alt Hacker NewsThat’s not the only thing that matters. The provenance of the code also matters enormously, specifically whether the person contributing it actually has the right to do so.
If I contributed code to an Open Source project behind my old employer’s back, that would have been bad, because that code was owned by them and not me, even if I wrote it on my own time using my own equipment, because of the contract I signed with them.
If I copied code out of an AGPLv3-licensed codebase and contributed it to a BSD-licensed codebase without telling anyone, that would have been bad, because I did not have the right to change the license on that code to BSD (or change the license on the codebase to which I was contributing to AGPLv3).
If you use an LLM to produce code, you may well be doing the latter since an LLM is actually just regurgitating portions of its inputs. This is not a hypothetical scenario; I’ve personally encountered a case of someone using an LLM attempt to contribute code I recognized from a specific Open Source project under one license to another project under a different license, while claiming they “wrote it themselves.”
Any project that accepts contributions needs to take liability seriously and manage their risk appropriately.
Replies
The genie is out of the bottle here. If this were true then all fortune 500 companies would be pearl clutching and limiting their developers access to these tools.
But for better or worst I can assure you (for which you have no reason to believe me, just look at the headlines): nearly all tech companies are setting internal goals to have x% of code generated by llms by y date. And speaking as an insider, that x number is very large and that y date is very soon.
And before everyone continues to downvote me because I'm saying things that you don't want to hear, you have to realize that this is the world we live in now.
So, either you're right and the legal entities attached to some of the most powerful tech corporations have just decided to flaunt the law. Or you are missing something, or the game has changed.
Open source projects that want to hide behind provenance as a gate keeper to introduce llm generated code into their code base are going to get smoked.
There's nothing stopping a company like anthropic from funding an open source division that starts forking projects and accelerating the development. Expect 1000x more Buns.
There's nothing stopping an wealthy individual who wants to do that.
When the dust settles, no one is going to be worried about what you've typed here.
And if somehow the ip lawyers and capitalists won, then China will become the tech hub of the world.
Whether it's right or wrong, that is the reality.
"LLM produced licensed code and person contributed it" is indistinguishable from "person contributed licensed code". The LLM is irrelevant. Result is the same as if they had copy pasted it.