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.)
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.
> 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.
You're being pretty, I'm not sure the right word, scaredycat?, about licensing. Licensing doesn't matter unless somebody sues you, which they won't in most cases. The AI era has exposed this truth that you're extremely unlikely to get sued about copyright violation - so unless you're the kind of person who avoids car trips because you could crash, you can ignore it.
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.)