TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases.
This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code.
That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.
Open source != copyrighted. Public domain source code is also open source.
I hate this trend I see of the FOSS movement retreating from the foundational principle that it started on: Free Sharing of Software.
Not shareware, not ‘libre but not gratis’, not ‘buy me a coffee to get access to the code on my patreon’, not ‘free to look at but not to use as source code’: free period. Libre and gratis.
These non-lawyers traipsing in to make claims about the effect of AI on open source licensing are giving me big “I release my code but only if I can 1) get paid for it and 2) control who and how it’s used” vibes. That’s what’s ‘hollowing-out’ open source.
What value? Value to whom? The value of source code is what it does, i.e. the program it compiles or is interpreted into. That doesn’t change by someone else using it differently than you. Google taking Linux and spinning off Android doesn’t “hurt” Linux. It doesn’t decrease the ‘value’. There’s no universal counter out there that says, “this GPLv2 attribution appears more than someone else’s, so therefore this project is more valuable”, that is being eroded if a company goes and uses it without reprinting the license notice as well. OSS licenses have never prevented that.
I said it before the last time FOSS came up, and I’ll say it again:
FOSS is about propagating software to as many people as possible, to help as many people as possible. It’s not about creating legal barriers to diminish the power of corporations; making tools available to people that are better and cheaper will do that naturally (and you were never going to beat the corpo lawyers anyways trying to enforce licenses).
If your zeal to prevent corporations from ever misusing FOSS leads you to remove some aspect of it (free, open, or source), then you’ve cut off your nose to spite your face.
I said I was focusing on copyleft, cool that you ignored the entire post though. 😑
Perhaps you should have titled the post “AI Code Hollowing Out Copyleft Ecosystem”, then, unless you’re intentionally trying to conflate Open Source with Copyleft (you are, based on your other blog posts). But I remember seeing your post about the “social contract” of OSS last December, and you are in fact exactly who my comment is about:
Copyleft is a reactionary movement from people who turned into the beast they hated in trying to fight it. “Permissive” licenses are FOSS. Copyleft is certainly maybe OSS, but it’s not “Free” (as in either “libre” or “gratis”) if some other person can mandate both that you do something, and what you do. If usage of something is contingent on payment (including payment via feel-good attribution), it’s not free.
I’ll add here: FOSS is also not about some one-sided “covenant” where a creator believes the users of said freely-given software owe them something (money, gratitude, or even just ‘reciprocity’ and attribution). If you’re in OSS for the fuzzy feeling you get when someone forks your repo, or the conviction that OSS contribs are intrinsically good in some nebulous way, it’s no wonder you’re hung up on seeing a transactional return on your labor instead of just knowing it’s out there maybe helping someone, somewhere.
I know what copyleft licenses are about, that was covered in the post - if you read it. If you are saying that you are making long comments without reading the post, great I guess, but not super interesting (to me).
I’m not really interested in getting into an argument around license choice because I wasn’t advocating for any particular license (like you seem to be).
I didn’t say that. I read the post, but did not click through to the other post from December to realize it was part of a pattern.
That’s fine, you are not beholden to respond to me.