It seems there’s a new use case for LLMs: letting it reimplement open-source software in order to re-license the result.
Armin Ronacher has some interesting thoughts on the licensing consequences:
What I think is more interesting about this question is the consequences of where we are. Copyleft code like the GPL heavily depends on copyrights and friction to enforce it. But because it’s fundamentally in the open, with or without tests, you can trivially rewrite it these days.
There are huge consequences to this. When the cost of generating code goes down that much, and we can re-implement it from test suites alone, what does that mean for the future of software? Will we see a lot of software re-emerging under more permissive licenses? Will we see a lot of proprietary software re-emerging as open source? Will we see a lot of software re-emerging as proprietary?
For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely.
In the GPL case, though, I think it warms up some old fights about copyleft vs permissive licenses that we have not seen in a long time. It probably does not feel great to have one’s work rewritten with a Clanker and one’s authorship eradicated. Unlike the Ship of Theseus, though, this seems more clear-cut: if you throw away all code and start from scratch, even if the end result behaves the same, it’s a new ship. It only continues to carry the name. Which may be another argument for why authors should hold on to trademarks rather than rely on licenses and contract law.
Simon Willison has a timeline of how it came to the “LLM rewrite” of chardet summarizes the arguments of those involved. There’s also a comment by one of the authors of the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 Richard Fontana:
[…] FWIW, IANDBL, TINLA, etc., I don’t currently see any basis for concluding that chardet 7.0.0 is required to be released under the LGPL. AFAIK no one including Mark Pilgrim has identified persistence of copyrightable expressive material from earlier versions in 7.0.0 nor has anyone articulated some viable alternate theory of license violation. I don’t think I personally would have used the MIT license here, even if I somehow rewrote everything from scratch without the use of AI in a way that didn’t implicate obligations flowing from earlier versions of chardet, but that’s irrelevant.