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Comment by joshka | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the issue is more likely that the LLM code doesn't have an author and hence some parts of it can't be licenses, it's less likely that it's infringing on git's copyright for various reasons. (I am not a lawyer, but I do read copyright law for funsies).

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https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html

> It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.

Well that's interesting.

Also "just" the legal opinion of a government office. It has yet to be tested in court

why wouldn't it? If you run git through a compiler it's still copyright the git devs, same if you run it through an LLM.

What makes you think that's what the article says that it did? There's a lot of specific nuance and it doesn't say that anywhere. In fact it speaks of making a test suite pass only. This is the classic cleanroom bios from specs approach but no need to extract it as the test is available to run and there's nothing in the GPL that suggests that running a test suite infects software that you run it on.

Surely git’s source is already in LLM’s training corpus. So this is far from clean room approach.

You've read books and they are in your brains corpus. You only infringe copyright if you reproduce the same actual words from the books in your memory (and then do infringing acts defined by copyright laws with that output).

Here that's not happening. The code being produced by the LLM is Rust, not C.

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