Post #2900941

2026-04-18 13:58 UTC

@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.

Replies (1)

@cwebber@social.coop 2026-04-18 14:01

However, it's not actually the laundering angle I am concerned with here entirely, it's whether we're turning FOSS codebases into potential legal toxic waste dumps that we will have a hell of a time cleaning up later. The previous Conservancy post, which @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org linked upthread, indicates that Conservancy does indeed consider the matter unsettled. Current LLMs wouldn't "default to copyleft", since they also include all-rights-reserved mixed in there. If the result of output of these systems is a slurry of inputs which carry their licensing somehow, their default licensing output situation is one of a hazard. I note that @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org and @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org seem to be hinting at hoping a "copyleft based LLM" with all-copyleft output it a winning scenario. I'm going to state plainly: I believe that's an impossible outcome. @richardfontana@mastodon.social

Open ##2900942