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▲ g-b-r 6 hours ago

Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.

Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

▲iamnothere 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.

Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)

▲flossly 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Linux (Linus T himself iirc) is very GPLv2.

They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc. But the result was also that big corps liked GPLv3 even less than GPLv2.

On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.

▲asveikau 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think what you're finding is that people who don't care about low quality of LLM outputs also don't care about licensing. If you're in the faction that supports all of this, you don't see a lot of people around you still caring about licensing or quality.

▲iamnothere 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I am in neither faction, as I already indicated. I’m not an LLM user except for search engine summaries.

I also already mentioned that some formerly GPL die-hards have been jumping ship from Linux to BSDs simply because of the respective stances on AI. That’s enough for me to say this works both ways.

▲g-b-r 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?

With Linux I meant the Linux kernel

▲iamnothere 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Copyright is based on laws, and laws can be changed or clarified. Given the amount of overinvestment in AI, I expect them to change. The EU is already making moves in this direction: https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expro...

I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.

▲g-b-r an hour ago | parent [-]

It could be, but:

- For now the laws are in force, and I don't even know of discussions to change them (that EU proposal only wants to allow training on personal data)

- changing intellectual property rights law would typically require changing international treaties

- however much companies are in love with AI now, I'm not sure they'd support abolishing legal protections on which their business relies

▲Vaushite an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're being pretty, I'm not sure the right word, scaredycat?, about licensing. Licensing doesn't matter unless somebody sues you, which they won't in most cases. The AI era has exposed this truth that you're extremely unlikely to get sued about copyright violation - so unless you're the kind of person who avoids car trips because you could crash, you can ignore it.

▲g-b-r an hour ago | parent [-]

Uhm, you're being pretty, careless?

I'm not sure that that's how legal departments think.

▲ethin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.

▲g-b-r 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Of course we're talking of code for which that's implausible.

I think in most cases twenty lines of identical code are more than enough for that to be the case (at least if it contains a few non-single-letter identifiers).

▲graemep 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How many cases of an LLM outputting training code have you heard of? let alone training code that you are not allowed to use or relicense?

Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

▲ltph0 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They did in 2023 and the AI thieves built logic to rephrase the plagiarism so it isn't immediately detectable.

Proprietary developers don't care because their code wasn't trained on. Is that a trick question?

They do care now that reverse engineering is possible.

▲graemep 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you explain further? What was the code affected?

▲g-b-r an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I heard many cases of LLMs outputting their training data verbatim; they sure don't check that such data can be legally used by you before doing it.

As others said, for closed source software it's a lot harder to detect plagiarism.

And it's in general very hard to detect plagiarized code; there's some product that does it, but it of course has only a partial inventory of the existing open-source code.

I think that some big company does use those products, though.

▲mschuster91 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.

And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.

▲graemep 3 hours ago | parent [-]

On the other hand it could be very expensive if caught. It could be very difficult to remove the code too.

Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.

I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.

▲soperj 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.

▲craftkiller 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> no contributions

That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.

Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:

  15925 The FreeBSD Foundation
   3738 Netflix
   2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
   1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
   1733 Dell EMC Isilon
   1550 Chelsio Communications
   1446 DARPA, AFRL
   1421 Mellanox Technologies
   1262 Klara, Inc.
    784 Arm Ltd
    729 iXsystems, Inc.
    707 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
    552 Netflix, Inc.
    477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
    473 Microsoft
    421 Juniper Networks, Inc.
    411 DARPA, NAI Labs
    386 Stormshield
    385 Microsoft OSTC
    384 DARPA
    375 NetApp, Inc.
    358 Innovate UK
    355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories
    317 Yandex LLC
    299 NVIDIA Networking
One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)
▲kevinrineer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So interesting to see Darpa represented in different labs. I wouldn't have bother to look for that interesting tidbit otherwise, so thanks for that.

▲Brian_K_White 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.

If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.

▲craftkiller 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

The assertion I was addressing is that copyfree code "just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions".

My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.

Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.

> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

▲tehologist 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.

▲MaxBarraclough 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Linux success has nothing to do with GPL

Linus doesn't agree. He once said in an interview that making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did, [0] and has said that I love GPLv2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back. [1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http:/www.tlug.jp...

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvaldss-love-hate-rela...

▲bch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL.

Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

▲iamnothere 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

BSD was tied up in lawsuits for years, giving Linux a head start.

▲tehologist 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also why did you mention MIT licensed, it is obviously BSD licensed.

▲ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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▲stackghost 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Literally nothing is less interesting than yet another "discussion" about the relative merits of software licenses, or generalizations about the kinds of people that prefer license A to license B.

I have flagged this comment.

▲g-b-r 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'll flag yours, because it was a completely senseless flagging.

It wasn't even a discussion about that, I wonder if you read the two lines of the comment.