All AI-generated code should be Open Source

Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.

Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.

The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.

I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...

Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.

I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.

Ethics don't really concern these companies so...

When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.

It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...

How do you copyright stolen material?

This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.

I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.

If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.

All 100% ai generated assets, art, music, text should be free and open source too.

There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.

The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.

Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.

Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)

There is still substantial human effort and R&D that goes into developing a complex code base with AI agents.

My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?

The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.

> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.

I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthetic to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?

This post is so close to getting it ;)

Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.

But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)

What’s the point, if you can generate infinte code?

Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.

The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.

In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.

Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?

I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.

agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.

But we're not headed in that direction are we.

[dead]

If AI generated code is not copyrightable, releasing it under an open source license is meaningless.