Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of continuing with the code, I spawned a fresh Pi session, and asked the agent to write a detailed specification of how the brcmfmac driver works

Planning markdown files are critical for any large LLM task.

View on HN

The line between AI-assisted clean-room reverse-engineeing and open-source-license-laundering is a thin one, and I think the one described in the article crosses over to laundering. In classic clean-room design, one team documents the interfaces - not the code.

In this case though, the new driver has the same license as the project it was based on and explicitly credits the original project

  ISC License
  
  Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation
  Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors
  
  Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.

This surprised me - but sure enough, they're right. The linux brcmfmac driver is ISC licensed:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/wi...

// SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC

A lot of Linux kernel drivers are permissively licensed, or dual-licensed with a choice of GPL and a permissive license. This is especially common for vendor-developed drivers. From a hardware vendor’s perspective, broad license compatibility directly supports adoption: the more operating systems, hypervisors, and embedded environments that can incorporate the driver code, the wider the potential market for the hardware itself.

It heavily depends on what you mean by "not the code", if all the code does is implement the necessary steps for the interface, then it's part of the interface. It's an interpretation of an interpretation of a datasheet.

i mean clean room was always license laundering and an AI agent cannot hold any copyright and it is largely not the same code

Reply on news.ycombinator.com