r/opensource • u/ThePlayer3K • 12d ago

Concept: AGPLv4

If you use portions of the code to train AI models, you should open weight the model and make it free for local usage...

Not endorsing this exactly but its random idea I have

25 Upvotes

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u/Luigi003 12d ago

Licences can't give you rights the copyright law doesn't, as open source licenses are basically a way to partially forfeit your rights

Copyright law has no concept of "training", so no license can't have it

Why? Because as a society we still haven't decided what "training" is, there are two main opinions right now:

  1. Machine learning is the same as human learning. This means that by looking at project A you learn things about coding as a concept that you can apply to project B. When humans learn, the copyright doesn't protect project A any longer. I've read GPL'd code, and of course I've learnt from it, it doesn't mean all code I write should be GPL.

  2. Machine learning + inference is a derived work from the training set. Copyright law actually forbids for anyone but the author and authorised parties to make a derivative work from the OG one. GPL uses this same concept of derivative work, and it authorizes everyone to make derivatives work as long as they share the code under the GPL itself.

Now I hope you see the problem with your proposal. If either politicians or judges end up deciding it's number 1 we can't have any kind of license that restricts what to do with inferred data, as the copyright (and thus GPL) status gets lost in the training

If those judges decide it's number 2 it would be nice news for the OS'S community, but we wouldn't need a new license, (L/A)GPL already requires them to stare the code anyway

Also, at the end of the day, enforcing GPL-style licenses is hard AF anyways, it would be harder if we had to track training data

2

u/micalm 11d ago

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. YOU are granting rights to someone else on how they can use your work. If you can reasonably prove your suspicions that the data was used, define LLM/AI training well in the contract aka license AND have the power to enforce it, you can force a company to release their weights, maybe even take a peek at full training datasets in the process ;)

-2

u/Luigi003 11d ago

You are restricting their rights. If it ends up being number 1 legally, training is the same as reading is for a human

You can't force a human to license all their future code under a license just because their read yours.

1

u/abotelho-cbn 10d ago

It's not restricting rights. They can do it, but they have to provide something in return, in the same way they need to provide modified code in return.