ACL 1.0: A source-available commercial license for the AI era

I've addressed why these schemes are questionable before. [0]

"This doesn't work because AI companies don't accept licenses. Either the training is already infringing (in which case this doesn't matter much) or it's fair use/permitted by law (in which case this also doesn't matter much)."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463807

While it will take a while to review the subtleties of this license, I appreciate that out of the gate they are marketing it as "Source Available" rather than picking a stupid fight by calling it "Open Source".

This license assumes that the code is valuable like before. Once you have the behavior known, independantly writing code that does it is now trivial. Hence there's no real need for this in the market.

Free-the-future is a good idea that rarely gets executed in practice because it makes nobody happy.

From the FOSS end, there's no meaningful way to participate in the license up until the proprietary terms expire. For Stallmanite purists, all the same proprietary harms still apply. For "Open Source" people, the four year delay means anyone who wants to meaningfully hack on the old version is now making an out of date fork. Good luck upstreaming that. So the proprietary side of the license just sees a "wait four years and get shit for free" license, which is a goodwill payment, not a business model.

Even the limited auditability rights, applied generally, would be unpalatable to the proprietary world. To be clear, proprietary software gets third-party audits and modifications all the time. The difference between proprietary and free is not that you can't view or modify the source[0], but that the legal right to do so is provided to capital-bearing entities only. If you don't have enough money to sue for, then you don't get to even pay for those rights, because you're not worth negotiating with. FOSS gets around this because it sets the cost of those rights to $0, so there's not much to even sue over, so here you go.

What this license and website seem to be proposing is that we just... publish proprietary apps with a general license grant that includes the right to audit source. This would be a good thing, but nobody will voluntarily agree to it, because it means competitive disadvantage. It's the sort of thing that really should have been covered by international treaty, but the last time those were negotiated, "software" meant big contracts between big companies to build something to a buyer's specifications, which is a world of difference to what it means now.

The AI clause is interesting but I'm not sure how it will play out.

[0] To be clear, Microsoft's source code has had multiple public leaks over the years; and you can make your own "leak" with a disassembler.

How are people handling AI generated code these days? Seems like everyone is using some sort of coding assistant. You can't just ship AI generated (or assisted) code to clients as if it were you're to (sub)license, can you? You don't even hold license to do so, I'd imagine

What's the difference between this and Public Domain/CC0 from PoV of labs and vibers?

It's not about "banning all AI," but trying to distinguish between using Al assistants in everyday development and feeding source code into someone else's model training systems.