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Comment by rjsw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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