couldn't you always generate infinite code? just write more of it. but what open source lets you do is read the code for a particular piece of software, to see what it actually does. generating infinite code has nothing to do with that.
agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.
Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.
I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...
There's a difference between something being released as open source and something that never gets released at all. Open source or not only becomes relevant when making the binary available to other people.
> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthetic to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
Makes sense, many of the programming languages are open source, other novelty things were released as open source aswell, we as programmers/software engineers does a bunch of our solutions based on public code or under Creative Commons.
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
I'm tired of these child like responses from adult professionals in this industry. Do you argue just for the sake of arguing? No, your exposure to opensource code "massive" and you are clearly smart enough to know this but you had this make this comment as rage bait.
An entire generation of web developers learned by viewing the source of webpages they visited at a time when HTML and JavaScript were still nascent. I don't think setting the bar for "massive" is the way to win this argument. It's valid because the biggest difference between an LLM reading Stack Overflow and remembering content and me finding answers there and learning something is that the LLM can do it much, much faster.
The difference is, just as a child doesn't need to consume the entirety of a language before being able to communicate with said language, a human developer doesn't need to consume all of Stack Overflow, Open source projects etc. in order to start producing functional work.
I have learnt to read by training on a lot of books, I should then open source all future things I write. I've learnt to walk by watching other people, I probably should publish videos of me whenever I walk.
Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way.
They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
No, the four freedoms rely on copyright. If there is no copyright, any company can take the open source code, modify it as they like, and never give back the modifications to anyone. It's the equivalent of an MIT license (technically, it's more like public domain but let's ignore this detail here). That's fine for many but far from the goals of the GPL.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.
My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.
I don't see extreme views in this article. When LLMs take creative content from copyleft code, the license says the output has to be copyleft. Otherwise, it's theft.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
That’s not an extreme view. Anyone who uses software under a copyleft license should also release any derivatives under the same license. While this isn’t currently the case legally since the GPL was never written with the possibility in mind that LLMs might be trained on it in the future it still aligns with the spirit of the license.
Taking all of available human knowledge, knowledge that was published under limited licences, and commercializing all that already is a fairly extreme action.
Merely arguing that perhaps the fruits of that harvest should also be available to the public doesn't seem that extreme.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
> such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything.
We already have a growing discoverability problem in many areas of content and throwing more slop into the mix is not the solution. This place for example has become a dumping ground for people, usually with no other activity here, to advertise their shovelware AI projects.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from
me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
Open source people have had half a century to figure out how to make money with fairly little success (aside from a dozen or so very notable projects, and looking at all my AI slop, I don't see one of these hiding in there).
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor. Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. I imagine those two things combined swing the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
That or everything goes full cloud, and you don't get any software on your computer of course.
The article contradicts itself. CC licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
> If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
The distinction is between creation and distribution.
Even if you accept that AI code isn't protected by copyright, code isn't public domain unless it's released. The legal issue would likely revolve around what 'released' means.
Code that runs on private servers isn't technically released. Code in web pages technically is.
But ultimately legal decisions decide to a large extent on who has the most money.
The frontier labs may eventually try to argue that they own the IP of all code, content, and inventions generated using their technology. That argument may or may not stand, and it's more likely to be over patent rights than plain copyright.
But there's a fair chance they'll try it once AI is unavoidably embedded in everyone's workflow.
Maybe the Do What The F*ck You Want To Public License (WTFPL). Its a super-permissive open-source license that acts almost like a public domain dedication.
> It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit.
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
> We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
I have no issue with changing the law. My comment is about the article and the author's misapplication of the law.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadBut we're not headed in that direction are we.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthetic to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
You're also unlikely to output what you trained on verbatim.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
OTOH as models get better at RE it may become moot.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
How do you copyright stolen material?
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?
First of all, nobody must force OpenSource. Period. Second, such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side.
Discussion is good, but this article is too draconian to be practical.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
No, GPL and copyleft licenses very much do and should force OpenSource by its nature. If someone uses GPL or AGPL and doesn't open source, they should be forced to Open Source.
IMO it'd be better if the weights themselves were considered public domain.
The opposite side had exrtreme views for at least 4 decades. They publish stuff, cram it into your face with advertisement and demand purchasing a license for consuming it. And if you don't buy they want you to pay thousands of dollars or go to jail. That's as extreme as it goes. Eff them. Reverse engineer, clone and open source everything.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.
Doesn't mean it did either. (99% of the time it didn't tho. Nobody reaches to a vibe code machine because they care or want to dedicate effort.)
Furthermore, copyright protects only the expression, not the idea - reimplementing the same idea with "different words" has always been permitted under copyright law (patents may protect the idea, though).
Of course, the fact that it would lack copyright protection it doesn't implythat you have to do something with the code for management of your kid's schedules, just that if someone else somehow legally gets hold of it, the law won't prevent them from making and distributing copies or derived work.
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor. Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. I imagine those two things combined swing the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
That or everything goes full cloud, and you don't get any software on your computer of course.
This is the crux of the issue. A license controls usage of copyrighted intellectual property. Until the underlying copyright/ip issues are resolved, it seems a moot point to discuss licensing.
That said, if AI code is _not_ copyrightable, does it automatically go into the public domain? Or is there a third category?
Even if you accept that AI code isn't protected by copyright, code isn't public domain unless it's released. The legal issue would likely revolve around what 'released' means.
Code that runs on private servers isn't technically released. Code in web pages technically is.
But ultimately legal decisions decide to a large extent on who has the most money.
The frontier labs may eventually try to argue that they own the IP of all code, content, and inventions generated using their technology. That argument may or may not stand, and it's more likely to be over patent rights than plain copyright.
But there's a fair chance they'll try it once AI is unavoidably embedded in everyone's workflow.
Just as it's important to remember that the purpose of regulations like copyright and patents are to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
We're not locked in to a suicide pact with what the Founding Fathers decided back in the late 1700s. Congress can decide that all LLM-generated code is automatically covered by -say- the GPLv3, even if no one holds the copyright to it.
If the absence of a particular person to hold the copyright twists your knickers, you could go a bit further and -say- decide that the people of the United States collectively hold the copyright to all LLM-generated code that's generated by US people or entities, and that relicensing of a particular piece of LLM-generated code must be agreed to by every US citizen that was alive when that code was created.
I have no issue with changing the law. My comment is about the article and the author's misapplication of the law.