cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44059967
for those not familiar with Mark Pilgrim, he is/was a prolific author, blogger, and hacker who abruptly disappeared from the internet in 2011.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/968527
Isn’t the LGPL supposed to be relicensable as opposed to GPL’s share-alike?
Nope. The LGPL simply makes an exception for programs that link with it through an API (aka when an LGPL program is used as a library).
No, LGPL just allows linking to differently-licensed software.
Basically linking copies some code from the library into the program that uses it, making any linked software a derivative work.
Sellers of proprietary software libraries give permission for this specific type of linking in their license. LGPL gives the same permission to people who are otherwise following the GPL. LGPL used to be called the “library-GPL” because it is the GPL plus permission to use the library linking mechanism.
nope, here *GPL acts like cancer, once it touches something, it remains *GPL until the last bit of it is still there.
Cancer is a bad analogy. It’s more like antibodies against non-free bactetia :)
I have a completely different view of what free means. xGPL are restrictive and sticky.
The freedom to deny others the same freedom?
Ok, maybe explain the restrictions that offend you so much?
GPL licenses are straight-up cancer, they force every derivative or linked project to adopt their viral copyleft rules, nuking proprietary reuse or easy mixing with other codebases, while a weird GPL cult preaches it as the one true path to “openness” and “freedom”. As someone who codes purely for fun, I like the dead-simple clarity of MIT and BSD: just keep the notice and license text, then do whatever the hell you want. No GPL bullshit or compliance headaches for me, permissive licenses like these keep my sanity intact.
That’s… The point of the GPL licenses, to preserve copyleft. I also prefer the simplicity of the MIT license for my own works, but I respect the copyleft ideals.
If it’s all your own work then a license is purely for others to follow. MIT and GPL license can be just as simple as including a textfile of that license in the project.
Ideally one includes a header in each code file to ensure people just looking at that file (without project context) know the license.
Licenses like the MIT are built to support grifters that just want to take and not contribute back, so…
Well, I do not get his point, the code has been completely rewritten. Not to mention that the new license is much better than the old one.
If the llm they used was trained on the original code, the result was not legally rewritten. To change licensing without buy in from all original authors, the new code must be fully original from spec. Ignoring the legal definitions for convenience opens the door for corporations to steal open source and copyleft materials and strip away the licensing requirements.
That’s a wild claim you’re making. So far, it looks like the code is completely new, and for this case, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. New code - new license.
If the LLM training data is based on / has used GPL code, this might set an interesting legal precedent.
This is a vast downgrade; stripping the GPL is an obvious attempt at nuking open source by bad faith actors. See what’s happening with AOSP, which would be impossible under GPL.
The day GPL stops being used is the day every major tech company will start slowly but surely closing their code down until open source is completely dead
What is happening with AOSP has nothing to do with the license. This project is not being developed by the community, but by Google for Google’s money, and Google can do whatever it wants with it. It’s silly to be offended by this. Anyone who is dissatisfied can fork the project and do whatever they want with it, if they can manage *(well, no, without Google’s resources, this is of course unrealistic).
One of the more “interesting” additional aspects is that courts have decided that works of generative models are not copyrightable… so one can’t license them either.
