AI and the Ship of Theseus

> Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause

The short version is that chardet is a dependency of requests which is very popular, and you cannot distribute PyInstaller/PyOxidizer builds with chardet due to how these systems bundle up dependencies.

[1]: https://velovix.github.io/post/lgpl-gpl-license-compliance-w...

[2]: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/issues/142

I don't think it changes much about licensing in particular. People are going on about how since the AI was trained on this code, that makes it a derivative work. But it must be borne in mind that AI training doesn't usually lead to memorizing the training data, but rather learning the general patterns of it. In the case of source code, it learns how to write systems and algorithms in general, not a particular function. If you then describe an interface to it, it is applying general principles to implement that interface. Its ability to succeed in this depends primarily on the complexity of the task. If you give it the interfaces of a closed source and open sourced project of similar complexity, it will have a relatively equal time of implementing them.

Even prior to this, relatively simple projects licensed under share alike licenses were in danger of being cloned under either proprietary or more permissive licenses. This project in particular was spared, basically because the LGPL is permissive enough that it was always easier to just comply with the license terms. A full on GPLed project like GCC isn't in danger of an AI being able to clone it anytime soon. Nevermind that it was already cloned under a more permissive license by human coders.

> or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.

I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.

If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it. The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real quick, massive difference in just a few years already.

Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.

And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.

I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.

I have no data to back this up but patent trolling seems to happen far less than companies that already own significant infra/talent ripping products from smaller companies and out competing them with their scale. I'd rather have patent trolling than have Amazon manufacturer everything i launch.

The problem with IP laws and the US is that the big companies already do what IP is suppose to protect and the US refuses to legislate effectively against them.

Is there anything you have created, spending considerable resources and time, that you ended up giving up for free? For the betterment of humanity?

If so, let's see it!

I don't think it's been established that clean-room rewrites are no longer painful. We don't know if chardet could have been rewritten so easily if the original code wasn't in the training set.

Maybe, but the LLM did not recite the chardet source code so that argument does not appear to apply here.

What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

100% agree, if we are fair and honorable.

In practice, well ... you saw what's been going on with the Epstein files, etc... we are far from being ourselves in a world that's fair and honorable.

(I'm not condoning it, I think it's massively trashy to steal code like this then pretend you're the good guy because of some super weird mental gymnastics you're doing)

> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?

Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.

> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.

Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.

So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.

>Licenses exists for a reason

Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.

And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.

But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.

And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).

"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"

This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the clear regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like the Linux kernel.