alt Hacker News> Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft
The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either manual reimplementation in the rewritten version or the clean-room process being repeated completely for the whole project.
> chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API —
(from the github description)
The “same name” part to me feels somewhat disingenuous. It isn't the same thing so it should have a different name to avoid confusion, even if that name is something very similar to the original like chardet-ng or chardet-ai.
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Who cares if it can be maintained. The system now penalizes the original creator for creating it and gives thieves the ability to conduct legal theft at a gargantuan scale, the only limit being how creative the abuser is in making money.
With the incentives set up like that, the era of open software cooperation would be ended rapidly.
This is super interesting. Exploring the basis for Free Software (the 4 liberties, Richard Stallman)... if AI-code is effectively under Public Domain, wouldn't that actually be even MORE defensive than relying on copyright to be able to generate copyleft? Wouldn't the rewrite of code (previously under any license, and maybe even unknown to the LLM) constitute a massive win for the population in general, because now their 4 liberties are more attainable through the extensive use of LLMs to generate code?