This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures:

1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all.

2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.

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sarchertech 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There’s an other option. The cost of copying existing software trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.

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anonymous_sorry 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".

	▲	dathinab 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		it's more complicated, the ruling was that AI can't be an author and the thing in question is (de-facto) public domain because it has no author in context of the "dev" claim it was fully build by AI but AI assisted code has an author and claiming it's AI assisted even if it is fully AI build is trivial (if you don't make it public that you didn't do anything) also some countries have laws which treat it like a tool in the sense that the one who used it is the author by default AFIK

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casey2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The value of software has never been tied to the cost of writing it, even if you don't distribute it your still breaking the law.

	▲	largbae 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The article is proceeding from the premise that a reimplementation is legal (but evil). To help my understanding of your comment, do you mean: 1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could write. 2. You read my example as "copying a project without distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same functionality just for me"