Post #2900945

2026-04-18 14:09 UTC

@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social Regarding the one containing CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA, the situation is more uncertain and seems highly affected by legal outcomes in upcoming law and cases to be set. There is the possibility that indeed, the LLM is considered a slurry of inputs and this is legally acceptable, and effectively any output which is not verbatim of its inputs in some way is effectively under the public domain. Now, of course, the problem is that we don't have to just worry about the US, we have to worry *internationally*. When considered from this angle, that FOSS is an international endeavour, this hope that things are in the public domain feels a lot dicier. The assumption is that then this effectively leads to the output being under the terms of CC BY-SA. This is fine, great even, right?! Because effectively everything is share-alike (Bradley I don't wanna get into whether BY-SA is copyleft or something weaker). We slap CC BY-SA on the output, it's fine. Right??????

Replies (1)

@cwebber@social.coop 2026-04-18 14:12

@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social Except, I actually believe this scenario isn't legally viable. And it's easier to understand if we scale back to the middle case. Let's now look at the LLM trained on CC0 and CC BY. Because it's the BY aspect that makes everything complicated. There is *NO WAY* in current LLM technology, nor I believe from studying how neural networks work, any viable computationally performant LLM, that they can track provenance. The BY clause cannot be upheld. This isn't a theoretical concern for me; someone built another vibecoded Scheme-to-WASM-GC compiler that looks an awful lot like Spritely's own Hoot compiler in places. They didn't attribute us. They probably didn't know. But like many FOSS licenses, Apache v2 does require certain levels of attribution to be upheld. Most FOSS projects do. You can't uphold the CC BY requirement, as far as I can tell.

Open ##2900946