Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.

And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.

I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.

I have no data to back this up but patent trolling seems to happen far less than companies that already own significant infra/talent ripping products from smaller companies and out competing them with their scale. I'd rather have patent trolling than have Amazon manufacturer everything i launch.

The problem with IP laws and the US is that the big companies already do what IP is suppose to protect and the US refuses to legislate effectively against them.

Maybe, but the LLM did not recite the chardet source code so that argument does not appear to apply here.

What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?

Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.

> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.

Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.

So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.

>Licenses exists for a reason

Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.

And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.

But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.

And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).

"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"

This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the clear regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like the Linux kernel.