Wait a minute. Reading some GPL’ed code and then writing a new thing, based on the ideas you’ve learned from the code, can be an intellectual property rights violation?
Wait a minute. Reading some GPL’ed code and then writing a new thing, based on the ideas you’ve learned from the code, can be an intellectual property rights violation?
That raises an interesting question though. If I read the code, remember it, and then re-type it as is, that'd obviously fall under license's terms. But if I write an ML process, that knows to read code, understand it, and reproduce it, and it ends up reproducing the said code byte-for-byte, is that considered copying too? Suppose I didn't intend for ML process to work that way, I just programmed it in a way to find optimal solutions, and trained it on a dataset of GPL code, and it happened that this particular piece of GPL code, byte-for-byte, was chosen by the ML algorithm as optimal. Did I copy the code? Did I violate the license even earlier, when training the ML model on GPL code?
Building a tool that facilitates or even automatically copies code and then using it would absolutely open you to issues.
I'm actually not sure what your thought process around why it wouldn't - if you're byte for byte copying something that you, or a machine, saw, that didn't have rights to use (or rather, didn't have rights to determine how other people use it - and you tried to enforce them) would be a problem.
If you're not supposed to look at GPL code, why would you train your model using such code?
If so, there must be some boundary there - but I am not sure where.
This isn’t about whether or not you’re allowed to use GPL code, it’s about whether you’re allowed to enforce ownership rights against it, presumably.
If you copy GPL code you are in violation, however it happens.
I am not talking about "enforcing ownership rights" - if I train a model on GPL code and it produces some code, I am not asking about ownership rights on that code. For all I care, that can be public domain. What I am asking is how much of the original code should be left in this product for it to be still covered under GPL and how would one find such a boundary?
TL;DR Microsoft is being Microsoft again. Also water is wet.
It's best to exclusively hire race car drivers and fedex delivery workers to your software development workforce, as they are statistically least likely to have been exposed to GPL code (per bureau of labor and statistics).