It's not just the GPL or protective licenses

There seems to be a lot of discussion about this being applied to software released under the GPL, and sometimes the LGPL or protective licenses.

I think that's misguided. Practically *ALL* open source software licenses have attribution requirements, and other requirements, that are *also* not being met by what's being done by this service.

Is it legal? I have no idea. I think this is really untested ground. There are several ways to look at this:

* Maybe this is "de minimus" use or otherwise fair use, in which case it's fine.

* Maybe this is more like a human learning from existing code; humans can write code after reading code (indeed, how else could humans learn?).

* Maybe this is more like creating a derivative work, in which case this is dubious from a copyright perspective.

I'm not a lawyer. I predict that if this starts becoming useful, a lot of lawyers *will* look at this :-).