I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels. The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free market.

As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the only part of any piece of software that can be copyrighted is that part that was created by a human.

If you vibe-code the entire thing, it's not copyrightable. And if it can't be copyrighted that means it is in the public domain from the instant it was created and can't be licensed.

These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.

Bikeshedding to eventually come full circle to understand why those decisions were made.

In a world where the large OEMs and bigcorps are increasinly locking down firmware , bootloaders , kernels and the internet. I would think a reappraisal of more enforcement that benefits the USER is paramount.

Instead we have devs looking to tear down the few user protections FLOSS provides and usher in a locked down hacker unfiendly future.

[1] https://licensecheck.io/blog/lgpl-dynamic-linking

IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"

(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)

ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP

Good heavens, that's incredibly unethical. I suppose I should expect nothing more from a profession that has shied away from ethics essentially since its conception.

> I think society is better off when we share

Me too.

> and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it.

The GPL explicitly allows anyone to do anything with it, apart from not sharing it.

You want me to share with you, but you don't want to share with me.

That's not how copyright works. It doesn't require exact copies. You also can't just rephrase an existing book from scratch when the ideas expressed are essentially the same. Same with music.

You cannot (*) use LLMs to generate code that you then license, whether that license is GPL, MIT or some proprietary mumbo-jumbo.

(*) unless you just lie about this part.

This is a head-spinning argument. The whole point of GPL is to force more things out into the open. You'd think someone who espouses open source would cheer the GPL. The only practical difference between MIT and GPL is that the former allows more closed-source code.

This feels analogous to the paradox of freedom. Truly unlimited freedom would include the freedom to oppress others, so "freedom maximalism" is an unsound philosophy (unless applied solipsistically).

When I publish, I tend to do so under MIT. I also write plenty of closed-source code. And I do generally believe in open source. But I don't use that as a justification for preferring MIT. If anything, I like MIT despite believing in open source, not because. Mainly because I want people to actually use what I wrote.

Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have explicit permission to train on.

Kinda surprised nobody commented on this

e.g. Somebody wrote a library, and then you had an LLM implement it in a new language.

You didn't come up with the idea for whatever the library does, and you didn't "perform" the new implementation. You're neither writer nor performer, just the person who requested a new performance. You're basically a club owner who hired a band to cover some tunes. There's a lot involved in running a club, just like there's a fair bit involved in operating a LLM, but none of that gives you rights over the "composition". If you want to make money off of that performance, you need to pay the writer and/or satisfy whatever terms and conditions they've made the library available under.

IANAL, so I don't even know what species of worms are inside this can I've opened up. It seems sensible, to me, that running somebody else's work through a LLM shouldn't give you something that you can then claim complete control over.

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Edit: For the sake of this argument, let's pretend we're somewhere with sensible music copyright laws, and not the weird piano-roll derived lunacy that currently exists in the U.S..

In the example given and discussed here the last couple of days there seems to be a process more akin to having an AI create a cast of the pre-existing work and fill it for the new one.

How would I defend myself against hostile entities and societal norms that make it OK to steal from me and my effort without compensation? I will close my doors, put up walls, and distrust more often.

That's clearly the trend the world is going towards and I don't see that changing until we find some a way to make it cheaper to detect deception and parasitic behavior along with holding said entities accountable. Since our world leaders have had a history of unaccountable leadership and they are whom model this behavior, I have difficulty seeing the norms change without drastic worldwide leadership change.

Imagine doing the same with vehicle engines. Less fuel consumption, less pollution, less weight and who knows how many more benefits.

Just letting the A.I. do it by itself is sloppy though. The real benefit is derived only when the resulting port is of equal or better quality than the original. It needs a more systematic approach, with a human in the loop and good tools to index and select data from both codebases, the original and the ported one. The tools are not invented yet but we will get there.

> © Copyright 2026 by Armin Ronacher.

Oooohkaaaay?

Good term.

For myself, I tend to have a similar view as the author (I publish MIT on most of my work), but it’s not really something I’m zealous about, and I’m not really into “slopforking” the work of others. I tend to prefer reinventing the wheel.

https://github.com/albfernandez/juniversalchardet

It also just feels a little nefarious. There isn't much reason to change between those licenses in question beyond to allow it to be more tightly integrated into something commercial and closed-source. In which case, having an LLM write a compatible rewrite _in a new project_ seems reasonable at the current moment in time. It's this intentional overriding of the original intentions, seemingly _for profit_ as well, that is the grossest part, because the alternatives are just so easy and common.

Not ship of Theseus, but a "new implementation from ground up.

Evidently, the author prefers MIT (https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...), and seems OK with slop-coding.

Interestingly that‘s also the exact same spot I stopped reading.

The dilution of morals weakens societies. We ignore them at our own peril, the planet and most certainly any god figure doesn’t care.

And thus we arrive at the absolute shit state the world is in. We keep putting morality aside for something “more interesting” then forget to consider it back in when making the final point.

“Have you tried: “kill all the poor?””

https://youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

Its not only likely, it is in fact the current position, at least in the US.