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

No right to relicense this project

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 388 posts

Re: No right to relicense this project

#71

Post by DarkmSparks »

spoiler wrote: post #54
DarkmSparks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.

Ok since this is not really answered... Hypothetically, If I'm a maintainer of this project. I decided I hate the implementation, it's naive, horrible performance, weird edge cases. I'm wiser today than 3 years ago. I rewrite it, my head full of my own, original, new ideas. The results turn out great. There's a few if and while loops that look the same, and some public interfaces stayed the same. But all the guts are…

You have all rights to the code that you wrote that is not "colored" by previous code. Aka "an original work"

But code that is any kind of derivative of code before it contains a complex mix of other peoples rights. It can be relicensed, but only if all authors large and small agree to the terms.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#72

Post by fragmede »

Roritharr wrote: post #13

As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…

Nothing. This is why SaaS stocks took a dump last week.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#73

Post by sigseg1v »

zozbot234 wrote: post #16
scosman wrote: post #14

Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code. Question: if they had built one using AI teams in both “rooms”, one writing a spec the other implementing, would that be fine? You’d need to verify spec doesn’t include source code, but that’s easy enough. It seems to mostly follow the IBM-era precedent. However, since the model probably had the original c…

This seems right to me. If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in al…

How would a team verify this for any current model? They would have to observe and control all training data. In practice, any currently available model that is good enough to perform this task likely fails the clean room criteria due to having a copy of the source code of the project it wants to rewrite. At that point it's basically an expensive lossy copy paste.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#74

Post by jonathanstrange »

spoiler wrote: post #38
imcritic wrote: post #32

Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

Why? What's your problem with them? They do exactly what they're supposed to do, to ensure that future derivatives of the source code have to be distributed under the same license and distribution respects fundamental freedoms.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#75

Post by jonathanstrange »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #55
spoiler wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

I like to think about GPL as a kind of an artistic performance and an elaborate critique of the whole concept of copyright. Like, "we don't like copyright, but since you insist on enforcing it and we can't do anything against it, we will invent a clever way to use your own rules against you ".

That is not really the motivation behind GPL licenses. These licenses have been designed to ensure by legal means that anyone can learn from the source code of software, fix bugs on their own, and modify the software to their needs.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#76

Post by toyg »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #9
mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL). Edit: my understanding of "clean room…

I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice , I’m not sure it’s wrong . A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know. I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ appr…

Lol at the statement that "clean room" would have been invented to scare people from suing. It's the opposite: clean room is a fairly-desperate attempt to pre-empt accusations in court when it is expected that the "derivative" argument will be very strong, in order to then piggyback on the doctrine about interoperability. Sometimes it works, but it's a very high bar to clear.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#77

Post by greggoB »

actionfromafar wrote: post #39
p0w3n3d wrote: post #29

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

[flagged]

Does "lonely" in this case encompass people who've formed relationshios with said LLMs?

Re: No right to relicense this project

#79

Post by Ukv »

fzeroracer wrote: post #61
charcircuit wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's up to the accuser to prove that they copied it and did not actually write it from scratch as they claimed.

No, that's not how copyright laws work. Especially in a world where the starting point is the accused making something and marketing it as someone else's IP with a license change.

It's still on the claimant to establish copying, which usually involves showing that the two works are substantially similar in protected elements. That the defendants had access to the original helps establish copying, but isn't on its own sufficient.

Only after that would the burden be on the defendants, such as to give a defense that their usage is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use.

Re: No right to relicense this project

#80

Post by toyg »

oytis wrote: post #57
zozbot234 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it? This can be checked for (by the team with access to the code) and it's also quite unlikely at least. It's not trivial at all to have an LLM replicate their training verbatim: even when feasible (the Harry Potter case, a work that's going to be massively overweighted in training due to its popularity) it takes very s…

> That only matters if expression of the original project really does end up in the rewrite, doesn't it? No, I don't think so. I hate comparing LLMs with humans, but for a human being familiar with the original code might disqualify them from writing a differently-licensed version. Anyway, LLMs are not human, so as many courts confirmed, their output is not copyrightable at all, under any license.

Uh, this is just a curiosity, but do you have a reference for that last argument?

If true, it would mean most commercial code being developed today, since it's increasingly AI-generated, would actually be copyright-free. I don't think most Western courts would uphold that position.

Post reply on HN