That LLM was trained on FOSS software that others like myself wrote and did not consent to have used in such a manner. Even if you're also a FOSS contributor and you're fine with it, I'm not.
So you like it, but you're not the party whose consent matters. You're the customer consuming the laundered goods from the fence.
The attribution licenses such as ALv2, BSD, MIT, etc. which are generally considered to be "permissive" still require attribution, and this condition is not upheld by popular LLMs.
Of course, the copied material has to be judged substantial enough for the license to apply in a court of law, which is a human-arbitrated threshold.
It will most likely be a copyleft author who eventually brings a court case, but the attribution licenses do not allow for LLM usage either unless the LLM provides attribution and preserves notices as spelled out in the licenses.
I think it is pretty obvious that lots of GPL authors wouldn’t want their code to be productized in ways that don’t contribute back to the community, because they had the ability to use a BSD or MIT license and didn’t take it.
Legally, of course, LLMs are not people. They don’t have the same rights as people, and it isn’t obvious whether or not they can legally generate new IP. They operate by a complicated but essentially mechanical process, and it is pretty novel to say that such a process could be used to remove copyrights.
But the defendant won't be Microsoft — they just provided a tool, and that's legal. No, the defendant will be the downstream consumer who incorporated the code spat out by the LLM.
It doesn't matter whether the LLM "learned" — intent is irrelevant and the defendant will have committed copyright violation regardless. The LLM can't copyright-wash the code — nobody can.
The point is that there are repositories on Github that contain commits from non-Github-users. For example, not every single commit to the Linux kernel has been made by a Github user, but there is a mirror at https://github.com/torvalds/linux .
> You're playing a dumb game
For what it’s worth I’m not a lawyer and surely get some things wrong but licensing is an area where I have a certain amount of practical experience.
There’s some interesting ground to cover on this topic but we aren’t getting there and the incivility isn’t helping. Please consider this passage from the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Also, take it up with Torvalds:
"And yes, at least under US copyright law, and at least if you see Linux as a "collective work" (which is arguably the most straightforward reading og copyright law, but perhaps not the only one) I am actually the sole owner of copyright in the *collective* work of the Linux kernel."