this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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Programming
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From the article:
I'm sorry but that pisses me right the hell off. I don't care who it is, using this rewrite-by-LLM to work around the GPL is just going to be a pox on the global software landscape.
Basically the author is saying "if you can afford to spend $20K on tokens, buy your way around the GPL! Those with the cash can bend, nay break, the rules!"
This is just abhorrent to me. It's STILL a derivative work, git already existed and these LLMs 100%, for sure, used knowledge from their training of the original C git implementation. Just because no one knows exactly how, where or when in the process it occurred, we know the LLMs all had access to original git in their training data.
iirc someone started a company doing just that.
..and they deserve eternal damnation for the idea, IMO. Hrrmph. LLMs by definition can only make derivative works. That's what they do, draw from their training on other works by humans. They are nothing without the training data. Data which was scraped from the entire f*cking Internet, without anyone's permissions. Why is this so hard for devs to understand?
Yes, I am grumpy about this.
I feel like rewriting a GPL thing based on the GPL version should require the GPL licence. After all, you've built something on top of GPL code which means it's also GPL right?
If I go and build my own implimentation of GTK, how do I even prove that I made it entirely without looking at GTK because that's what's required to relicense right?
Solely from the fact that I'm telling you I made my own implementation of GTK, I'm admitting It's not clean room right?
No. Not even a little. It's a copyright, not a patent.
I still feel like it should apply, this is the first term of the gpl:
"I rewrote it in another language as a library instead of an exe" is still covered under this term isn't it?
APIs don't fall under copyright, but implementations do. This is a good thing, otherwise we couldn't have linux or wine, because they used apis from unix and windows respectively, or open source implementations of anything.
If you look at how another program does something to, you are bound by it's license, but if you only look at what it does you are not.
Nope.