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Comment by bananamogul | Hacker News Reader

If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look at the GNU code.

But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certainly possible to clone GNU grep without copying any code and I don't think it would fail any copyright claims just because the GNU grep code is in the wild.

If that was the case, the moment any code is written under the GPL, it could never be reimplemented with a different license.

So instead of a human cloner, I use AI. Sure, the AI has access to the GPL code - every intelligence on the planet does. But does that mean that it's impossible to reimplement an idea? I don't think so.

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Normally with clean room reimplementations, you’d have the developer working from a set of requirements which have been gathered by someone else who reverse engineered the process.

Here, neither steps are taken.

If you’re supplying a BOM manifest, rather than software constraints, then the only way to assert those constraints is to directly compare against the original project. It doesn’t matter if it’s AI or a human doing that, because either way it’s not “clean room”.

You can do clean room design with AI via SDD (spec driven development). But that’s not what this service (satire or not) offers.

What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place.

Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea really does matter when we are talking about defrauding intellectual property holders and stealing their opportunity.

"Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place."

But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it from scratch under a different license.

Yes the entire enterprise and legal precedent is full of shit with intellectual property law being abused left and right. For example, I don’t think Google should have been able to copy the Java API for Kotlin/Android. Java should have just died and everyone would have been better off. By making copyright more weak, free software reaps what it sews.

I love FOSS but I hate that it’s been used to replicate existing code or serve as a way to outsource corporate tech debt. The shadow of profit looms over it all.

This rewrite of GNU coreutils to rust comes to mind https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

Someone should take that and submit it upstream.

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