This analysis is spot-on. I especially think you’re onto something with your reference to the commons. (Edit: The generative AI movement could be a seen as a modern reincarnation of enclosure)
These guys think of a commons in a sense of ownership: if I own something, I can do whatever I want with it.
But the real historical examples of a commons are more like a mutual obligation. It’s a relationship, not a delivery of inert goods. Yes, you get access to the benefits of the commons, but that comes hand-in-hand with accepting the duty to care for the commons as an ongoing entity.
That’s what really irks me about all of this. They didn’t “steal” something. They killed a collective organism.
Interesting writing. But my concern is that social responsibility will be dumped by the cost factor as he said. Anything that is GPL is under threat by an AI-based reimplementation. The cost of doing that seems artificially low now (investment hype phase, not ROI phase of these businesses), so it’s not really the idea anyone could do it that concerns me. The concerning part is no matter the price, bigger companies can take the hit and now direct their resources to undo the GPL everywhere and simultaneously replace labor in doing it.
Companies will then eat shit when trying to maintain code after firing the
developerprompt engineer thatwroteinspired it.I think management rarely understand why they pay people, but with tech is becoming super clear they don’t understand that they pay us to maintain apps not code, and a huge party of that is understanding the app, which is why LOC is a bad metric, why riser4 was never merged into main & AI code isn’t visible long term.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I read an article saying tests should be left closed source as using AI to make it bug free without the tests will be significantly harder. Creates a moat of sorts.
Primeagen mentioned it here, noting that sqlite does this
Nice post. Relatedly, see also malus.sh and this talk by the people that made it (both of which I posted in this lemmy community here).
A couple of minor corrections to your text:
Blanchard’s account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly.
Blanchard doesn’t say that he never looked at the existing code; on the contrary, he has been the maintainer (and primary contributor) to it for over a decade so he is probably the person who is most familiar with the pre-Claude version’s implementation details. Rather, he says that he didn’t prompt Claude with the source code while reimplementing it. iirc he does not acknowledge that it is extremely likely that multiple prior versions of it were included in Claude’s training corpus (which is non-public, so this can only be conclusively verified easily by Anthropic).
The GPL’s conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.
The GPL does not require you to offer GPL-licensed source code when using the program to provide a network service; because it is solely a copyright license, the GPL’s obligations are only triggered by distribution. (It’s the AGPL which goes beyond copyright and imposes these obligations on people running a program as a network service…)
That’s part of what I picked as a teaser:
Start with what the GPL actually prohibits. It does not prohibit keeping source code private. It imposes no constraint on privately modifying GPL software and using it yourself. The GPL’s conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms. This is not a restriction on sharing. It is a condition placed on sharing: if you share, you must share in kind. The requirement that improvements be returned to the commons is not a mechanism that suppresses sharing. It is a mechanism that makes sharing recursive and self-reinforcing. The claim that imposing contribution obligations on users of a commons undermines sharing culture does not hold together logically. The contrast with the MIT license clarifies the point. Under MIT, anyone may take code, improve it, and close it off into a proprietary product. You can receive from the commons without giving back. If Ronacher calls this structure “more share-friendly,” he is using a concept of sharing with a specific directionality built in: sharing flows toward whoever has more capital and more engineers to take advantage of it. The historical record bears this out. In the 1990s, companies routinely absorbed GPL code into proprietary products—not because they had chosen permissive licenses, but because copyleft enforcement was slack. The strengthening of copyleft mechanisms closed that gap. For individual developers and small projects without the resources to compete on anything but reciprocity, copyleft was what made the exchange approximately fair. The creator of Flask knows this distinction. If he elides it anyway, the argument is not naïve—it is convenient.
Legal or not, using code generation to bypass GPL is just shitty behavior. Personally I think this counts as ”derived work” and should remain GPL.
I was almost done writing my blog post addressing the same issue! I’ll give this a read to make sure I don’t re-say anything you did. The state site generator I use (Hugo) also looks very similar to yours lol.
