Comment by Jare
21 hours ago
I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit.
If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves.
For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".
To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom".
The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom", not related to whether you profit from it or not.
> To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom
To clarify further: "freedom" for the end user, and not the developer leveraging GPL code in their software product.
Absolutely not. GPL is freedom for the authors. The end users have conditions they must meet to use the software. Those conditions are restrictions. That is precisely the opposite of freedom for end users.
To anticipate objections, the conditions keep the software "free for everyone", which is true. But that's still explicitly freedom for the authors. The conditions preemptively eliminate end users who would otherwise find the software valuable. Because it is not freedom for end users.
MIT license requires credit.
So does the BSD license. Copyright must be reproduced
Most licenses do.
1 reply →
Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong.
> My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.