Comment by utopiah
5 months ago
Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them.
It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify.
"Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!
This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save you either.
No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)
Those clauses exclude those licenses from some very important definitions of free/open-source software. For example they would fail the Desert Island Test for the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
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You are either talking about a license nobody is using (at least I've never heard of it) or misconstruing what the AGPL obligates you to do.
I am going to assume it's the latter.
If you in your house take an AGPL program, host it for yourself, and use it yourself, nothing in the AGPL obligates you to publish the source changes.
In fact, even if you take AGPL software and put it behind a paywall and modify it, the only people who the license mandates you to provide the source code for are the people paying.
The AGPL is basically the GPL with the definition of "user" broadened to include people interacting with the software over the network.
And the GPL, again, only requires you to provide the source code, upon request, to users. If you only distribute GPL software behind a paywall, you personally only need to give the source to people paying.
Although in both these cases, nothing stops the person receiving that source code from publishing it under its own terms.
The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.
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Which licenses do that?
"given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever"
I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive for most, if not all, projects?
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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Civil War Hospital Clean Room equivalent
Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?
The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).
If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.
> If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.
Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM.
It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
No one who understands the first thing about this topic could possibly have read that web page and not realized that it was satire.
"Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?"
"Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers."
"For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers."
"Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"
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If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
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There is an overlay of smeared poop on one of the license files… is that something you are seeing on typical tech company landing pages?
The company is literally named “bad/evil.”