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It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.

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> If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?

I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.

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In the 90s aircraft manufacturers basically stopped whole segments of the market (anything smaller than a piston twin) due to litigation. I wouldn't be horribly surprised to find we spend the next 10 years fighting about this stuff in court.
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I'm fully aware of lots of times powerful companies have used the courts to protect their business. My point is basically all of the powerful companies are elbow deep in LLMs to the extent of some sort of mutually assured destruction if they were to start court cases like this.

LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?

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It's purely conjecture at this point but my gut feeling is most companies are in high spirits about the costs they can save and the benefits it can bring to their own business. I don't think enough time has passed to see really high profile losers. What happens when Infosys starts losing money or Free CAD becomes the next SolidWorks due to LLM driven improvements?
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The lack of modern small airplane designs, especially engines, is the extensive and thus expensive certification process. Most of what is a "new" airplane usually is derived from a very old, grandfathered design.

The only real innovation for small planes is in the electric flight area - when you gotta do a full certification anyway as you're piloting an entirely new drivetrain, you can financially afford to be much more innovative on other parts of the design.

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Why wouldn't it be feasible for Apple, with an unlimited war chest, to go after Asahi? I am not saying they will, but it is certainly possible for them.
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Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs.

Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.

And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?

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Heh, sounds like it'd be along the same lines as the SCO Unix kerfuffle back in the day.
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Mutually assured destruction is what keeps everyone quiet at the moment.
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These are very good observations indeed.
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Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).
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It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.
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No judge I’ve ever met gave a damn how much a party spent on legal resources. With rare exceptions, they care a great deal about achieving justice, and often bend over backwards to help indigent parties avoid prejudicing themselves. Keep in mind that there are no indigent parties in this debate; both major IP rights holders and the frontier AI companies are well capitalized.

(I worked in a federal district court for a while.)

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The problem is that money buys lawyers, and you need those to get justice. If the other side spends more, you are likely to lose.
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Which of these parties doesn’t have lawyers? (I’m talking about bigcorps stealing from bigcorps here.)

In a case where both parties have lawyers, having more and more expensive lawyers is not necessarily predictive of a case’s outcome. There are diminishing returns.

What having more resources tends to do is force the poorer party to settle quicker. But that’s not necessarily a loss. Judges still have to approve settlements in the interest of justice.

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Not everywhere is the US.
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The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.
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none of this is incorrect, however, how freaking sad is it that in order to get any OS that's not locked down and owned by Apple on the hardware we buy and supposedly own, someone (together with whole open source organizations) has to risk utter financial ruin.

I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.

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Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.
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Nothing. I hope those companies go bankrupt, I'm not underwriting their failure to support their customers with my time and effort.
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Cool. Excited to see you on the pitch next time you comment on a football game.
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It may not just be about IP but also code quality. As an example, TFA calls the user mode portion "slop" in need of cleanup.
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