Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control.

The implications will not end up being anti-large-corporation or pro-sharing. If you can prevent someone from re-implementing a spec or building a client that speaks your API or building a work-a-like, it will be the large corporations that exersize this power as usual.

So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.

What AI are eroding is copyright. You can re-implement not just a GPL program, but to reverse engineer and re-implement a closed source program too, people have demonstrated it already, there were stories here on HN about it.

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.

This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and it came out in the shape of Mickey Mouse, and so it can't be copyright infringement because it was created without the use of my knowledge of Micky Mouse"

Blanchard is, of course, familiar with the source code, he's been its maintainer for years. The premise is that he prompted Claude to reimplement it, without using his own knowledge of it to direct or steer.

Sec has a deny by default policy. Eng has a use-more-AI policy. Any code written in-house is accepted by default. You can see where this is going.

We've been using AI to reimplement tooling that security won't approve. The incentives conspired in the worst outcome, yet here we are. If you want a different outcome, you need to create different incentives.

If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.

Sure, but neither of those is an IP Lawyer.

The actual IP Lawyer who turned up and tried to engage, Richard Fontana, had his issue closed:

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334

Richard's point was this (quoted below):

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FWIW, that case is not really relevant to what we are/were talking about here.

The question is whether you are truly an "author", or whether there was no (human) author.

The general legal consensus has been that generative AI output is not copyrightable (without some special facts of some sort, perhaps).

> If all of this code was somehow not copyrightable because someone wrote a prompt instead of directly editing the code, that would have pretty huge implications.

That's exactly it. Your act of applying the MIT license with your copyright notice to code that you did not "directly edit" has enormous implications.

1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all.

2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.

> He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch.

From GPL2:

> The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

Is a project's test suite not considered part of its source code? When I make modifications to a project, its test cases are very much a part of that process.

If the test suite is part of this library's source code, and Claude was fed the test suite or interface definition files, is the output not considered a work based on the library under the terms of LGPL 2.1?

It also doesn't talk about the far more interesting philosophical queston. Does what Blanchard did cover ALL implementations from Claude? What if anyone did exactly what he did, feed it the test cases and say "re-implement from scratch", ostensibly one would expect the results to be largely similar (technically under the right conditions deterministically similar)

could you then fork the project under your own name and a commercial license? when you use an LLM like this, to basically do what anyone else could ask it to do how do you attach any license to it? Is it first come first serve?

If an agent is acting mostly on its own it feels like if you found a copy of Harry Potter in the fictional library of Babel, you didn't write it, just found it amongst the infinite library, but if you found it first could you block everyone else that stumbles on a near-identical copy elsewhere in the library? or does each found copy represent a "Re-implementation" that could be individually copyrighted?

Another question which as far as I can see isn't addressed in the article: even if you accept that the AI-driven reimplementation is an independent new work, can you (even as a maintainer) simply "hijack" the old LGPL-licensed project and overwrite it (if the new code is 98,7% different from the existing code, it's essentially overwriting) with your MIT-licensed code? You're free to start a new MIT-licensed project with your reimplementation, but putting the new code into the old project like some kind of cuckoo's egg seems wrong to me...

However, the purported reimplementations did not usurp the names of the reimplemented product. Reimplement chardet using AI and insisting in calling the product the same as old chardet with a new version number and a new license is, I think, not exactly honest. At least he should have used something like "chardet-ng", "chardet-fresh", or whatever, and a completely different source tree.

But a point that was not made strongly, which highlights this even more, is that this goes in every direction.

If this kind of reimplementation is legal, then I can take any permissive OSS and rebuild it as proprietary. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as permissive. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as my own proprietary software.

Either the law needs to catch up and prevent this kind of behavior, or we're going to enter an effectively post-copyright world with respect to software. Which ISN'T GOOD, because that will disincentivize any sort of open license at all, and companies will start protecting/obfuscating their APIs like trade secrets.

When I first read about the chardet situation, I was conflicted but largely sided on the legal permissibility side of things. Uncomfortably I couldn't really fault the vibers; I guess I'm just liberal at heart.

The argument from the commons has really invoked my belief in the inherent morality of a public good. Something being "impermissible" sounds bad until you realize that otherwise the arrow of public knowledge suddenly points backwards.

Seeing this example play out in real life has had retroactive effects on my previously BSD-aligned brain. Even though the argument itself may have been presented before, I now understand the morals that a GPL license text underpins better.

This whole article is just complaining that other people didn't have the discussion he wanted.

Ronacher even acknowledged that it's a different discussion, and not one they were trying to have at the moment.

If you want to have it, have it. Don't blast others for not having it for you.

This creates an odd situation where the "reimplementation via AI" concern cuts both ways. If someone feeds my MIT repo to an LLM and gets a copyleft-violating derivative, that's one problem. But if I use an LLM trained on copyleft code to write my MIT-licensed tool, am I the one laundering licenses without knowing it?

I think the article's core point holds: legitimacy and legality are diverging fast. The open source community built norms around intent and reciprocity, and those norms are now being stress-tested by tools that can reimplement anything from a spec. No license text can fully encode "don't be a free rider."

The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be coherent and consistent.

You can’t just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things you don’t like and feel “off” to you in some way- not if you’re trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less others. You don’t have to land on a conclusion either. By all means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall apart if you haven’t done the harder work of replacing the framework of law with that of another conceptual structure.

You need to at least be asking “to what ends? What purpose is served by the rule?” Otherwise you’re stuck in things where half the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and edge cases reached. If you’re asking, essentially, “is the spirit of the rule still there?” You’ve got to stop and fill in what that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void to their own ends.

Copyleft could be seen as an attempt to give Free Software an edge in this competition for users, to counter the increased resources that proprietary systems can often draw on. I think success has been mixed. Sure, Linux won on the server. Open source won for libraries downloaded by language-specific package managers. But there’s a long tail of GPL apps that are not really all that appealing, compared to all the proprietary apps available from app stores.

But if reimplementing software is easy, there’s just going to be a lot more competition from both proprietary and open source software. Software that you can download for free that has better features and is more user-friendly is going to have an advantage.

With coding agents, it’s likely that you’ll be able to modify apps to your own needs more easily, too. Perhaps plugin systems and an AI that can write plugins for you will become the norm?

Our legal and ethical frameworks including both copyleft and permissive licenses operate under the illusion of discrete, bounded attribution. They assume we can draw a clean perimeter around 'the code' and its 'author.' In reality, software production is a highly complex socio-technical network characterized by deep epistemic opacity. We are arguing over who holds the title to the final output while completely ignoring the vast, distributed network of inputs that made it possible.

Furthermore, because end-users face massive transaction costs and a general lack of incentive to evaluate the granular utility of their consumption, we have no reliable market mechanism to signal value back up the supply chain. Consequently, we fail to effectively compensate the true chain of biological and artificial contributors that facilitate downstream consumption.

In a rigorously mapped value-system, attribution would not stop at the keyboard; it would extend to all nodes of enablement. This includes what sociologists and economists term 'reproductive labor' or 'invisible labor' such as the developer’s partner who cooked them breakfast, thereby sustaining the biological and cognitive infrastructure necessary for the developer to contribute to the repository in the first place. The AI model is merely another node of aggregated external labor in this exact same web - both by its upward 'training' and downward utilization.

Until we develop an economic and technological ontology capable of tracing and rewarding this entire ecosystem of adjacent contributions, our debates over LGPL versus MIT will remain myopic. We are trying to govern a distributed, interconnected web of collective labor using property tools designed for solitary craftsmen.

Think about it; the license says that copies of the work must be reproduced with the copyright notice and licensing clauses intact. Why would anyone obey that, knowing it came from AI?

Countless instances of such licenses were ignored in the training data.

So, you could argue that people are using double standards here a bit. It's fine when people take proprietary software and create GPL versions of it. But it's not OK when people take GPL software and create permissively licensed or proprietary versions of it. That's of course not how copyright actually works. The reason all of this is OK is that copyright allows you to do this thing. This isn't some kind of loophole that needs closing but an essential feature of copyright.

The friction here, and common misunderstanding about how copyright works is that you don't copyright ideas but the form or expression of something. Making a painting of a photograph is not a copyright violation. Same idea, different expression. Patents are for protecting ideas. Trademarks are for protecting brands. Some companies have managed to trademark certain color codes even, which is controversial.

There's a lot of legal history for interpretation of what is and isn't "fair use" under copyright of course. It gets much more complicated if you also consider international law and how copyright works in different countries. But people being able to make reasonable use of copyrighted material always was essential to the notion of having it to begin with.

The reason we can have music that uses samples from other people's music without that being a copyright violation is exactly this fair use. In the same way, you can quote from books and create funny memes based on movie fragments. Or create new theater plays, movies, etc. reinterpreting works of others. All legal, up to a point. If you copy too much it stops being fair use and starts being plagiarism.

With software copyright violations, you have to prove that substantial parts of the software were lifted verbatim. Lawyers and judges look at this in terms of how they would apply it to a plagiarism case. Literally - software doesn't get special treatment under copyright. Copyright long predates the existence of software and computers and did not change in any material way after that was invented.

Our legal framework wasn't built for a situation where reimplementing complex software is trivial, much less almost completely automated.

Ridiculous. I don't want specifications for proprietary APIs to be protected, and I don't want the free ones to be either. The software community seemed pretty certain as a whole that this would be very bad for competition [1].

Morally, I don't think there's anything wrong with re-implementing a technology with the same API as another, or running a test suite from a GPL licensed codebase. The code wasn't stolen, it was capitalized on. Like a business using a GPL code editor to write a new one.

> This is not a restriction on sharing. It is a condition placed on sharing

Also this doesn't make any logical sense. A condition on sharing cannot exist without corresponding restrictions.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mklieg/supreme_cou...

You can copy the idea and not use the source code. This has been ruled ok many times already and would be quite dangerous if that was not the case.

But this is not what this is. To generate the new program, another program, the AI, must have an input which then becomes part of the program itself. It does not really matter much if the generation does not contain the source code itself or a similar reimplementation. One could rewrite a full version of the Lord of the Rings changing all the words but having the same elements, it would still be plagiarism. No reason to think this is not the case here. It is evident that the source code was the base, hence, this is a derived work.

Edit: looks like an IP lawyer had this exact issue on the GitHub and it was closed.

This is an interesting reversal in itself. If you make the specification protected under copyright, then the whole practice of clean room implementations is invalid.

So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if it's not easy to put one's finger on it.

I don't see how it matters what he looked at. If I took a copyrighted code and run it through a script that replaces all variable names, and then claimed copyright on the result because it's an entirely new work and I did not look on the original work, I'd be ridiculed and sued, and would lose that lawsuit. AI is a more complex machine, but still a machine. If you feed somebody'd work into a machine, what comes out is a derivative work.

Test suite is a part of copyrighted code, is it not? If he used just the API description, preferably from a copyright-clean source, then we could claim new work (regardless of how it was produced, by using Claude or trained pigeons or by consuming magic mushrooms). But once parts of the copyrighted code had been used, it becomes derivative work.

If you are 50 years old or more, the computing you were born with (you own the computer, you own the programs) will be gone. Copyleft only makes sense if you own the computer.

That makes me sad.

That’s just your subjective opinion which many other people would disagree. I bet Armin Ronacher would agree that an MIT licensed library is even freer than an LGPL licensed library. To them, the vector is running from free to freer.

Offering as a networked service is not distribution. That was why they had to make AGPL to put conditions on use in networked services.

For SQLite the actual product is the test-suite and the audits.

Sure you can use the code all you like, but you only ever get past quality gates if you use the audited and provably tested version.

This becomes just more relevant in the age of ai coding, where an agent might be able to reimplement your specs.

Keep your code open, but consider moving your tests.

There was an issue where Google did something similar with the JVM, and ultimately it came down to whether or not Oracle owned the copyright to the header files containing the API. It went all the way to the US supreme court, and they ruled in Google's favour; finding that the API wasn't the implementation, and that the amount of shared code was so minimal as to be irrelevant.

They didn't anticipate that in less than half a decade we'd have technology that could _rapidly_ reimplement software given a strong functional definition and contract enforcing test suite.

I like the article's point of legal vs. legitimate here, though; copyright is actually something of a strange animal to use to protect source code, it was just the most convenient pre-existing framework to shove it in.

I argue more free. EULAs and restrictions on how+for what software can be used, like DRM, typically use copyright as their legal backing. GPL licenses turn that on it's head but that doesn't redeem the original, flawed, law.

This seems to follow the letter but not the spirit of the license. If this does pass legal muster, we can do the same to whatever proprietary software we wish, which makes a dramatically different but IMO better ecosystem in the end.

But what happens with the new things? Has the era of software-making (or creating things at large) finished, and from now on everything will be re-(gurgitated|implemented|polished) old stuff?

Or all goes back to proprietary everything.. Babylon-tower style, noone talks to noone?

edit: another view - is open-source from now on only for resume-building? "see-what-i've-built" style

The answer to that, I think, is that the authors wanted to squat an existing successful project and gain a platform from it. Hence we have news cycle discussing it.

Nobody cares about a new library using AI, but squash an existing one with this stuff, and you get attention. It’s the reputation, the GitHub stars, whatever

Morally - yes, technically - no. I think it's odd to be mad at someone doing the exact thing you praise in another case just because license isn't copyleft within license allowance. Make a better copyleft license?

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish 2. The freedom to study how it works and modify it (which requires access to source code) 3. The freedom to redistribute copies to help others 4. The freedom to distribute modified versions, so the whole community benefits from your improvements

To my mind ... GenAI coding make all of these far more realizable, especially for "normal people", than CopyLeft ever has. Let's go through them ...

Want to run a program as you wish? Great! It's easier than ever to build a replacement. Proprietary or non-free software is just as vulnerable to reimplementation as Copyleft is.

Want to study a how a program works and to modify it? This is now much more achievable.

Want the freedom to redistribute copies to help others? Build your own version! It may not even be copyrightable if it's 100% generated (IANAL).

Want to distribute modified versions? yes! see previous.

I dunno; seems like generative coding can be as much a liberator as any kind of problem.

I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.

    The

It does feel like open source is about to change. My hunch is that commercial open source (beyond the consultation model) risks disappearing. Though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Proving this is going to be hard with current "open source" models.

This can also apply to people, either if they have seen the code previously and therefore are ineligible to write the code for a clean-room implementation, or it gets murky when the same person writes the same code twice from their own knoeldge, as in the Oracle Java case.

Coming from a professional programming perspective I can totally see the desire to have more libraries written in permissive licences like BSD or MIT, as they allow one like myself to include them in commercial closed-source products without needing to open source the entire codebase.

However I find myself agreeing with the article in so far as this LLM generated implementation is breaking the social contract for a GPL/LGPL based library. The author could have easily implemented the new version as a separate project and there would not have been an outcry, but because they are replacing the GPL version with this new one it feels scummy to say the least.

It’s not and never has been.

It’s not illegal for me to draw The Simpsons - whether or not I used AI. It’s illegal for me to sell it as my own.

To ban the very ability to produce it at all would be a dystopia. It would extend copyright to mean things it was never intended to mean - it would prevent you from physically uttering statements or depicting images, if these luddites who haven’t thought it through had their way.

That’s a weird statement while releasing the new version of the same project. Maybe just release it as a new project, chardet-ai v1.0 or whatever.

However, I take issue with his version of history:

>The history of the GPL is the history of licensing tools evolving in response to new forms of exploitation: GPLv2 to GPLv3, then AGPL.

GPLv3 set open source backwards: it wasn't an evolution to protect anything, it was a an overly paranoid failure. Don't believe me? Just count how many GPL3 vs. how many GPL2 projects have been started since GPL3 dropped.

Again, I'm very pro-OSS, but let's not pretend the community has always had a straight line of progress forward; some stuff is crazy Stallman stuff that set us back.

That's what something like AGPL does.

One of those things is that we assumed that the code embodied most of the value it offered. That it was the code that contained the creativity and expressiveness and usefulness. And we thought only we could write code. And so we thought we only needed to protect the code to protect our efforts and investments. Which is also why we accepted copyright as an appropriate legal protection for software, or of enforcing an ethos of sharing, as with copyleft.

But the code itself was never the valuable aspect; it was the functionality it provided.

And now AI is making that starkly apparent, while undermining a lot of other presumptions. Including about copyright.

Copyright protection for software is a historical hack because people didn’t want to figure out an appropriate legal framework from scratch. You “wrote” books, you "wrote" code, let’s shoehorn software into copyright and go get lunch! Completely overlooking the fact that copyright explicitly does not cover functional aspects (that is the realm of patents) which is the entire raison d'etre of code.

Sure, copyright covers “expressive elements”, but again those are properties of the source code, not the functionality. In fact, expressiveness is BAD for code (cf “code should be boring”)! Copyright will protect whether you used a streams API or a for-loop for iteration, which is absolutely irrelevant to the technical functionality that actually solves user problems, which has always been the only thing users really cared about.

In fact, if you look at significant copyright-related cases for software now (e.g. Oracle vs Google), you'll realize they have twisted themselves into knots trying to apply laws intended for expressive creativity to issues that were essentially about technical creativity.

I have no hopes that we will figure out an appropriate IP framework for software, so I expect people will move towards other things like patents, trade secrets and trademarks. Which have their own problems, but at least they already exist and are more suitable than copyright, especially in the age of AI.

I downloaded both 6.0 and 7.0 and based on only a light comparison of a few key files, nothing would suggest to me that 7.0 was copied from 6.0, especially for a 41x faster implementation. It is a lot more organized and readable in my armature opinion, and the code is about 1/10th the size.

Has anyone else lost almost all respect for Antirez because of stuff like this?

> The ethical force of that project did not come from its legal permissibility—it came from the direction it was moving, from the fact that it was expanding the commons. That is why people cheered.

How is this not just relitigating GPL vs MIT? By now you know which side of that argument you are in. The AI component is orthogonal.

If we protect API under copyright, it makes it easier to prevent interoperability. We obviously do NOT want that. It would give big companies even more power.

Now in the US, the Supreme Court that the output of an LLM is not copyrightable. So even a permissive licence doesn't work for that reimplementation: it should be public domain.

Disclaimer: I am all for copyleft for the code I write, but already without LLMs, one could rewrite a similar project and use the licence they please. LLMs make them faster at that, it's just a fact.

Now I wonder: say I vibe-code a library (so it's public domain in the US), I don't publish that code but I sell it to a customer. Can I prevent them from reselling it? I guess not, since it's public domain?

And as an employee writing code for a company. If I produce public domain code because it is written by an LLM, can I publish it, or can the company prevent me from doing it?

No, AI does not mean the end of either copyright or copyleft, it means that the laws need to catch up. And they should, and they will.

If you have software your testsuite should be your testsuite, you do dev with a testsuite and then mit without releasing one. Depending on the test-suite it may break clean room rules, especially for ttd codebases.

One thing is certain, however: copyleft licenses will disappear: If I can't control the redistribution of my code (through a GPL or similar license), I choose to develop it in closed source.

Already, the IP protections which exist for software suck. Patents are expensive and you can't even use them for software most of the time anyway. Copyright doesn't protect innovative ideas or architectures; if someone can just copy your code, mix it with a bunch of other code (no functionality changes) and then use it as their own; then copyright provides no protection at all...

If this is the case, then why should anyone bother to write any quality software at all? It has no value since anyone can just appropriate any essential functionality that they didn't create for themselves. What's to prevent an employee from taking their employer's source code, rewriting it with an LLM (same functionally) and generate a clone of their company's software to use as their own to compete against their employer?

Without any IP protections, anyone who writes software becomes a complete loser. There's 0 benefit. One software developer would be doing all the work and then some marketing expert or someone with good social connections could just steal their work and sell it for billions... The software developer gets NOTHING.

Firstly, an AI agent is not a person. Secondly, the MIT license doesn't offer any rights to the code itself; it says a 'copy of the software' - That's what people are given the right to. It says nothing about the code and in terms of the software, it still requires attribution. Attribution of use and distribution of the software (or parts) is required regardless of the copyright aspect. AI agents are redistributing the software, not the code.

The MIT license makes a clear distinction between code and software. It doesn't cede any rights to the code.

And then, in the spirit of copyright; it was designed to protect the financial interests of the authors. The 'fair use' carve-out was meant for cases which do not have an adverse market impact on the author which it clearly does; at least in the cases highlighted in this article.

This isn't a problem, this is the goal. GNU was born when RMS couldn't use a printer the way he wanted because of an unmodifiable proprietary driver. That kind of thing just won't happen in the vibe coded future.

A lot of SaaS too, especially if AI can run a simple deploy.

We might be approaching a huge deflationary catastrophe in the cost of a lot of software. It’s not a catastrophe for the consumer but it is for the industry.

>The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and federal courts have consistently ruled that AI-generated works—where the expressive elements are determined by the machine, even in response to a human prompt—lack the necessary human creative input and therefore cannot be copyrighted.

All this code is public domain. Your employees can publish "your" AI generated code freely and it won't matter how many tokens you spent generating it. It is not covered by copyright.

2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of work.

The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make them. Figuring out and understanding the problem you're trying to solve, whether it's a complex mathematical problem or a customer's need. And then evaluating solutions until you find the right one. (One constrains being how much time you can spend on it.)

All that work is incredibly valuable but once the solution exists, it's each easier to copy without replicating or even understanding the thought process which led to it. But that thought process took time and effort.

The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation.

And he deserves it transitively, if his work is used to build other works - proportional to his contribution. The hard part is quantifying it, of course. But a lot of people these days benefit from throwing their hands up and saying we can't quantify it exactly so let's make it finders keepers. That's exploitation.

3) Both LLM training and inference are derivative works by any reasonable meaning of those words. If LLMs are not derivative works of the training data then why is so much training data needed? Why don't they just build AI from scratch? Because they can't. They just claim they found a legal loophole to exploit other people's work without consent.

I am still hoping the legal people take time to understand how LLMs work, how other algorithms, such as synonym replacement or c2rust work, decide that calling it "AI" doesn't magically remove copyright and the huge AI companies will be forced to destroy their existing models and train new ones which respect the licenses.

Add something like this to NEW gpl /bsd/mit licenses:

'you are forbidden from reimplementing it with AI'

or just:

'all clones, reimpletetions with ai etc must still be GPL'

Here we see three engineers writing — at length! — about a hugely complicated matter of law.

No one outside your bubble cares what you think. You are unqualified and your opinions irrelevant. You might as well be debating open heart surgery techniques.

- proprietary

- free

- slop-licensed

software?

This argument makes no sense. Are they arguing that because Vercel, specifically, had this attitude, this is an attitude necessitated by AI, reimplementation, and those who are in favor of it towards more permissive licenses? That certainly doesn't seem to be an accurate way to summarize what antirez or Ronacher believe. In fact, under the legal and ethical frameworks (respectively) that those two put forward, Vercel has no right to claim that position and no way to enforce it, so it seems very strange to me to even assert that this sort of thing would be the practical result of AI reimplementations. This seems to just be pointing towards the hypocrisy of one particular company, and assuming that this would be the inevitable universal, attitude, and result when there's no evidence to think so.

It's ironic, because antirez actually literally addresses this specific argument. They completely miss the fact that a lot of his blog post is not actually just about legal but also about ethical matters. Specifically, the idea he puts forward is that yes, corporations can do these kinds of rewrites now, but they always had the resources and manpower to do so anyway. What's different now is that individuals can do this kind of rewrites when they never have the ability to do so before, and the vector of such a rewrite can be from a permissive to copyleft or even from decompile the proprietary to permissive or copyleft. The fact that it hasn't been so far is a more a factor of the fact that most people really hate copyleft and find an annoying and it's been losing traction and developer mind share for decades, not that this tactic can't be used that way. I think that's actually one of the big points he's trying to make with his GNU comparison — not just that if it was legal for GNU to do it, then it's legal for you to do with AI, and not even just the fundamental libertarian ethical axiom (that I agree with for the most part) that it should remain legal to do such a rewrite in either direction because in terms of the fundamental axioms that we enforce with violence in our society, there should be a level playing field where we look at the action itself and not just whether we like or dislike the consequences, but specifically the fact that if GNU did it once with the ability to rewrite things, it can be done again, even in the same direction, it now even more easily using AI.