There was another rule you did not know seemingly. Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The only source quoted on the water issue is an EE professor from a school in California, who I am guessing is not a subject matter expert on water in Washington state.

There is no contradiction. Open source software licenses allow use without conditions. Ad blocker use does not distribute the modified web pages.

I have not seen any evidence that LLMs ‘distribute’ modified software, though they do seem capable of replicating it.

I fail to see how mass scale reproduction of copyrighted code isn't a form of distribution.

Reproduce is a definition of replicate. And LLMs reproduced code.

The view LLMs should respect open source software licenses is not for replication alone. Models and generated code are derived from training data.

Developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.

As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.

Depends on how you define "learn": usually, a company wanting to rebuild and publish something under a different license prohibits their developers from having ever looked at original code, to avoid the risk of copying over exact snippets out of their memory accidentally.

Copyright protects only arbitrarily non-trivial parts of the original being reproduced, but that means that you have to be careful with learning from copyrighted material. Programming books will have direct clauses allowing snippet reuse, but not for teaching purposes.

> Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.

This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.

> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.

How?

LLMs are not people. They do not learn the way people do.

Even if they did, if someone memorized copywritten code and then typed it back out that would still be a copywrite violation

> Open source software licenses allow use without conditions.

Don't a number of open source licenses notably involve restrictions?

The user would know how?

MIT license requires credit.

So does the BSD license. Copyright must be reproduced

Most licenses do.

BSD0 doesnt

Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".

The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong.

> My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".

The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.

You were not wrong.

Netflix and Amazon use many packages of all sizes. And contributions to projects with many contributors helped people get jobs.

How would you even know that Netflix or Amazon uses your package?

Their open source software depended on or derived from your package. They included your copyright notice with software they distributed. Someone contributed code. Someone reported a bug. Someone requested a feature. Someone mentioned it at a conference. I could continue.

> edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected

Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.

"BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa 2026" is arguably attribution enough.

This would be useless. And false. It could not be argued in good faith. And open source licenses require the original copyright notice specifically.

> There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use.

There were source available licenses against commercial use. Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition said a license must allow any use.

> In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local.

People complained of no forwarding in Wayland when it was invented.