Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 26, 2026 11:19 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Is it free software? by kleptog
Parent article: The Book of Remind

If all free software is in the training set, and the output of the LLM is effectively not copyright protected (because it's too expensive to prove), then things like OpenWRT would never have happened, because you could avoid the problem with GPL licensing by having the LLM "vibe-code" an entire router OS, instead of copying Linux.

It's not a new risk. But if you're looking at LLMs as "they will obliterate copyright walls", I think you're barking up the wrong tree; I expect them to be bad for small copyright holders (since proving copying becomes harder), but not big ones.

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Is it free software?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 12:27 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (2 responses)

At least right now it is hard to get an LLM to move a function from the file foo/bar to the file foo/baz without modification but a hypothetical future AI based on a different fundamental concept might be usable that way.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 12:32 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

For someone abusing LLMs to "copyright-wash" infringement, that modification is a feature, not a bug. The copying is no longer literal, so it makes it harder to show that copying took place, while as long as the modifications don't introduce too many new bugs, you can refer back to the original and fix them (or ignore them if they're irrelevant to your product - if you're building a WiFi router, and the bugs relate to DCCP NAT, "just" don't support that).

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 12:58 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

In the specific case I had in mind the LLM just kept changing APIs back from the version of a library I was using to the version of the same library that was current when it was trained (bevy 0.17 -> 0.14) which was incredibly annoying.