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Comment by aliasEli | Hacker News Reader

The entire problem could have been avoided if they had just trained their models on code with a permissive license.

This is specifically addressed as not a solution in the article.

For example MIT, one of the most permissive licenses there is, still requires you to include the MIT license and copyright notice "in all copies or substantial portions of the Software".

You might be one of the people that down-voted my submission. This is probably a language problem, I don't think the original MIT license is a permissive license at all in this case.

In the open source space, the term “permissive license” is well understood to mean licenses like MIT and Apache2 and CC-BY, which allow you to do whatever you like with the work so long as you acknowledge the author and license terms.

It sounds like you meant something more like a public domain dedication like CC0, which is about the only way you can go more permissive past the likes of MIT/Apache2/CC-BY.

Also, CC0 etc. are not really called "permissive licenses", because they explicitly waive away any and all rights a license would entail. In the same way "off" isn't a TV channel.

Creative commons specifically calls CC0 an "alternative to our licenses" [1]

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

Or zero-clause BSD and ISC. Although both are generally discouraged and EU advise on using MIT instead, which we now end up with the acknowledgement problem.

No. A lot of weak licenses still require attribution.

Yep. They would have had to filter their training data down to the most permissive licenses to be entirely safe. The WTFPL, CC0, and any others that give full "do as you please" permissions.

WTFPL and CC0 apply to a tiny fraction of FLOSS software.

More importantly, just because a chunk of code is published under CC0 on github that does not give you any guarantee that such code is not already breaching an existing copyright.

It happened in various occasions that closed source code was leaked into FLOSS projects and if you reuse it you are in breach of the license as well.

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