Post #2900940

2026-04-18 13:52 UTC

@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social So the question is: is it safe, from a legal perspective, given the current state of uncertainty of copyright of such contributions, to encourage accepting such contributions into repositories? Now clearly, many projects are: the Linux kernel most famously is, and their recent policy document says effectively, "You can contribute AI generated code, but the onus is on you whether or not you legally could have". Which is not very helpful of a handwave, I would say, since few contributors are equipped to assess such a thing. I've left myself and three others addressed in this portion of the thread, and all of us *have* done licensing work, and my suspicion is, *especially* based on what's been written, that none of us could confidently project where things are going to go.

Replies (1)

@cwebber@social.coop 2026-04-18 13:58

@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social Part of the problem here is that the AI companies have set the stage themselves. Their presumption is that it's fine to absorb effectively all open and "indie" content, and that this is entirely fair to pull into a model without any legal implications, whereas potentially yes, you may need to "license" something that looks like a Disney character. In the land of code, I also sense that Microsoft is perfectly fine with the idea that you can "copyright launder" a codebase from the GPL to perhaps the public domain, but if someone did that to their own leaked source code, they would be very upset. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who works in films has said that he keeps hearing rumors that OpenAI would like a cut of stuff made with their stuff. We should presume tthat true. Regardless, I'm sure everyone on this thread wants an *equitable* situation for proprietary and FOSS licensing. I'll expand on that more in a moment though.

Open ##2900941