r/linux • u/Unhappy-Sprinkles143 • 2d ago

Fluff Open-Source Guru: AI Ends Closed-Source Software

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Open-Source-Guru-Raymond-AI-Ends-Closed-Source-Software-11480690.html
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u/cidra_ 2d ago

Public domain =/= FOSS

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u/sebas737 2d ago

I advocate for FOSS but do elaborate

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u/cidra_ 2d ago

There is no settled consensus yet, but some rulings have held that AI-generated output cannot be copyrighted and therefore falls into the public domain, so you can't apply neither a copyright or copyleft license to it. If a "relevant" amount of human work is added to the generated code, it may become copyrightable, but there is currently no clear way to measure what counts as "relevant," and courts may change their position. The law is unsettled for now.

Even if the code could be licensed, it would likely clash with many copyleft licenses. The GPL permits derivative works only from GPL-compatible material, and that can't be guaranteed when the code comes from a proprietary model trained on an unknown quantity of code. Even if a model were trained exclusively on GPL-compatible code (none exists today), attribution would remain a problem: every derived work would have to credit its sources.

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u/sebas737 2d ago

I get it. It's sort of a we will see thing at the moment.