Posted by zoobab 10/28/2025
1. Does an AI "reading" source code that has been otherwise lawfully obtained infringe copyright? Is this even enforceable?
2. Why write a new license rather than just adding a rider to the AGPL? This is missing language the AGPL uses to cover usage (rather than just copying) of software.
To the extent that this has been decided under US law, no. AI training on legally acquired material has been deemed fair use.
The operative words are the last four there. GPL, and all other software licenses (copyleft or not), can only bind you as strongly as the underlying copyright law. They are providing a copyright license that grants the licensee favorable terms, but it's still fundamentally the same framework. Anything which is fair use under copyright is also going to be fair use under the GPL (and LLMs are probably transformative enough to be fair use, though that remains to be seen.)
Arguably, at least in the US, it has been seen. Unless someone comes up with a novel argument not already advanced in the Anthropic case about why training an AI on otherwise legally acquired material is not transformative enough to be fair use, I don't see how you could read the ruling any other way.
Honestly with how much focus there tends to be on *GPL in these discussions, I get the feeling that MIT style licenses tend to be the most frequently violated, because people treat it as public domain.
Demand better protections. Demand better pay.
Demand your rights. Demand accountability for oppressors.
Real "let me speak to your manager" activism. You have to have been sheltered in a really extreme way not only to say things like this, but to listen to it without laughing.
Here's some unrequested advice: the way to make simple people follow you is to make them feel like leaders among people they feel superior to, and to make them feel like rebels among people they feel inferior to. Keep this in mind and introspect when you find yourself mindlessly sloganeering.
Unsure who you are addressing, but clearly its someone other than me.
Did you see where the OP implied that any activism is useless? Got any harsh words for that philosophy?
The LLMs are harmful to the business of creating software. Full stop. Either we can do something about it (like expose the futility of licensing in general), or we can just die.
While I think this licensing effort is likely to be ignored, I applaud it and hope more things like this continue to be created. The silicon valley VC hose is truly evil.
This is both interesting but at the same time IANAL but I have a question regarding the backends system
Suppose I have an AGPL software, think a photo editing web app and any customer then takes the photo and reshapes it or whatever and get a new photo, now saying that the new photo somehow becomes a part of AGPL is weird
but the same thing is happening here, if a backed service uses it, my question is, what if someone creates a local proxy to that backend service and then the AI scrapes that local proxy or think that someone copies the output and pastes it to an AI , I don't understand it since I feel like there isn't even a proper definition of AI so could it theoretically consider everything automated? What if it isn't AI which directly accesses it
Another thing is that it seems that the backend service could have a user input, think a backend service like codeberg / forejo / gitea etc.
if I host a git server using a software which uses hopl, wouldn't that also inherently somehow enforce a terms and condition on the code hosted in it
This seems a genuinely nice idea and I have a few interesting takes on it
Firstly, what if I take freebsd which is under permissive BSD iirc, try to add a hopl license to it (or its equivalent in future?) and then build an operating system
Now, technically wouldn't everything be a part of this new human only bsd (Hob) lol, and I am not sure but this idea sounds damn fascinating, imagine a cloud where I can just change the operating system and just mention it like proudly on HOB and it would try to enforce limits on AI
What I am more interesting about is text, can I theoretically write this comment under human only public license?
What if I create a service like mataroa but where the user who wants to write the blog specifies that the text itself would become hopl, as this can limit the sense of frustration on their part regarding AI knowing that they are trying to combat it
Also I am not sure if legally speaking this thing could be done, it just seems like a way so that people can legally enforce robots.txt if this thing works but I have its questions as I had shared, and even more
It would be funny if I wrote things with AI and then created a HOPL license
something like HOPL + https://brainmade.org/ could go absolutely bunkers for making a human interacts with human sort of thing or atleast trying to achieve that. It would be a fun social experiment if we could create a social media trying to create this but as I said, I doubt that it would work other than just trying to send a message right now but I may be wrong, I usually am