@aral Honestly I don't actually hate this.

It's a tool. The _user_ is responsible for what they're submitting. It's putting code generated by them in their name. I think this is actually good.

@glyph Yeah, I disagree. Code isn't ingredients and it's not “contamination" any more than you should label “I used search and replace on this”

What you want to know is whether it was well engineered or not.

And in fact, this is almost entirely orthogonal to "safety”. This is an engineering product. The safety comes from processes and whether or not _anyone checked the work done was right_, not the inputs.

@aredridel @glyph What "AI coding tools" *should* be putting in commit messages is:

Co-Authored-By: An unknown and unknowable set of people who did not consent to their work being used this way and to which there is no license for inclusion.

@dalias Morally arguable but not actually true under the copyright regime that exists.

At what point does learning from others constitute their authorship?

@aredridel LLM slop is nothing like "learning from others".

But if you recall, we even took precautions against that. FOSS projects reimplementing proprietary things were careful to exclude anyone who might had read the proprietary source, disassembled proprietary code, worked at the companies who wrote or had access to that code, etc.

@dalias @aredridel A test which LLMs fail by the very virtue of their functioning mechanisms.

It's all fundamentally derivative of the training dataset and it has been exposed both to AGPL and to proprietary datasets.

@aredridel @lispi314 The facts of the matter are completely and utterly obvious.

Now, we live in a world where legal authorities are under complete capture by billionaires pushing this drug, so I am not going to make any predictions about how courts will rule. Even if they do rule in favor of these companies, those rulings will not be treated as precedents that benefit us.

And they will not be accepted by our communities.

What defines FOSS is not whether a court says it's non-infringing, but whether our communities agree that it was made respecting the intent and consent of the authors who licensed it.

@dalias Have you checked with the Free Software Foundation about that?

(Seriously, if it's a moral argument you're making, it's way stronger if you actually make it!)

Now "respect the intent of the author" is a fascinating concept and one worth examining!

@dalias Right. You're appealing to a definition of "FOSS" that isn't entirely clear what it is. And the people who do usually have (some) claim to that authority, the common uses of it, are not the ones you're using.

I'm sympathetic to that but I can't tell what it is in an appeal to an unstated norm for a community that I can't quite identify.

@aredridel @dalias it's an existing community that's pretty well-defined as:

Everyone who believes that the *intent* of open-source licenses should be respected regardless of whether legal machinations actually enforce that.

It's super interesting to observe right now how that community is smaller than "people who say they're committed to FOSS" but the community is clearly at least a substantial subset of open-source contributors and maintainers, and regardless of what happens with the whole current "AI" debacle, we're mostly going to continue building human-authored code, giving it away for free (with an attribution requirement or more) and hoping that others will respect that simple requirement, and shaming/shunning those who flaunt it and brag about doing so (or in this case try as hard as they can to maliciously break the good citation practices and attributions that are part of the lifeblood of the community.

Some think this community will shrink and atrophy over time; others imagine it will be around cleaning up the mess after the AI bubble bursts. Whatever your expectation, saying "I think it's fine for Anthropic employees to actively undermine open-source attribution principles" tells everyone clearly that you're not interested in being part of the community that cares about those.

@bms48 Yep. Not the model I want to see, but one I think is quite justified (and probably the right one in a few cases)

I want to see more people look at making software _designed_ in its structure to be open and liberatory and not be used in corporate control systems so much. It means making things that are shaped differently: less oauth2 and free libraries to implement common control structures, and more like systems built to give users direct control to manipulate their structure. Plugins and primitives that can be combined and reordered and self-hosting and peer to peer.

Like, the license has never particularly kept things being very good, and the stuff that _really_ gets widely used is permissively licensed anyway.

I've always thought that _what_ we are building should make it undesirable to copy and use in a corporate setting.