I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels. The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free market.
Bikeshedding to eventually come full circle to understand why those decisions were made.
In a world where the large OEMs and bigcorps are increasinly locking down firmware , bootloaders , kernels and the internet. I would think a reappraisal of more enforcement that benefits the USER is paramount.
Instead we have devs looking to tear down the few user protections FLOSS provides and usher in a locked down hacker unfiendly future.
The short version is that chardet is a dependency of requests which is very popular, and you cannot distribute PyInstaller/PyOxidizer builds with chardet due to how these systems bundle up dependencies.
[1]: https://velovix.github.io/post/lgpl-gpl-license-compliance-w...
As i recall there were some similar situations in regards to licences for distro builders regarding graphicsdrivers and even mp3 decoders wherer there was a song and dance the end user had to go through to legally install them during/after setup.
Or better yet to make a truly api compatible re-implementation to use with the license that they want to use, since what they have done i surmise would fall under a derivative work.So they havent really accomplised what they wanted - and instead introduced an unacceptable amount of risk to whoever uses the library going forward.
Kinda reminds me of what the Inderner Archive did during the pandemic with the digital lending library.Pushing the boundaries to test them and establish precedence. in any case let see how it plays out.
These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
Even prior to this, relatively simple projects licensed under share alike licenses were in danger of being cloned under either proprietary or more permissive licenses. This project in particular was spared, basically because the LGPL is permissive enough that it was always easier to just comply with the license terms. A full on GPLed project like GCC isn't in danger of an AI being able to clone it anytime soon. Nevermind that it was already cloned under a more permissive license by human coders.
I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.
If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it. The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real quick, massive difference in just a few years already.
And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.
LLM companies and increasingly courts view LLM training as fair use, so copyright licensing does not enter the picture.
It doesn't if Dan Blanchard spends some tokens on it and then licenses the output as MIT.
I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.
So with "Real AI" you actually mean artificial superintelligence.
This is not always true, for an extreme example see Indistinguishability obfuscation.
IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"
(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)
ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP
The problem with IP laws and the US is that the big companies already do what IP is suppose to protect and the US refuses to legislate effectively against them.
If so, let's see it!
Only "pointing it". But the LLM, who can recite over 90% of a book in its training set verbatim *, would have also have had trained on the original code.
Maybe "the slop of Theseus" is a better title.
* https://the-decoder.com/researchers-extract-up-to-96-of-harr...
Not to mention the fact that, as the other commenters mention, that appears to just... not have happened at all in this case, so it's a moot point.
My argument is that while you write that it was "only pointed" to the API, an LLM, who can recite over 90% of a book in its training set verbatim, would also have trained on the original code (and can have it in "mind").
So "pointing it to the API" doesn't mean it ONLY used the API in its implementation. Could very well have used whatever internal knowledge of the behavior and architecture and choices of the original code - regardless of if it recited or translated the original verbatim or not.
So when considering this, "AI was just pointed at the API" is a weaker claim than it appears to be.
Unlike with music, in software traditionally a (human) programmer could be chosen who haven't "heard" (i.e. read the original code). That has traditionally called a "clean room" implementation (not to be confused with the software development process called "clean room").
Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have explicit permission to train on.
Let's be honest about what's happening here.
In practice, well ... you saw what's been going on with the Epstein files, etc... we are far from being ourselves in a world that's fair and honorable.
(I'm not condoning it, I think it's massively trashy to steal code like this then pretend you're the good guy because of some super weird mental gymnastics you're doing)
Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of software licenses.
"But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out.
Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.
> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.
Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.
So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.
I have looked at the project earlier today there is effectively no resemblance other than the public API.
Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.
And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.
But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.
And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).
"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"
It's not some sort of democracy, lol, it's a set of exclusive rights that are created the moment the work being copyrighted is produced.
(For a quick intro I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVs7FCgOig)
In the case of the license in question (L/GPL), it's one of the most strict ones out there, it explicitly forbids relicensing code under a different non-compatible license, like MIT; let me says that again, L/GPL EXPLICITLY FORBIDS the thing that happened here from happening.
I sympathize with the guy that spent 12 years of his life maintaining the code, thank you for your service or something, but that does not make a difference. The wording of the (L/GPL) license is clear and the original author and most of the other 50 or so contributors did not approve of this.
Nobody said you have.
>You just slap the license you want to your code and that's it.
Nobody said you can't.
>It's not some sort of democracy, lol
Nobody said it is, lol.
I'm answering to what you actually wrote, that those expressing their dislike of a project having a speicific license are "either malicious or non mentally capable enough" what licenses are for.
That's a stupid argument putting other people down with a silly strawman.
One can be perfecty capable to understand what licenses are for and still think a project made a mistake chosing a specific language, or want it to change to another (and sometimes, like in the examples I gave, the latter works too).