I am the author of multiple AGPL systems, many in mainstream use. Early LLM models would spit out my code almost verbatim. Modern systems borrow heavily on the creative design of those systems.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
I don't see extreme views in this article. When LLMs take creative content from copyleft code, the license says the output has to be copyleft. Otherwise, it's theft.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
Doe v. GitHub already decided (I'm simplifying, read the actual thing yourself) that LLM output is not automatically open source - or specifically it doesn't infringe on the open source training material and doesn't inherit the oss copyright notice.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
You can't apply naïve transitive reasoning to law. Law is not code. Your assertions are meaningless and unsupported noise until they're actually tried in a court.
Every major corporation on earth is behaving as if it was. If/when it gets tested you can be sure that the pro-copyright side will be very, very well funded.
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
Whilst the first training sets would have used Stack overflow and open source projects.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
Here is a different angle. A programming language is a material like wood, aluminum, or stone. If you know the syntax and properties of it can you start trying to bend it to your will - you can make a ship, a satelite, or a children’s toy wihh tv the same language. You first have to spend years mastering the material and its limitations before you can bend it, so only a small number of the people who want to make stuff get to. Some people release open versions of a ship and a satelite you can start from, to lower the threshold of making stuff. They protect them to make sure giant shipbuilder doesn’t go making an army of their ships to kill their trade.
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market. Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
I mostly agree and have pretty much every one of my projects open source. One in particular, though, is not. And that is because the design of it is heavily domain specific and is built on loads and loads of experience. Not sure how to reconcile that...
There's a difference between something being released as open source and something that never gets released at all. Open source or not only becomes relevant when making the binary available to other people.
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from
me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
I agree with the spirit of this. I'm a longtime open source developer and generally prefer GPL for my manual code. For my AI-generated code I'm using a multiple choice license of Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
Open source people have had half a century to figure out how to make money with fairly little success (aside from a dozen or so very notable projects, and looking at all my AI slop, I don't see one of these hiding in there).
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.
>First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
There is so little value to most code produced with models these days I just don’t see the point.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way.
They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
> First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement.
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
Makes sense, many of the programming languages are open source, other novelty things were released as open source aswell, we as programmers/software engineers does a bunch of our solutions based on public code or under Creative Commons.
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
I'm tired of these child like responses from adult professionals in this industry. Do you argue just for the sake of arguing? No, your exposure to opensource code "massive" and you are clearly smart enough to know this but you had this make this comment as rage bait.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how LLMs have essentially made all code open source in a strange and very capitalist way: They’ve appropriated our human work—without regard for any licenses—by force and without any compensation to the authors, and are now selling the code back to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.
couldn't you always generate infinite code? just write more of it. but what open source lets you do is read the code for a particular piece of software, to see what it actually does. generating infinite code has nothing to do with that.
you could also do this before, but only with infinite time. open source value is shifting. open source is human-validated code. just OSSing generated code has no value.
My patterns for loading data into Python is pretty much the same everytime with polars. I didn’t create that - I looked it up from a book somewhere. Do I need to open source it?
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
Even if you modify it before using it, it's still based on open source (often GPL) code, so just everything based in part on LLM output should be open source.
agreed. The problem is _which_ open source, because what we're probably going to slowly realize is most software will now be a public good and proper governance is needed thats indistinguishable from a public utility.
We already have a growing discoverability problem in many areas of content and throwing more slop into the mix is not the solution. This place for example has become a dumping ground for people, usually with no other activity here, to advertise their shovelware AI projects.
The author needs to realize that this is unenforceable.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.
This means “all software should be Open Source unless written fully by humans”, which practically means almost all software in the near future, which is a terrible idea for multiple reasons.
Under those conditions it would be un-licensable (since a license is essentially an agreement not to sue for copyright infringement) but it can still be made open by publication. I'm skeptical that the "anything that comes out of AI can't be copyrighted" argument will end up holding, but in the meantime it provides a strong incentive not to make that code public.
One company first pirated my AGPL code (e.g. shipped it without my name, copyright notices, source availability, etc.). I sent them violation notices. After many months of fighting, they had an LLM clone the system. The LLM clone feels:
a) Buggy and bad compared to my code
b) Still, like it's basically my creative content
It's as if you asked an LLM to rewrite Harry Potter, with the same plot, but bad dialogue.
First of all, nobody must force OpenSource. Period. Second, such exterme views spawn extreme views in the opposite side.
Discussion is good, but this article is too draconian to be practical.
If LLMs weren't trained on AGPL/GPL/LGPL code, it'd be different. But they are.
Thaler v. Perlmutter (again simplified) showed 100% AI output can't be given any copyright.
The directions the current cases are going are very much opposed to that idea and I wouldn't expect things to change in the opposite direction.
Agentic code development is human steering, thus copyrightable under the same grounds.
Open source code is copyrighted, otherwise we would be talking about public domain.
When you edit something in the public domain to enrich it, it then becomes copyrightable again.
[1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
It's important to remember that the purpose of the license is to allow the copyright owner to exercise their rights in a manner they deem fit. Even if they choose to give the code away, that choice is captured the form of a specifically worded license (MIT, BSD, etc.).
This means that licenses exist because code is copyrightable in the first place, with the license governing the use of said copyright. If AI code is not copyrightable, then no license can govern it.
I have my suspicions that the AI companies have been using reverse engineering to gain more training data.
Ethics don't really concern these companies so...
When you have essentially infinite compute and are constantly looking for more training data. To me the next logical step is to start reversing compiled programs.
It could also explain why these AI models are so good at it too...
How do you copyright stolen material?
AI comes along and now grandma, who was formerly a midwife and teenager from home can start bending aluminum and carving wood with their words through AI. There are a bunch of open ships and satellites in the market, but Grandma is using her midwifing skills to ask AI to bend a new tool for her that helps turn breach babies around without requiring a c-section. No open source breach tools or medical tools on the market. Grandma just needs aluminum and wood combination she would never be able to achieve without AI. Next her grandson decided to combine tungsten and wood to make a new toy that helps kids go airborne and land safely every time - like an egg-drop but for real life people. No open source code for that out there - he used the AI which knew the properties and the languages needed to get his idea to work. By this plan should they be allowed to copyright their work? Should their work be automatically open source so they can never monetize it either?
Just because AI was involved doesn’t mean significant human thought and effort didn’t go into the production of those artifacts.
My agentic software development loop requires heavy involvement of real-world feedback. The ratio is huge. 20 mins of agentic software coding against hours or days of testing, trying it out, real-world contact, thinking about what feature is next or what tweak would make it more usable, smooth, intuitive. That feedback is baked into the product. Forcing it to be open source steals all that time and effort for me, and takes from me the decision as to how and whether to open-source it. So you mean the code that I’ve agentically written to help manage my private financial affairs (on local models, for privacy) or my kids’ complicated school schedules must now be open sourced?
My manners begin to fail, so I’ll stop here.
If you're curious, here's my newest open source which helps build Rust web services along with Axum: https://github.com/publicprojects-io/axa and you can see the LICENSE.md file.
I don't particularly care about copyright or whatever ethical arguments yo may come up with -- I write code mostly for money, as do my competitors -- if you can figure out a way to stop them from using AI, I'm fine with not using it either. I'm fairly skeptical you can close Pandora's box though.
That aside, we may see more software going in a source-available direction -- either that or full cloud. Up until now being closed source was a competitive advantage, but now it's trivial to clone even fairly huge software suites, so that's less of a factor.
Having the source may also become a bigger advantage for regular users than before -- given they can now vibecode extensions/plugins, or customize the software more than what a config would personally allow. this probably wings the calculus away from a Photoshop-style license, and closer an Unreal Engine-style license.
Either that; or everything goes full cloud of course.
Strong argument, but the case that such a strong transformation should maintain the original licence only applies to my knowledge to GPL, which consists of a very small portion of the training set. Creative Commons would not even require the source code to be distributed, just attribution, which may already be the case by the nature of the models.
>"The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights."
But no one claims that the AI holds the copyright, unlike Greenpeace which claimed that Naruto the monkey held the copyright.
The real value ends up being found in software where there is a person behind it continuously refining it into something others will look at and say “Someone clearly paid attention to this.” Models can’t (yet) reproduce that because they can’t/don’t go interacting with users or asking bigger picture questions.
Whether someone is producing that software with a model or not doesn’t change much about the ownership picture to me: it’s the person that owns the project, and the LLM is a tool.
Once again, it all comes down to it being a tool and how it’s used, and there are no useful blanket statements that can be made about it (or how the tool’s output should be classified, legally or otherwise)
1. Software had a strong movement of freely sharing all code because they believed this technology was too important to be controlled by corporations.
2. AI companies managed to create millions of RL environments from GitHub PR’s and similar, and train their model to learn what it means to code from all the human labour in the world from the past 30 or so years.
3. Companies now use these closed source AI models, to automate and fire their human workers who enabled this.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, whether this falls under copyright or not is besides the point.
We weaponized a fundamentally good instinct that generated a lot of value for society and allowed corporations to rent seek on all the data these humans generated to help other humans not trillion dollar corporations.
“Well we’ll give them a UBI check”, the AI company says which is a complete non-sequitur. It’s not about the money, most of us have saved enough.
The only solution that sounds good to me, is a model trained on Open Source Data must be Open Source and all the code it generates must also be open source. This is the only way to stop the coming rent seeking. Even mathematicians will be happy with this change!
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
I too have trained on the massive corpus of open source code. Should everything I code also be open source? Or only if I leverage an artificial neural network as a prosthesis to enhance the capabilities of my natural neural network?
What I agree with the post is specific licenses require us some specific requirements like release the code if it's a derivation of prior work!
You're also unlikely to output what you trained on verbatim.
But yeah, aside from that, I’m also releasing all my Vibe Coding games under the MIT license: https://github.com/retrogames23/
The AI machine just went out and read a bunch of examples then adapted them, which is what lots of programmers do.
Yes, it was trained on free software. Why does that mean my privacy should be invaded now if I distribute binaries I made?
But we're not headed in that direction are we.
In fact I'd argue that free software and open source is economically dead and unsustainable because of AI generated code and almost no one wants to pay for their tools because an AI can generate the missing feature for them close to $0.
Maintaining it is another thing, but assuming that the cost of tokens get cheaper, why wait for open source developers to maintain it when a frontier AI model can do it for far cheaper and quicker?
I am just saying what the average manager turned vibe coder would say who will refuse to donate or pay for established open source projects that they use for free.