This case shows how Open Source will die. With anyone just being able to pipe existing code and tests through an LLM and claiming that to be "clean room" (which is hogwash) no licensing can protect your work from being accumulated and monetized by anyone. The commons are actively being shredded in front of our eyes.
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@tante MIT/BSD isn't open source anymore? News to me
@feld if you can strip LGPL requirements that way, you can strip anything
@tante let's consider some more practical examples:
pkg-config. pkg-config is a big deal, pretty important these days in software development/packaging. Should everyone be forced to use the GPL version? Nope, we have a drop-in replacement called pkgconf that's BSD licensed, and that's what the BSDs all use.
resolvconf, another Linux distro invention. Are BSDs forced to use the GPL version simply because it exists? No, we have a full rewrite called openresolv which is a drop in replacement.
Should the GNU Coreutils be allowed to exist since they're mostly rewrites/reimplementations of the BSD variants? Sure.
We've been playing this game for decades, LLMs just makes this easier.
This guy's cardinal sin was keeping the name. He should never have done that. This is where he'll lose in court. He has to rename this project.
edit: another good one -- Toybox reinventing Busybox
pkg-config. pkg-config is a big deal, pretty important these days in software development/packaging. Should everyone be forced to use the GPL version? Nope, we have a drop-in replacement called pkgconf that's BSD licensed, and that's what the BSDs all use.
resolvconf, another Linux distro invention. Are BSDs forced to use the GPL version simply because it exists? No, we have a full rewrite called openresolv which is a drop in replacement.
Should the GNU Coreutils be allowed to exist since they're mostly rewrites/reimplementations of the BSD variants? Sure.
We've been playing this game for decades, LLMs just makes this easier.
This guy's cardinal sin was keeping the name. He should never have done that. This is where he'll lose in court. He has to rename this project.
edit: another good one -- Toybox reinventing Busybox
@mawhrin @tante but he didn't re-license code. The old code no longer exists in the repo. Not a single line of it.
He replaced the project with new code that has a new license. Anyone can do this in any project and it happens all the time. Rewriting code to change its license or its copyright holder is not unusual. Companies that force you to sign a CLA to contribute do this to launder all the code that they never got CLAs signed off for, then they can change the license of the entire project.
He should be forced to rename the project, though. I think that's his one mistake.
He replaced the project with new code that has a new license. Anyone can do this in any project and it happens all the time. Rewriting code to change its license or its copyright holder is not unusual. Companies that force you to sign a CLA to contribute do this to launder all the code that they never got CLAs signed off for, then they can change the license of the entire project.
He should be forced to rename the project, though. I think that's his one mistake.