Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

This is extremely false. Copyright additionally grants you exclusive control over the production and distribution of derivative works.

A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".

A training set is just an anthology, and the training process is condensation. That makes the weights a derivative work of every work in the training set.

Now, there's a separate discussion to be had about whether that derivative work meets the criteria for fair use, but that's it's own tangent.

We based all of this on gentlemen's agreements and handshakes. That let quite a few people get only very wealthy, instead of hyper-wealthy. Thus those agreements have to be shredded.

AP mentions this in the link:

> Section 227(g)(4). Enforcement. Statutory damages of not less than $500 per server request made in violation of this section, consistent with the per-violation damages established under the original Act for unsolicited facsimile transmissions.

While this is at least something, it's not going to dissuade a startup from doing this sort of thing. They'll find ways to hide the origin of traffic, or just soak up the costs with more VC money.

You need to start throwing people in prison for long periods of time (10+ years) for this sort of thing to stick.

Uh, that is exactly what a derivative work is. You literally specify that Hamlet is an input to your work. I believe you're conflating derivative with transformative. You're certainly creating a transformative derivation of Hamlet, but you are by definition creating a derivative work by training a Markov chain on the text of Hamlet.

The obvious follow up here is whether an LLM is creating transformative derivations or not. A lot of folks argue that yes, an LLM spitting out statistically sampled code that matches existing code is not transformative and is (or might be) infringing the terms of the license it was released under. Others argue that there's not an exact copy of the original source in the LLM's weights so by definition it must be a transformative work. I think it's a pretty obvious "somewhere in the middle" that is gonna make a bunch of lawyers a whole lot of money.

Personally, I don't care one way or the other. I'm one of the folks that thinks software shouldn't be copyright-able in the first place.

Other people using your code to enrich their lives or businesses doesn't exploit you in any way, as it doesn't cost you a thing. This is irrational.

No, I'm well aware of the different motivations for and approaches to FOSS. I'm mostly focusing on the copyleft/GNU GPL side of the discussion here because that's the side of the house where most of ideas of a social contract and desire to see a specific ecosystem develop have been located. People on the MIT/BSD side of things, which has always had a much more direct "do whatever you want" ethos, are not the ones I'd expect to be making these arguments in the first place.

> For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared.

I'd agree that someone using an LLM to create a deterministic transcription of someone else's work is indeed violating the license. But I think the argument goes beyond that, into using LLMs in any way at all.

> That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.

That's a reasonable position, and from the perspective of examining whether the current LLM climate is sapping motivation to participate in FOSS, I can understand where you're coming from.

But to that point, I'd argue that if your motivation was to gain recognition, participate in a community, etc. then you're going to lose those things by keeping your code private anyway, whereas you won't necessarily lose those things just because an LLM was trained on your code. If you contribute to a popular project, people were almost certainly already using your work to do things you don't approve of -- if that didn't take away your motivation, why would LLMs do much worse?