Comment by pseudalopex
12 hours ago
The view LLMs should respect open source software licenses is not for replication alone. Models and generated code are derived from training data.
12 hours ago
The view LLMs should respect open source software licenses is not for replication alone. Models and generated code are derived from training data.
Developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
Depends on how you define "learn": usually, a company wanting to rebuild and publish something under a different license prohibits their developers from having ever looked at original code, to avoid the risk of copying over exact snippets out of their memory accidentally.
Copyright protects only arbitrarily non-trivial parts of the original being reproduced, but that means that you have to be careful with learning from copyrighted material. Programming books will have direct clauses allowing snippet reuse, but not for teaching purposes.
> Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.
> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
How?