Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 27, 2026 12:27 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: Is it free software? by farnz
Parent article: The Book of Remind

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.

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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.