alt Hacker NewsI supported Redis against Valkey because I felt software should not be appropriated like that.
Now that the Redis author supports broad copyright violations and has turned into an LLM influencer, I regret having ever supported Redis. I have watched many open source authors, who have positioned themselves as rebels and open source populists, go fully corporate. This is the latest instance.
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> broad copyright violations
You’re probably not going to be very pleased with how this all plays out in court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...
LLMs work precisely because they converge on the abstract ideas in our languages. Anything verbatim is de minimus or more likely filtered out through the lens of the above doctrines.
Corporations love copyright. I don't see why "supports broad copyright violations" and "go fully corporate" fit together here.
Corey Doctorow wrote about that recently: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washin...
He's not a generative AI fan at all, but he argues that if artists think tightening up copyright law to make it harder to train models is a good idea they're going to find themselves strengthening the very corporate overlords that they've been trying to escape.
One of the most important thing to do right now to redistribute something to the society, is to use AI to write free software: more free software than ever. If AI will be hard to access in the future, the more software it is released free, the better. If instead things go well (as I hope), there will be just a multiplication of the effect of OSS using today and tomorrow AI. In any way, writing free software using AI is a good idea, IMHO. I believe LLMs are the incarnation of software democratization, which aligns very well with why I used to write OSS. LLMs "steal" ideas, not verbatim code, you can force them to regurgitate some verbatim stuff, but most of it is ideas, and we humans also re-elaborate things we saw and we avoid (like LLMs are able to do) to emit the same stuff verbatim. But the software can't be patented for very good reasons, and LLMs capture all this value that is not subject to intellectual property, and provides it to the people that don't have the right tools and knowledge. And, it allows people that can code, to code 100x more.