alt Hacker NewsThis is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures:
1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all.
2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.
Replies
There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".
The value of software has never been tied to the cost of writing it, even if you don't distribute it your still breaking the law.
There’s an other option. The cost of copying existing software trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.