Post #2693099

2026-05-19 15:13 UTC

They didn’t check licenses in any way, as it did reproduce the famous quake fast inverse square root function, comments included. And quake, like majority of github projects, is published under GPL, which requires all copies and modifications to be published under GPL as well, after which all sane enterprises have banned copilot usage. Though, we’re not living in sane times anymore. Chatgpt, gemini, deepseek, claude, all reproduce copylefted code left and right. Realistically, Stallman should’ve been rolling in cash by now…

Replies (1)

@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 2026-05-19 18:25

This brings up an interesting question with AI If I, as a human, read a piece of Open source code it solves a problem in a unique and new way, and then I myself write my own closed source code that solves the problem in the same way, I have not violated a license. The license is for the code itself, not a patent for the specific way the code solves the problem. And since the code in the closed source product is written by me and not copy pasted from the open source project, I have not violated the license per So what about AI? If you train the AI on a piece of code, and it outputs the same or similar code, do we treat that as if the human copy pasted the code? Or do we treat it as if the human used what they learned from the first program and wrote something similar? There is already an AI company taking advantage of this. They advertise that that if you want to use open source code in a closed source product, you hire them-- their AI will parse through the open source code and spit out a list of specifications that is specifically not code. Another AI on a completely different system that has never had access to the open source code will then take that specification and spit out program code that is functionally identical and does the exact same thing but is a completely new creation. The result is that you essentially rewrite the open source code but without the copyleft restrictions. This is going to be an issue that laws and courts will have to address. Especially if, in your example, the code produced by the AI was actually identical to the GPL quake code. Because while a human copying the functionality is never going to write the exact same code line by line, the machine might be.

Open ##2700134