Can't speak for others but I'm just tired of hearing far-fetched copyright concerns that mask the real motivation (ideological opposition to LLMs).
I am not saying this is not what will happen — the actual law seems to be still up in the air. But if it does happen it will be an existential threat to the GNU and the whole free software ecosystem.
1. There is no indication that is at all likely except for purely vibe-coded projects. It seems highly unlikely and in some countries (e.g. the UK) the law clearly says otherwise.
2. There have been quite a few rulings in countries where it is unclear, and they all set some level of human input that will make AI generated code covered by copyright. Look at the cases that have been in HN stories about cases in the US, Germany and Japan, for example.
2. It would have to be all AI generated, and you would need to replace all the human written parts. Not a practical problem for a large, old project.
If this is their real reasoning they are jumping at shadows. However, this might be like where, the copyright (which is the explanation given in the ToS) is not the real reason (which was explained in the subsequent blog post).
It is interesting that proprietary software businesses, who have an even stronger interest in ensuring their software is covered by copyright in all countries seem to be quite happy to use LLM generated code. Microsoft and many others boast about how much of their code is now LLM generated.
I don’t think taking copyright off the table harms the practice of sharing code. They will still try to use trade secrets to restrict code sharing and contracts, but using GNU software won’t be stopped. It will reduce the ability to sue people not sharing their modifications but that was always outside the mainstream, and places like AWS, Apple, and Google find ways around it anyways since it doesn’t cover hosted services or non-linked code.
The core stream of openly developed and exponentially improving software does not need copyright to win if it cannot be sued for copyright violation.
Now I suppose some OpenAI lawyer is trying to find a way to sue humans for copyright infringement while keeping them safe from lawsuits, so we can worry about that attack.
In images it's much more _obvious_, but I think code is very likely to have similar problems. Like, websites that an LLM spits out are often very very similar. It wouldn't be shocking to me if some of the code in the training set was trained off GPL code, and there are small GPL violations all over the place.
By the way, do you have a source on Midjourney spitting out copyrighted stuff all the time? Does it happen at random or when users intentionally steer the prompt in that direction? I suspect it's the latter but I admit I'm not really familiar with this tool.
Its much the same as someone creating a fork of GPL code in which they make additions that they put in the public domain. All the original code and the fork as a whole would remain GPL.
its not a small risk, its a negligible risk.
As you pointed out yourself, there's always the option to create a fork that does allow AI contributions, which may eventually force a re-assessment of the policy if the gap in utility grows too large.
That would take a very long time if contributions are reviewed etc. By then any legal ambiguities would be clear.
> a public domain codebase with some GPL code
which would still be a GPL codebase
> One way to do so is to outright ban contributions leveraging tools that are able to generate public domain code at superhuman speeds.
Can they generate code that would pass the quality standards, and pass the processes, of a project like this at superhuman speed? There is a separate requirement that contributors must be able to understand code and answer questions about it so a human would have to review code before even trying to contribute it.
> As you pointed out yourself, there's always the option to create a fork that does allow AI contributions, which may eventually force a re-assessment of the policy if the gap in utility grows too large.
1. if you are right that LLMs will do well enough to create a huge gap, then that is inevitable. 2. if you are wrong about that then it is unnecessary to try to stop it.
> which would still be a GPL codebase
If the GPL-licensed parts have become so insignificant that they can easily be replaced, it effectively no longer would be.