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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.

On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.

The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.

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The reason for NetBSD rejecting any use of AI is the concern that a future legal case will rule that the output of LLMs trained on GPL code is itself subject to the GPL due to the viral clause in the licence.

God that would be amazing. How incredible would it be if basically all software was free?

The chances american courts would find for this is basically zero. Maybe in other markets....

Fortunately for the ROTW, there are hundreds of other countries, and the USA is working as hard and as fast as it can to become disunited and tear itself apart.

I think that some of the arguments in the Apple vs OpenAI case may lead to a ruling on whether copyright gets stripped or not by running something through an LLM.

If it is established that copyright is retained then someone else could follow up on the GPL aspects.

... or commercial software vendors would roll back a couple of years in their VCS and start again from that point.

Sure, but they would still be required to open the source code of the last version they distributed before that roll back, which could then be forked.

It's hard to convince a court to order specific performance, and this is not the sort of case where it's at all likely to happen.

Generally, courts have levied fines for copyright infringement rather than forcing ooen sourcing of code. The times when code has been open sourced are usually settlements to avoid a fine.

It would be amazing because while unemployed you’d have all the time in the world to play with that software

There are non-software jobs, and also paid work supporting and developing free software.

With the arrival of AI, many of us will need to career change anyway.

Are you saying we would all be unemployed if everything is GPL'd?

Now it's the case that almost all software can be reverse engineered by AI. So the moat will be eroded regardless. Filthy copyleft or not.

Legally reverse engineering a system is a lot harder than throwing an AI at it, at least if you think you might be called into court over it.

hey now -- i'd be working hard as a barista. totally employed.

but all the code would be free.

I assume the reason was more generally non-permissive licensing and legal issues? Specifically seeing only copyleft as the problem sounds unreasonably sociopathic, so I assume you picked that out as just one prominent example. (That, or I should take care to steer clear of NetBSD.)

In context it seems they're concerned about clear ownership of the code. It's lumped in with rules about not submitting code that might not have clear licensing or ownership. Here's the specific part from NetBSD's Commit Guidelines:

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

I think it's a good thing. In a couple of years we'll have a clear way to measure the true productivity and impact (or lack thereof) of AI on software dev. It's the perfect "natural experiment".

No. If an open source project allows small amounts of LLM slop to please their foundation donors, is all productivity in that project due to LLMs? Of course not.

If 10 of 20 developers work for corporations and have to pretend that their code is AI written to please the corporations, is that AI productivity?

The advertising and social pressure machinery is so AI heavy right now because most techies are cowards and only speak up on issues (including DEI as we see since Trump) if HR tells them to.

Then of course many projects like Linux or git are entrenched. You can't copy Unix and bitkeeper like Linus did and be immediately successful, because the whole culture is against you (unlike in the 1990s, when the culture was anti-Microsoft).

So yeah, if Gen-Alpha declares OpenAI and Anthropic the new Microsoft and builds up a new counter-culture, then in 10 years you might have some clue.

Otherwise, we have to stick to the current situation and observe that no software has gotten better since AI.

So if software is developed with AI and that's better then we should discount AI's contribution, but if software is developed without AI is better then obviously it's because AI had no productivity boost?

I am still anti-microsoft in 2026.

We have ways to measure productivity now. AI doesn't change what to measure unless you just want to flex. Every time I see "100k lines of code, all AI," I think they probably could have done the same thing with a fraction of that. Anytime productivity is measured that way, you will always fail. As a CTO, my mantra was "I pay for outcomes, not hours." AI coding tools are just that, tools. My outlook on that hasn't changed. I enjoy working with LLM's especially locally, to handle quite a bit of the heavy lifting. I'm not paying for tokens, I'm paying for outcomes.

Which ways do we have to measure productivity for open source software? Most of the tooling around that still focus on lines of code and cyclomatic complexity

projected ideology doesn't really match reality, so not really.

detecting AI written code without a minder chained to your arm watching your every movement is still a topic of research...

...and as someone who has been to the last 10 miscellaneous FSF/GNU celebrations I can tell you that community has just as many license cheaters and scoundrels as the rest of the computing world, they just tend to bias towards the good stuff, similarly to how every microsoft employee isn't required to drink the blood of infants (it just looks good on quarterlies.)

It doesn't need to be 0% ai vs 100% ai for the comparison to work.

They don't do it for productivity. There's a summary of anti-llm motivations in the ToS change announcement for Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/

They don’t do it for productivity, sure, but it will still be obvious in a few year’s time who was more productive.

Not exactly the same but I’ve noticed I have less conflict over code at work too now that everyone’s using llms to generate and review it.

Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.

Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.

Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)

The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?

With Linux I meant the Linux kernel

How many cases of an LLM outputting training code have you heard of? let alone training code that you are not allowed to use or relicense?

Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

> Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.

And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.

On the other hand it could be very expensive if caught. It could be very difficult to remove the code too.

Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.

I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.

They did in 2023 and the AI thieves built logic to rephrase the plagiarism so it isn't immediately detectable.

Proprietary developers don't care because their code wasn't trained on. Is that a trick question?

They do care now that reverse engineering is possible.

Can you explain further? What was the code affected?

I heard many cases of LLMs outputting their training data verbatim; they sure don't check that such data can be legally used by you before doing it.

As others said, for closed source software it's a lot harder to detect plagiarism.

And it's in general very hard to detect plagiarized code; there's some product that does it, but it of course has only a partial inventory of the existing open-source code.

I think that some big company does use those products, though.

> I heard many cases of LLMs outputting their training data verbatim;

I have heard of this happening in response to prompts designed to do so, not inadvertently.

How many case of proprietary code inadvertently being included in open source projects, or even of copyleft code being included in permissively licensed projects do you know of?

I can just imagine it happening to a purely vibe coded project that lets an LLM do huge chunks of stuff with minimal instructions doing something like copying a chunk of a library, but its otherwise hard to just copy code that will work in a different context.

We read of huge LLM assisted projects on HN all the time. How many of those have been sued?

Copyright is based on laws, and laws can be changed or clarified. Given the amount of overinvestment in AI, I expect them to change. The EU is already making moves in this direction: https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expro...

I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.

It could be, but:

- For now the laws are in force, and I don't even know of discussions to change them (that EU proposal only wants to allow training on personal data)

- changing intellectual property rights law would typically require changing international treaties

- however much companies are in love with AI now, I'm not sure they'd support abolishing legal protections on which their business relies

> The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.

Of course we're talking of code for which that's implausible.

I think in most cases twenty lines of identical code are more than enough for that to be the case (at least if it contains a few non-single-letter identifiers).

I mean, if it uses the exact same identifiers and maybe even comments, then sure, that's pretty good evidence. However, 99.99999999999 percent of the time this will not be the case. As in, the super-super-super-majority of LLM-generated code is customized for the specific use case it's being employed in. As such, claiming any kind of infringement, let alone proving it, will be insanely difficult.

We're talking of the case when it happens (and it's detected).

I don't know if that's in the 0.000000000001 percent of the time, but it can happen.

You're being pretty, I'm not sure the right word, scaredycat?, about licensing. Licensing doesn't matter unless somebody sues you, which they won't in most cases. The AI era has exposed this truth that you're extremely unlikely to get sued about copyright violation - so unless you're the kind of person who avoids car trips because you could crash, you can ignore it.

Uhm, you're being pretty, careless?

I'm not sure that that's how legal departments think.

Legal departments definitely think about their practical exposure. That is because they are employed by businesses.

I think what you're finding is that people who don't care about low quality of LLM outputs also don't care about licensing. If you're in the faction that supports all of this, you don't see a lot of people around you still caring about licensing or quality.

I am in neither faction, as I already indicated. I’m not an LLM user except for search engine summaries.

I also already mentioned that some formerly GPL die-hards have been jumping ship from Linux to BSDs simply because of the respective stances on AI. That’s enough for me to say this works both ways.

Linux (Linus T himself iirc) is very GPLv2.

They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc. But the result was also that big corps liked GPLv3 even less than GPLv2.

On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.

> On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.

My understanding was this was never a problem, almost all of the kernel was licensed as "GPL2 or newer" until GPL3 was released and they removed the "or newer" from new releases

You're mistaken. Here's a direct quote from Linux Torvalds dated 2006:

    The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version"
    language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the
    actual License itself. It's part of the _explanatory_ text that talks
    about how to apply the license to your program, and it says that _if_ you
    want to accept any later versions of the GPL, you can state so in your
    source code.
    The Linux kernel has never stated that in general. Some authors have
    chosen to use the suggested FSF boilerplate (including the "any later
    version" language), but the kernel in general never has.
    In other words: the _default_ license strategy is always just the
    particular version of the GPL that accompanies a project. If you want to
    license a program under _any_ later version of the GPL, you have to state
    so explicitly. Linux never did.

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl.html

Thanks for clarifying, I'd been misunderstanding that for 20+ years.

> They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc

I think what Linus is against in the GPLv3 is mostly the anti-tivoisation mechanisms. He wants tivoisation as a feature for the Linux kernel.

As a gplv3 advocate, I disagree. Anti-Tivoisation is thr main innovation of gplv3

Some contributors were already dead by the time the decision would have come to a head. Getting them to sign an agreement would have been challenging.

> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.

> no contributions

That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.

Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:

  15925 The FreeBSD Foundation
   3738 Netflix
   2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
   1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
   1733 Dell EMC Isilon
   1550 Chelsio Communications
   1446 DARPA, AFRL
   1421 Mellanox Technologies
   1262 Klara, Inc.
    784 Arm Ltd
    729 iXsystems, Inc.
    707 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
    552 Netflix, Inc.
    477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
    473 Microsoft
    421 Juniper Networks, Inc.
    411 DARPA, NAI Labs
    386 Stormshield
    385 Microsoft OSTC
    384 DARPA
    375 NetApp, Inc.
    358 Innovate UK
    355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories
    317 Yandex LLC
    299 NVIDIA Networking

One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)

So interesting to see Darpa represented in different labs. I wouldn't have bother to look for that interesting tidbit otherwise, so thanks for that.

The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.

If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.

The assertion I was addressing is that copyfree code "just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions".

My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.

Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.

> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It did not prove any such thing except in the meaningless pedantic technicality way. No reasonably rational person read that comment and thought they meant literally 100% not a single example. The existence of exceptions does not disprove anything. Everything has exceptions.

Numbers prove or disprove it. Which neither of us has. The fact that everything you showed even fits in a little comment like that compared to the scope of all software actually proves what a joke it was to even try to present this as any sort of argument.

"why do you keep saying MIT?" Oh FFS really? MIT, or BSD, is perfectly understandable shorthand for any of the mit/bsd/x11/etc in a general discussion like this. They are all of a class. How do you know? Because no one has attempted to discuss any fine points here that would make any of those any different from any of the others. You have to go out of your way to say they are different, and then cannot say in what way that matters or changes anything. So why do you yet again pretend an insignificant detail in any way affects the thrust of the argument?

Go ahead and substitute "MIT" with "BSD" or any of the specific "various BSD licences". Ok now that you did that, what changed? The argument was valid or invalid before, and the opposite now?

So far I'm the only one here who has provided any numbers. All you and soperj have provided are unsubstantiated claims. Why don't you do some analysis on the "scope of all software" and get back to me? Given the scale, I imagine it will take you at least a couple of years.

> The existence of exceptions does not disprove anything. Everything has exceptions.

It does when the original claim was an absolute one. That's how logic works.

> The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.

Yes it does. The assertion was:

> MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.

Therefore, any number of contributions disprove the assertion.

These are pitiful amounts of changes in comparison. Sonys closed sourced PlayStation changes alone would dwarf these numbers.

You can know how much corporations put into MIT but never how much they extracted.

Without reading the contents of the patches there is no way to know how significant or insignificant those changes are.

That being said, I think it is important to consider: in a hypothetical world where the BSDs and other copyfree operating systems didn't exist we *still* wouldn't get those patches from Sony. The alternative is not "we have to use Linux now and make our work public", it is "we have to use one of the many commercially available operating systems". Just look at all the devices that ship with QNX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.

> Linux success has nothing to do with GPL

Linus doesn't agree. He once said in an interview that making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did, [0] and has said that I love GPLv2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back. [1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http:/www.tlug.jp...

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvaldss-love-hate-rela...

Both can be true, you know.

They cannot. Linux success has nothing to do with GPL is in direct contradiction with I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux.

Except you left out an important bit of the OP's statement, where he/she is talking about Linux's success over BSD specifically.

When Linus was talking about the GPL being part of Linux's success, he was talking about Linux's success in general. And yeah, the GPL most likely is a big part of Linux's success.

However, if 386BSD had been freely available in '91, Linux would likely never have had the opportunity to build the developer base needed to take it from a student's neat project to a viable operating system.

Also why did you mention MIT licensed, it is obviously BSD licensed.

BSD was tied up in lawsuits for years, giving Linux a head start.

> The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL.

Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

If that was the case, we wouldn't be using openssh, openssl, perl/python/ruby etc...

I'm a GPL person but that's not why Linux won over the BSDs.

Sure, and USL vs BSDI had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Seriously, if you like the GPL, use arguments that are verifiably true. Otherwise you're just another fanboy spouting talking points.

Interestingly, Linux is GPLv2 and NetBSD is permissive, so I assume AlpineBSD is permissive as well?

Linux being GPL doesn't matter here because it's not used in AlpineBSD.

I was saying:

> NetBSD is permissive, so I assume AlpineBSD is permissive as well?

The "interesting" part being that if that is the case, then AlpineBSD doesn't care much about the GPL either, does it?

It's basically the Amish of IT.

The shift is like that from horse drawn carriage to motor vehicle.

> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars

It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?

It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.

I wasn’t referring to the specifics of the disagreement, I meant the level of vitriol.

Ah, that makes sense. My bad!

Most of what you use is built by "code monkeys" and is on the way to being vibe coded.

Yeah. We noticed. We've been complaining about the quality for a while.

Except in this case the monkeys are pretty good at coding as long as you have enough bananas (tokens). They can follow directions pretty accurately and work independently for at least short periods and incrementally test the work even if you’re not present onsite monkey-handling all the time. I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue. If and when nearly the entire professional industry changes to LLM-based code in most cases, what are they going to do to find those relatively few people who are still willing to write everything manually and spend their spare time maintaining these projects?

Perhaps one day we’ll finally understand the value of simpler software that moves ever-closer to “complete” (simple maintenance only), rather than constantly reinventing Zawinsky’s Law.

It’s ok for software to be replaced when something better comes along for a new generation, but what I wouldn’t give for more well-maintained tools that are feature complete.

What is the modern version of Zawinsky’s Law, anyway? Every program expands until it contains a web browser (Electron), notifications, and a chatbot?

>I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue.

plagiarism machine can not be trusted.

therefore plagiarism machine must not be allowed to make decisions.

Especially when it's the corporate plagiarism machine owned by the amoral billionaire class that is profiting wildly off the well-paid legislature's shocking sudden disinterest in protecting the rights and privacy of the people after the capture of the first, second, and third branches alongside the fourth estate.

People are tired of exploding costs, loss of privacy, intrusive technology, pervasive advertising, malignant anti-intellectualism, endless rent-seeking products, and fascist leadership. Adding economic crisis from job loss is a fast track to violence.

I use AI and see it's value and even I'm furious about how it's going.

Plagiarism is on the part of the companies making them, the machine cannot really intend things and thus are not the things that are "guilty" of plagiarism. It also doesn't have to be the thing that decides anything, you can still decide anything of importance while acting as a guide.

Except none of that is actually true. LLMs suck at programming, and the level of effort you have to put in to police their suck is so great that you may as well have just written it yourself.

If you know what you want to do (i.e. you have the architecture/pseudo-code in your head already), LLMs are a actually quite good at transforming that into real code and do save you time/effort. If you are using them like slot machines, and hope for the best after a vague prompt, then yes, it's not worth it, it just leads to frustration and wasted energy.

I and countless others have been using them quite effectively for complex coding tasks since at least 2023. This seems to be a skill issue in itself or you haven't used any frontier models in about 3 years. Living in denial about new technology isn't very beneficial generally; look around you, the industry has already changed significantly, people like Linus Torvalds who are tough on even good human coders are willing to use LLMs nowadays.

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