I feel this pain, one of my small donation driven sites has been destroyed by crawlers who just ignore robots.txt and burn the site into the ground.
Sort of jokingly I proposed an update to the "spam fax" law:
"If you copy my work, you should share your work too."
or at minimum (MIT):
"If you copy my work, you should credit me."
I think it is no longer under dispute that the legal contract is satisfied by LLMs. The AI companies won and will continue to win.
But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. What did the authors mean by "copy"? Did they mean literally CTRL+C, CTRL+V or something broader?
This is a matter of opinion which only each individual creator can answer. For me, copying meant something like:
"To reproduce the function of my work, dependent on my having published it, without effort nor understanding of your own"
Ten years ago this basically required doing a CTRL+C, CTRL+V so there was no need to be more specific. Anybody who did enough work to, say, rewrite in another language (with that language's idioms), met the bar of clause 3. Now AI enables a form of "copying" that matches my definition, without the user even being aware of whose works they are copying. It perfectly launders the origins of its output. It can write an FFmpeg clone in Rust for you that would appear to be a novel work.
Of course, I cannot say that my own little bits and pieces of open source code would make a scratch in AI's capability, were it removed.
But I do strongly believe that if all the code that was published by authors with the same mindset was unavailable, Claude would be a far weaker developer.
Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then. The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downstream of you use code is illegitimate, and that licenses like the GPL were meant to use copyright law to achieve something that resembles the state of affairs that might exist if copyright didn't exist in the first place. That's what the whole concept of "copyleft" always seemed to imply.
Now we have a new class of technologies that is admittedly fraught with a wide range of risks and pitfalls, but also a lot of promise to enable people to actually put the "four freedoms" into practice in ways they couldn't before, and we're seeing people who have normative opinions about AI derived from other, unrelated principles trying to circle the wagons and exclude those use cases. That is what seems like a breach of the social contract as I've always understood it.
> Did they mean literally CTRL+C, CTRL+V or something broader?
Given that FOSS licenses were always constructed to function within applicable copyright law, I don't see how they could mean anything else. "Literal CTRL+C, CTRL+V" is the only thing copyright has ever applied to, and the whole point of "copyleft" was to lessen the restrictions on even that.
There seems to be an implicit premise here that any work generated by an LLM whose training data includes a particular bit of code itself constitutes a redistribution of that code. I've yet to encounter any strong arguments substantiating this premise as a general principle, and my own suspicion is that it is not valid as a general principle, given the nature of how LLMs operate.
It's certainly possible that specific instances of LLMs lazily copy-pasting code from public repos may exist, and the extent to which this is happening is something that can be substantiated by empirical examples, so if you have any to point to, I'd be interested in looking at them. However, where this is happening, it ought to be regarded as a failure modality of LLMs, and not something that implicates the underlying nature of LLMs, given that their intended purpose is to function as stochastic generators that do not merely copy-paste input data.
My initial feeling here is that using open-source code to train LLMs is not per se a violation of the generally accepted FOSS social contract, but rather that attempting to restrict specific use cases of FOSS-licensed code on the basis of normative opinions unrelated to the license terms is a violation, or at least a rejection, of that social contract. I'm not fully committed to this position, though, and would welcome well-reasoned arguments to the contrary.
Yes but my answer would be different. It can be either about what coding agents do (and you'll see that it breaks the social contract), or it can be about what the FOSS social contract is (and you'll argue that coding agents don't break it.) Lo and behold, it was the latter.
> There seems to be an implicit premise here that any work generated by an LLM whose training data includes a particular bit of code itself constitutes a redistribution of that code.
Not any work. But if a specific work was generated based on a specific open source work, then according to the social contract that binds non-AI code generators such as transpilers, the output is derivative and should follow the license of that open source work.
There's also the question of whether the model itself is a redistribution. For every other lossy compression algorithm in history, the answer is a resounding yes. Is a model meaningfully different from a hypercompressed corpus of its learning data?
The social contract of the open source (not to be confused with the legal contract of GPL, MIT etc.) is that developers give users software that they can use and modify in any way they want, and in exchange the users give the developer recognition and help with development and maintance, as well as give each other the assurance that the software will remain available to them and any future users.
AI gives the user all the benefits of using open source software with none of the obligations that come from using open source software. Developer gains nothing from going open source. It makes no sense for any developer to go open source. Social comtract breaks down, and it's all because AI users didn't hold up their half of the bargain.
I don't disagree with the premise that any LLM that is cloning code wholesale from a third-party repo is creating a derivative work, and the license terms apply to it.
But I also don't agree that non-AI code generators such as transpilers are in the same category as LLMs -- a deterministic process that is simply parsing input from a single source and outputting it in a new form is not the same thing as a stochastic process that interpolates patterns from multiple sources and then uses those patterns to generate novel outputs.
> There's also the question of whether the model itself is a redistribution. For every other lossy compression algorithm in history, the answer is a resounding yes. Is a model meaningfully different from a hypercompressed corpus of its learning data?
The model isn't a lossy compression archive that merely represents a collection of pre-existing works in parallel to each other. It's a probability matrix that relates together uniquely isolatable units of data to each other across the entire collection.
If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.
> The social contract of the open source (not to be confused with the legal contract of GPL, MIT etc.) is that developers give users software that they can use and modify in any way they want, and in exchange the users give the developer recognition and help with development and maintance, as well as give each other the assurance that the software will remain available to them and any future users.
I don't think that is generally true. There's always been a hope and expectation that some subset of users would contribute back to the project in the ways you're describing, but never a sense of there being any obligation to do so. Only a fraction of FOSS users have ever contributed to back to the projects whose software they use.
There's always been both a social and legal obligation to properly attribute authors and abide by license terms when redistributing or forking FOSS code, but neither obligation has ever applied when learning programming techniques from FOSS code in order to write your own software. And the way LLMs are designed to work is more similar to the latter than to the former.
But in cases where LLMs actually are acting in ways similar to the former, I agree that they should be held accountable both socially and legally.
Attribution is often required even on MIT or BSD licenses where code is being redistributed, either in original or modified versions, but that would relate to this discussion only to the extent that one regards using LLMs whose training data included a certain bit of code as itself constituting redistribution of that specific code -- but that in turn is a very debatable premise which really ought to be argued for, and not merely argued upon as though it is already generally recognized as true.
Are you now layering the old and tired "copyright infringement = stealing" argument on top of the still unsubstantiated premise that all LLM training is copyright infringement?
And the more they DDOS small websites — instead of respectfully scraping once — the more realistic my conspiracy theory looks.
And I push a lot of open source code including a ton for the SWGEmu project, but now I’m of mixed mind to stop pushing anything public. I can’t decide, am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, it’s a confusing time to navigate for sure.
I think SWGEmu (cool project, just learned of it from you!) do represent some optimism though. Maybe these sorts of passion projects will take over the space?
You have a hole here. Your web server is sending the response and the bot is receiving.
Fix that and … profit? :-)
> The initiator of the communication pays, not the server operator.
This project in particular has been unconcerned with new coding practices so far, primarily, because I derive pleasure from hand-written implementations of my ideas, and believe that overcoming challenges the hard way is the main value I get from it.
Multiple times I got partially broken "citations" of GPL licensed code out of the models as answers to basic research questions (aka prompts) w/o any mentioning of the original license applied to the code. Just adding some random bugs every 10th line doesn't make it not a direct derivate. Image generators happily generated Sonics or Bart Simpsons (w/o directly prompting for that either). No mentions that those are copyrighted characters either.
- Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had gone into it. The writer paid effort so the reader didn't have to.
- There'd be some level of attachment to what you've put effort into.
With LLMs, that's undermined: it's easy to produce thoughtless imitations. Code or comments where thought didn't go into it. So, seeing some result isn't an indication of skill, but also not even an indication thought went into it.
I guess there's still something lost if someone isn't going to share code they've put thought into. -- But on the other hand, if it's just for me & I don't have to share it with a wider audience, getting LLMs to write out code isn't so expensive.. so code itself isn't necessarily something to value so much.
I think the key part is how much thought goes into something.
Optimistically, LLMs are good at taking unstructured input, and (probably) producing the intended output from that. -- This allows for an interesting new way of coding: a set of instructions don't need to be as rigorous as a shell script, but can be natural language.
That part surely extends creativity. An LLM will be familiar with domain ideas I'm not, even if an LLM is completely disinterested in doing things.
Pessimistically, I think it's still not clear what the right way of interacting online with all of this is (other than clear expectations of "no AI")... in some sense LLM output is worthless to share, in the sense that I'm just as capable of asking the LLM to output something as anyone else is.
There was a relatively big shift in riding style right around the same time of the first mass production of vehicles.
First, I think it's the best time to write software since so much boring stuff can be automated. I can put my thoughts into what I'm trying to achieve instead of how. To put it otherwise, I think about big picture much more than about mundane details like dealing with particularities of a programming language.
Second, most people were using SO to solve just about any issue they had. The number of developers producing truly original code was minimal even 10 years ago.
If a one-person show, closing it up would effectively kill it? Or (re?)turn it into a hobby project developed at snail pace.
If some community exists: fork coming up?
I see a lot of risks involved in people surrendering their own decision-making to LLMs, but that's a question of how they're used, not how they're trained. The idea that using FOSS software to train LLMs is somehow a violation of FOSS norms just doesn't seem valid.
Not true. Most FOSS licenses require attribution and many require derivatives to be released under the same license.
Or are you saying that you think anything generated by an LLM qualifies as a derivative work of anything included in its training data?
It's a tool, if using data is necessary to make the tool work, then its output derives from the data.
If the LLM generation is not derivative of its training data, then why would it need the training data in the first place?
That's simply not correct within the applicable meaning of "derives" as understood in copyright law. In fact, data per se is not even within the scope of copyright protection in the first place: specific published works are copyrighted, but the underlying ideas and facts that they convey are not.
Even creating works that merely draw on a single source of data, but express the ideas drawn from that in a new or transformative way, are not considered derivative works (see the ruling in Google v. Oracle, for example), let alone works based on patterns extrapolated by relating together ideas sourced from many distinct works, which is what LLMs are principally doing.
If you applied the principle you're proposing here to human developers, you'd conclude that any code written by someone who learned to program by studying techniques used in FOSS software would in turn be a derivative work of that software. No one has ever regarded this to be the case.
I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet.
And the AI IP that makes that possible is still enclosed rather than open.
Could you perhaps explain that irony a bit more explicitly?
Can you provide any examples of "commercialized enclosure of software IP" somehow backwashing into the FOSS ecosystem and closing things up that are already open?
Judging from the number of projects I've seen from people who aren't software developers, we're there enough.
Worse, because the sometimes valuable real time answers are generated by scraping the web and rewriting the IP in plain sight.
A couple of academic psychopaths who write horrible academic code themselves steal all valuable human knowledge right before our eyes and market it as "tech".
There should be a new civil war against these modern plantation owners and slave holders.