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No right to relicense this project
331–340 of 388 posts
Re: No right to relicense this project
#332> chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API Licensing aside, morally you don't rewrite someone else's project with the same package name.
I've got some serious moral questions about "rewrite your own widely used project from scratch with the same package name"... but I don't think it's fair to call this "someone else's project" when the OP has apparently been the only maintainer working on the project for 13 years...
Re: No right to relicense this project
#333Another tangent that I didn't see in the thread is that the Supreme Court just confirmed a ruling that LLM created art isn't copyrightable since the author must be human for copyright to apply. If the new code was generated entirely by an LLM, can it be licensed at all? Or is it automatically in the public domain?
The US supreme court declined to hear a challenge to the claim that if you explicitly disclaim any human input to make a point then the art isn't copyrightable in the US. The copyrightability of "actually I had some design input" is still up in the air in the US, and copyrightability in general is still up in the air in probably the entire rest of the world as well as every court in the US outside of the DC circuit (because the supreme court declining to hear a case does not constitute an endorsement of the lower courts ruling or create precedent).
There's absolutely nothing stopping you granting a license to public domain work... granting a license is just waiving rights that the author might have to sue for copyright infringement under certain circumstances...
Personally I'd be unwilling to use this work without the license, because I would not be confident that it was public domain.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#334Earlier 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.
Soulless multinationals often want to share costs with other soulless multinationals, just like individuals do. So I think there will always be publicly shared code. The real question is whether this code will be worth much if it can be implemented so quickly by a machine.
Implementation is only one of the costs shared through open-source projects.
There are others, such as security vulnerability detection, support, & general maintenance.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#335I 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.
If automated AI rewrites are generally feasible, then the marginal price of nearly all software trends to zero.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Afaik, the EU and Russia says that observing/experimenting with the external behavior of the program to determine its internal logic is legal. Russia even allows to decompile object code if you have to solve private compatibility issues.
Even in the US, are there any non-DRM examples where reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in violation of a license agreement have been used as the basis for copyright claims, even when the results are incorporated into a competing product? For example, I don't recall Microsoft ever being sued by WordPerfect or Lotus for reading and writing their applications' unpublished file formats, which wouldn…
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. is also a relevant case, I suspect. Found for Google against Oracle's claim of copyright infringement, for non-clean-room RE of Java APIs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...>
Re: No right to relicense this project
#337I feel like the author is missing a huge point here by fighting this. The entire reason why GPL and any other copyleft license exists in the first place is to ensure that the rights of a user to modify, etc a work cannot be ever taken away. Before, relicensing as MIT - or any other fully permissive license - would've meant open doors to apply restrictions going forward, but with AI this is now a non-issue. Code is no…
Well put. It seems like a lot of people have tunnel vision on this. It's going to take a while for people to realize that copyright is obsolete, especially in its current form.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#338Interestingly the original author ported the code from the Mozilla C++ version which is licensed as "MPL 1.1 or LGPL" (it's a bit unclear as the readme says that but the license file mentions only MPL). So the author did already relicence the project in a way by licensing the port as LGPL only.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#339Interestingly the original author ported the code from the Mozilla C++ version which is licensed as "MPL 1.1 or LGPL" (it's a bit unclear as the readme says that but the license file mentions only MPL). So the author did already relicence the project in a way by licensing the port as LGPL only.
> licensing the port as LGPL only
They ported the LGPL version. There's no obligation to port any other, unless "MPL 1.1 or LGPL" is itself some kind of singular licence.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#340I 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…
Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work. After all, they all are substantially based on GPL licensed works by others. The standard courts have always used for "substantially based" by the way, is the ability to extract from the new work anything bigger than an excerpt of the original work. S…
The LLM would, under that argument, be a transformative derivative work, which has important fair use implications (that don’t exist in the chardet case)…