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Comment by anilgulecha | Hacker News Reader

You have a good core idea here. You're pretty much killing your project in infancy with the AGPL+donation license model. Meanwhile, some other projects will take the core idea of "language aware differ" and release BSD, and one of those will win, including perhaps making it into git/future version controls.

IMO, you should seek to make this a standard that wins, and hopefully other opportunities that come will be where you make commercial hay. My unsolicited 2c.

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I really do care about copyleft and AGPL. It’s a political choice. I specifically chose it because I know from direct experience that big tech is allergic to it.

I actually don’t care about the commercial license. It’s more of an experiment for my own amusement than an actual attempt at building a commercial project.

If it inspires someone to build another one and we still end up with a better differ, I’m ok with that world. As long as the open source community has a better differ.

Note that there already are at least 3 that I am aware of. But they do perform worse on speed and accuracy.

FWIW, there's probably no point in using a copyleft licence if AI is involved[1][2], unless you've got pretty solid proof AI only "assisted" rather than doing the bulk of the work. Otherwise, you don't have copyright on the generated code, and without copyright the licence is meaningless, AFAIK.

This is not to say you can't or shouldn't use AI, but it's important to understand the tradeoffs you're making.

[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/thaler-v-perlmutter/ [2] https://www.jenner.com/en/news-insights/client-alerts/us-cop...

I’m not based in the US so SCOTUS doesn’t set meaningful precedent for my IP.

That said, even under those rules, I would be comfortable arguing before the court that this code has significant human involvement and easily passes the copyright standard.

It’s also why I don’t think someone can just easily create another one and license it under BSD. My code is AI assisted, but all truly important pieces were human made.

> It’s also why I don’t think someone can just easily create another one and license it under BSD. My code is AI assisted, but all truly important pieces were human made.

Get one AI to describe what the code does, and another to implement based on that description. You might even get away with a human doing one of the steps. A variation of the classic “clean room reverse engineering” method that was used by Compaq to reimplement IBM's BIOS and start the clone PC market.

Some argue that “it doesn't work like that” but it certainly seems to be what some people are doing and as yet no one has been confident enough that their copyright extends through this mechanism that they've tested the theory in court.

Note: I'm not saying it is right, but that it might well be perfectly legal. It is definitely possible, practical even. I'd still release stuff under AGPL/similar for the same reasons stated above, but I'd not operate under any illusion that I'd be safe from someone using that method to copy everything they wanted to.

If an individual went through all this effort just to release it under MIT, I’d honestly be mostly just surprised someone cared so much. I’d probably just send them my own project relicensed under MIT out of pure curiosity.

But I am counting on the fact that _companies_ would be too worried about legal uncertainty to try this.

> Meanwhile, some other projects will take the core idea of "language aware differ" and release BSD, and one of those will win, including perhaps making it into git/future version controls.

Diffsitter and Difftastic have been around for a while, both MIT, so I doubt it.

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