Interesting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.
On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.
The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.
I think it's a good thing. In a couple of years we'll have a clear way to measure the true productivity and impact (or lack thereof) of AI on software dev. It's the perfect "natural experiment".
No. If an open source project allows small amounts of LLM slop to please their foundation donors, is all productivity in that project due to LLMs? Of course not.
If 10 of 20 developers work for corporations and have to pretend that their code is AI written to please the corporations, is that AI productivity?
The advertising and social pressure machinery is so AI heavy right now because most techies are cowards and only speak up on issues (including DEI as we see since Trump) if HR tells them to.
Then of course many projects like Linux or git are entrenched. You can't copy Unix and bitkeeper like Linus did and be immediately successful, because the whole culture is against you (unlike in the 1990s, when the culture was anti-Microsoft).
So yeah, if Gen-Alpha declares OpenAI and Anthropic the new Microsoft and builds up a new counter-culture, then in 10 years you might have some clue.
Otherwise, we have to stick to the current situation and observe that no software has gotten better since AI.
It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.
Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)
> Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?
Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.
And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.
On the other hand it could be very expensive if caught. It could be very difficult to remove the code too.
Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.
I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.
I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.
> The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?
The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.
I think what you're finding is that people who don't care about low quality of LLM outputs also don't care about licensing. If you're in the faction that supports all of this, you don't see a lot of people around you still caring about licensing or quality.
I am in neither faction, as I already indicated. I’m not an LLM user except for search engine summaries.
I also already mentioned that some formerly GPL die-hards have been jumping ship from Linux to BSDs simply because of the respective stances on AI. That’s enough for me to say this works both ways.
> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.
The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.
That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.
Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:
15925 The FreeBSD Foundation
3738 Netflix
2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
1733 Dell EMC Isilon
1550 Chelsio Communications
1446 DARPA, AFRL
1421 Mellanox Technologies
1262 Klara, Inc.
784 Arm Ltd
729 iXsystems, Inc.
707 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
552 Netflix, Inc.
477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
473 Microsoft
421 Juniper Networks, Inc.
411 DARPA, NAI Labs
386 Stormshield
385 Microsoft OSTC
384 DARPA
375 NetApp, Inc.
358 Innovate UK
355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories
317 Yandex LLC
299 NVIDIA Networking
One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)
Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.
> The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL.
Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.
Literally nothing is less interesting than yet another "discussion" about the relative merits of software licenses, or generalizations about the kinds of people that prefer license A to license B.
It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?
It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.
Except in this case the monkeys are pretty good at coding as long as you have enough bananas (tokens). They can follow directions pretty accurately and work independently for at least short periods and incrementally test the work even if you’re not present onsite monkey-handling all the time. I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue. If and when nearly the entire professional industry changes to LLM-based code in most cases, what are they going to do to find those relatively few people who are still willing to write everything manually and spend their spare time maintaining these projects?
Perhaps one day we’ll finally understand the value of simpler software that moves ever-closer to “complete” (simple maintenance only), rather than constantly reinventing Zawinsky’s Law.
It’s ok for software to be replaced when something better comes along for a new generation, but what I wouldn’t give for more well-maintained tools that are feature complete.
What is the modern version of Zawinsky’s Law, anyway? Every program expands until it contains a web browser (Electron), notifications, and a chatbot?
On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.
The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.