alt Hacker NewsAI and the Ship of Theseus
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Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause [1] and MIT is even more permissive. Importantly these were meant to protect the USER of the code.Not the Dev , or the Company or the CLA holder - the USER is primary in the FreeSoftware world.Or at least was supposed to be , OSS muddied the waters and forgetting the old lessons learned when thing were basically bigcorp vs indie hacker trying to getthir electronic device to connect to what they want to connect to and do what they need is why were here.
Bikeshedding to eventually come full circle to understand why those decisions were made.
In a world where the large OEMs and bigcorps are increasinly locking down firmware , bootloaders , kernels and the internet. I would think a reappraisal of more enforcement that benefits the USER is paramount.
Instead we have devs looking to tear down the few user protections FLOSS provides and usher in a locked down hacker unfiendly future.
In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon it
IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"
(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)
ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP
After cloning a test suite you're still left with ongoing maintenance and development, maintaining feature parity etc. There's a lot more than passing a test suite. If the rewrite is truly superior it deserves to become the new Ship of Theseus. But e.g. I doubt anyone's AI rewrites of SQLite will ever put a dent in its marketshare.
The legal question is a distraction. GPL was always enforced by economics: reimplementation had to cost more than compliance. At $1,100 for 94% API coverage, it doesn't. Copyleft was built for a world where clean-room rewrites were painful but they aren't anymore.
Translate an alternative?
>Something related, but different, happened with chardet. The current maintainer reimplemented it from scratch by only pointing it to the API and the test suite.
Only "pointing it". But the LLM, who can recite over 90% of a book in its training set verbatim *, would have also have had trained on the original code.
Maybe "the slop of Theseus" is a better title.
* https://the-decoder.com/researchers-extract-up-to-96-of-harr...
The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore.
Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have explicit permission to train on.
>I personally have a horse in the race here because I too wanted chardet to be under a non-GPL license for many years.
Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of software licenses.
"But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out.
> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it.
I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels. The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free market.