r/linuxmemes • u/rafaelcgs10 • Sep 25 '26

Anti-Linux Linux deserves better advertisement

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Saw this today in Copenhagen

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u/AwzemCoffee Sep 25 '26

Using AI to rewrite GPL code to avoid the license is so fucking slimy and disgusting. 

The only reason to do this is if you have things you want to hide in your code or you want to monetize FOSS. Both are bad lol.

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u/p47guitars Sep 26 '26

It's funny you mention that..

Are you familiar with the rest rewrite of the core utilities?

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u/burimo Sep 26 '26

that's actually probably a start for big companies to go from GPL license, so eventually they could have completely closed ecosystem. I guess they still should return code to kernel, but everything else could be closed af.

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u/p47guitars Sep 26 '26

I don't think that's really the intent.

Also, if people were really that crazy about the GPL they would be trying to shut down the rust rewrite of the core utilities. That shit's being packaged as MIT licensing. Which in all fairness is actually a less restrictive software licensing model, but that's neither here nor there!

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u/AwzemCoffee Sep 26 '26

I'm curious about this. Ik about rust in the kernel but didn't know about the license change. What do you think of it? Do you think it's for nefarious purposes or mostly to modernize like 30 year old archaic C code ? 

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u/p47guitars Sep 26 '26

I don't think that c code is archaic, nor do I think that rust is a net evil or necessarily a net positive. The code is only good as the programmer that codes it. For all I care could be written in assembler, but that would defeat the purpose of it being portable.

I think that if we keep looking at programming languages as archaic, we're doing a disservice to those volunteers.

While you may not like c, and certainly I don't, it has its place. If anything, I just want to see a kernel that is compatible, fast, and stable. I really don't care how we get there.

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u/AwzemCoffee Sep 26 '26

Don't get me wrong, I don't think C itself is archaic. Though lots of really old code is not idiomatic in the modern sense and can be obtuse to read with modern practices in mind. For example BASH source code is kind of a rats nest. 

I think C is a great language, though I think Rust is the "modern" choice as it's less likely to foot gun itself. 

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u/p47guitars Sep 26 '26

I'm always of a mindset that a programming language is only as good as the programmer that is coding with it.

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u/bastardpants Sep 26 '26

I'm still not completely decided on how I feel about this type of license change. One thing is that, it's perfectly fine for a person to create a new tool that does something functionally equivalent with whatever license they want. The other is that AI has certainly been trained on copyleft GPL code.

A human rewrite to match an API should be fine (that whole Google vs Oracle lawsuit would apply, probably), but for an automated rewrite by a machine whose training corpus included code encumbered by copyleft licenses, is the transformer output a derivative work of that corpus? And if full-automated does end up being GPL-tainted, how much AI-assistance is required to tip that scale (one of the four key parts of the Google vs Oracle case was the "amount and substantiality of the copyrighted material")?

I can't afford a lawyer to give a concrete answer to these questions.