but distinct enough not to run afoul of Disney lawyers. Then come back and tell us.

Mickey Mouse was already a legally distinct Oswald the Rabbit.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#317

Post by lenkite »

MBCook wrote: post #53
heyts wrote: post #6

I'd be really interested in the opposite, just for the sake of experimentation since that's what these projects mostly are. They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance", because the cost is now lower bc of AI. I'd be interested to see something like a port of Quake III in Python or Kubernetes in Perl, even Rails in Python would be goofy and really fun to see

> They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance". And yet this performs dramatically worse. A slower, untested, incomplete git implementation, all for the low low price of $10-$15,000. And don’t forget it wasted a bunch of human time in the process. So if someone mentioned somewhere else there is already a Rust port a group is doing somewhere. How much could they have accomplished with this much money and…

> A slower, untested, incomplete git implementation, all for the low low price of $10-$15,000.

That $15k is indeed a very low low subsidized AI price. It will be $150k next year.

Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

#318

Post by kisper »

jbotz wrote: post #166
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.

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…

Mathematically, does similarity/intelligibility of one equation to another have any bearing on whether the one was derived from the other? Philosophically? Legally? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but that's the crux of the matter to me: did you start with something, and iterate from it (even if it was so many times as to be transformed beyond recognition), or is it something more akin to clean-room reverse engineering?
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