alt Hacker News> In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead.
Hmm. That's going to be interesting.
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they would be just wrong. I hope someone with standing sues
Obligatory: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software and releasing under permissive licenses. Also why I'm not a fan of UUtils nor Canonical's early adoption of it in Ubuntu.
The intent here is extraction of all the value provided by copyleft projects without the obligation to give back. Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.
Knowing what you don't know is such an important skill in life and your career. And I 100% agree with you that the author is, well, off their rocker.
Let me give an example: I could take Goldeneye from the N64, extract the binary and then run it through an LLM to disassemble it and possibly rewrite it in a modern higher-level language. Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.
ingesting the source code and producing output in another language is quite clearly a derivative work. You don't need to be an IP lawyer to figure that out.
Now, if you went to Calude and gave it documentation and told it to produce something that was compatible, would that be a derivative work and thus covered by the GPL? I would guess probably. But I'm not 100% sure anymore. I wouldn't risk it however.
Here's another thought experiment: what if someone takes this supposedly MIT licensed source tree, plugs it into another LLM and asks it to produce the output in C? Now how is it licensed? It might be very similar. After all, there are only so many ways to produce a SHA1 hash and so many ways to do a command line parser.
But this then makes it an interesting legal issue. In the Oracle v. Google court case, this was a key issue. Google successfully argued there's only so many ways to write a loop so just because a loop is similar to the source, that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement (as Oracle argued).
Anyway, it's a crazy position to take.
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but it seems pretty clear to me you can't wash a license using an LLM.
[US jurisdiction]: Anything in the result written by the LLM can not be copyright by anyone.
Anything in the result written by a human can be, and if it was all emitted by the LLM then that portion originally written by a human carries its own copyright.
As a work of an LLM, the entirety presumably can not be copyright, at all. Portions written by humans presumably carry their original copyright.
A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case-law with respect to creative works. Given the current climate of ever-expanding scope of "intellectual property", if they admit that the LLM had access to git source code then I would say their case is weak at best.