I have long been skeptical of the "or later" clauses. I can imagine a not terribly distant future where RMS has passed away and GNU gets taken over by disinterested corporate psychos like happened to Mozilla, who then release GPL-4.0 without the copyleft, set up for industry looting of any GPL project that left in the "or later" clause.

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ronsor 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think AI will render software licenses and copyright irrelevant long before a hypothetical evil GPL-4 gets released.

Most new (corporate-sponsored!) software is already under permissive licenses anyway.

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mikkupikku 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

True.. my hope is that open weight models will progress to the point where they become viable coding agents for normies, so that even if open source dies with copyright, we will still nonetheless see a renaissance in people controlling their own computers, being able to create their own programs to solve their own problems. HyperCard on steroids, that anybody can use with no technical background. We're not there yet even for frontier models, but maybe in a few more years..

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anthk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If any AI's will be sued into oblivion from Copyright holders until the bubble collapses into itself due to LLM rot over time due to the lack of curated human input.

	▲	ronsor 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is quite frankly not a serious scenario. Once the label "national security" gets affixed to anything, you'd better be sure it's not going away. Also, half of all AI development is in China. Why would China care about Western copyright holders, or rather, why would they start caring?