> LLM as the main weapon

LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS.

I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation.

Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet.

There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.

Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up and people don't have to respect the license or even acknowledge your work.

Copyleft is a mirror of copyright, not a way to fight copyright. It grants rights to the consumer where copyright grants rights to the creator. Importantly, it gives the end-user the right to modify the software running on their devices.

Unfortunately, there are cases where you simply can't just "re-implement" something. E.g., because doing so requires access to restricted tools, keys, or proprietary specifications.

Its purpose "if you run the software you should be able to inspect and modify that software, and to share those modifications with your peers" not explicitly resist copyright. Yes copyright is bad in that it often prevents one from doing that, but it is not the purpose of the GPL to dismantle copyright.

Reducing it to "well you can clone the proprietary software you're forced to use by LLM" is really missing the soul of the GPL.

> AI is eroding copyright, so there may no longer be a need for the GPL. GNU should stop and rethink its stance, chuck away the GPL as the main tool to fight evil software corporations and embrace LLM as the main weapon.

Is this LLM thing freely available or is it owned and controlled by these companies? Are we going to rent the tools to fight "evil software corporations"?

> we'll see that it was an attempt to fight copyrights with copyrights

it's not that simple

yes, GPLs origins have the idea of "everyone should be able to use"

but it also is about attribution the original author

and making sure people can't just de-facto "size public goods"

the kind of AI usage is removing attribution and is often sizing public goods in a way far worse then most companies which just ignored the license did

so today there is more need then ever in the last few decades for GPL like licenses

That's naive. Copyright doesn't just apply to software. There already have been countless lawsuits about copying music long before the term "open source" was invented. No, changing the lyrics a bit doesn't circumvent copyright. Nor does translating a Stephen King novel to German and switching the names of the places and characters.

A court ordered the first Nosferatu movie to be destroyed because it had too many similarities to Dracula. Despite the fact that the movie makes rather large deviations from the original.

If Claude was indeed asked to reimplement the existing codebase, just in Rust and a bit optimized, that could well be a copyright violation. Just like rephrasing A Song ot Ice and Fire a bit, and switching to a different language, doesn't remove its copyright.

So not only are we moving goalposts here, but we've decided the GNU team should join the other team? I don't understand how GNU would see mass model LLM training as anything but the most flagrant violations of their ethos. LLM labs, in their view, would be among the most evil software corporations to have ever existed.

> What AI are eroding is copyright.

At the moment it's people that are eroding copyright. E.g. in this case someone did something.

"AI" didn't have a brain, woke up and suddenly decided to do it.

Realistically nothing to do with AI. Having a gun doesn't mean you randomly shoot.

While I personally agree with you, Richard Stallman (the creator of the GPL) does not. He has always advocated in favor of strong copyright protection, because the foundation of the GPL is the monopoly power granted by copyright. The problem that the GPL is intended to solve is proprietary software.

Generative models (AI) are not really eroding copyright. They are calling its bluff. The very notion of intellectual property depends on a property line: some arbitrary boundary where the property begins and ends. Generative models blur that line, making it impractical to distinguish which property belongs to whom.

Ironically, these models are made by giant monopolistic corporations whose wealth is quite literally a market valuation (stock price) of their copyrights! If generative models ever become good enough to reimplement CUDA, what value will NVIDIA have left?

The reality is that generative models are nowhere near good enough to actually call the bluff. Copyright is still the winning hand, and that is likely to continue, particularly while IP holders are the primary authors of law.

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This whole situation is missing the forest for the trees. Intellectual Property is bullshit. A system predicated on monopoly power can only result in consolidated wealth driving the consolidation of power; which is precisely what has happened. The words "starving artist" ring every bit as familiar today as any time in history. Copyright has utterly failed the very goals it was explicitly written with.

It isn't the GPL that needs changing. So long as a system of copyright rules the land, copyleft is the best way to participate. What we really need is a cohesive political movement against monopoly power; one that isn't conveniently ignorant of copyright as its most significant source.

> Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years.

I would argue it's irrelevant if they looked or didn't look at the code. As well as weather he was or wasn't familiar with it.

What matters is, that they feed to original code into a tool which they setup to make a copy of it. How that tool works doesn't really matter. Neither does it make a difference if you obfuscate that it's an copy.

If I blindfold myself when making copies of books with a book scanner + printer I'm still engaging in copyright infringement.

If AI is a tool, that should hold.

If it isn't "just" a tool, then it did engage in copyright infringement (as it created the new output side by side with the original) in the same way an employee might do so on command of their boss. Which still makes the boss/company liable for copyright infringement and in general just because you weren't the one who created an infringing product doesn't mean you aren't more or less as liable of distributing it, as if you had done so.

I just don't see how it's relevant whether he did look or didn't. In my opinion, it's not just legally valid to make a re-implementation of something if you've seen the code as long as it doesn't copy expressive elements. I think it's also ethically fine as well to use source code as a reference for re-implementing something as long as it doesn't turn into an exact translation.

Oracle had it's day in court with Google over the Java APIs. Reimplementing APIs can be done without copyright infringement, but Oracle must have tried to find real infringement during discovery.

In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.

Can anyone find the actual quote where Blanchard said this?

My understanding was that his claim was that Claude was not looking at the existing source code while writing it.

Isn't this a red herring? An API definition is fair use under Google v. Oracle, but the test suite is definitely copyrightable code!

If you only stick to the API and ignore the implementation, it is not Mickey Mouse any more but a rodent. If it was just a clone it wouldn't be 50x as fast. Nevertheless, APIs apparently can be copyrightable. I generally disagree with this; it's how PC compatibles took off, giving consumers better options.

> This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and

> He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it

Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to...

Technically did look.

What if we said that generative AI output is simply not copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be public domain, except in cases where the output directly infringes the rights of an existing work.

This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain.

I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.

There’s an other option. The cost of copying existing software trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.

There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".

The value of software has never been tied to the cost of writing it, even if you don't distribute it your still breaking the law.

Total digression but yeah, that layout is stupid and the way those words are dropped in using Romaji makes no sense. That's not how Japanese people lay out pages on the web. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese web page laid out like a book like this, and in general I'd expect the English proper nouns and words that don't have obvious translations to get transliterated into Katakana. Smells like automatic conversion added by someone not really familiar with common practices for presenting Japanese on the web.

> Was it due to ideology or lower cost or more features?

It was due to access.