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Comment by g-b-r

10 hours ago

Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.

Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

38 comments

g-b-r

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iamnothere  10 hours ago

It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.

Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)

  • flossly  4 hours ago

    Linux (Linus T himself iirc) is very GPLv2.

    They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc. But the result was also that big corps liked GPLv3 even less than GPLv2.

    On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.

    • ender341341  2 hours ago

      > On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.

      My understanding was this was never a problem, almost all of the kernel was licensed as "GPL2 or newer" until GPL3 was released and they removed the "or newer" from new releases

      1 reply →

  • asveikau  8 hours ago

    I think what you're finding is that people who don't care about low quality of LLM outputs also don't care about licensing. If you're in the faction that supports all of this, you don't see a lot of people around you still caring about licensing or quality.

    • iamnothere  7 hours ago

      I am in neither faction, as I already indicated. I’m not an LLM user except for search engine summaries.

      I also already mentioned that some formerly GPL die-hards have been jumping ship from Linux to BSDs simply because of the respective stances on AI. That’s enough for me to say this works both ways.

  • g-b-r  9 hours ago

    The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

    Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?

    With Linux I meant the Linux kernel

    • iamnothere  8 hours ago

      Copyright is based on laws, and laws can be changed or clarified. Given the amount of overinvestment in AI, I expect them to change. The EU is already making moves in this direction: https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expro...

      I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.

      1 reply →

    • ethin  5 hours ago

      > The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

      The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.

      3 replies →

    • Vaushite  5 hours ago

      You're being pretty, I'm not sure the right word, scaredycat?, about licensing. Licensing doesn't matter unless somebody sues you, which they won't in most cases. The AI era has exposed this truth that you're extremely unlikely to get sued about copyright violation - so unless you're the kind of person who avoids car trips because you could crash, you can ignore it.

      1 reply →

    • graemep  8 hours ago

      How many cases of an LLM outputting training code have you heard of? let alone training code that you are not allowed to use or relicense?

      Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

      5 replies →

soperj  9 hours ago

> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.

  • craftkiller  9 hours ago

    > no contributions

    That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.

    Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:

      15925 The FreeBSD Foundation
   3738 Netflix
   2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
   1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
   1733 Dell EMC Isilon
   1550 Chelsio Communications
   1446 DARPA, AFRL
   1421 Mellanox Technologies
   1262 Klara, Inc.
    784 Arm Ltd
    729 iXsystems, Inc.
    707 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
    552 Netflix, Inc.
    477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
    473 Microsoft
    421 Juniper Networks, Inc.
    411 DARPA, NAI Labs
    386 Stormshield
    385 Microsoft OSTC
    384 DARPA
    375 NetApp, Inc.
    358 Innovate UK
    355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories
    317 Yandex LLC
    299 NVIDIA Networking

    One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)

    • kevinrineer  7 hours ago

      So interesting to see Darpa represented in different labs. I wouldn't have bother to look for that interesting tidbit otherwise, so thanks for that.

    • Brian_K_White  4 hours ago

      The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.

      If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

      What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.

      3 replies →

  • tehologist  9 hours ago

    Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.

  • riffraff  1 hour ago

    If that was the case, we wouldn't be using openssh, openssl, perl/python/ruby etc...

    I'm a GPL person but that's not why Linux won over the BSDs.

palata  3 hours ago

Interestingly, Linux is GPLv2 and NetBSD is permissive, so I assume AlpineBSD is permissive as well?

stackghost  5 hours ago

Literally nothing is less interesting than yet another "discussion" about the relative merits of software licenses, or generalizations about the kinds of people that prefer license A to license B.

I have flagged this comment.

  • g-b-r  5 hours ago

    I'll flag yours, because it was a completely senseless flagging.

    It wasn't even a discussion about that, I wonder if you read the two lines of the comment.