This is probably a healthy concern.
I think there might be some good ways to hedge one's bets, though.
Use LLMs for rubber ducking, code scanning and review, rather than code generation.
Keep LLM code contributions minimal and unremarkable, too.
Don't make them load-bearing. If the code is central to the program, it's too unique.
@richardfontana @bkuhn @ossguy That's a problem so hard it throws the "NP complete" debate out the window in favor of something brand new. Given that these codebases have no trouble "translating" from one language's source code into another, how on *earth* could you possibly hope to build a compliance tool around that?
Laughable, to anyone who tries.
@cwebber excellent, thanks!
@evan @bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana I am talking about copyright
@evan @richardfontana I am saying we don't know the answer to that question, and it seems that @bkuhn and @ossguy agree that we don't know the answer to it, based on previous posts, and the lack of knowledge about what the copyright implications of LLM based contributions means that we are creating a schrodingers-licensing-timebomb for our FOSS codebases
@cwebber @bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana
Like, not copyrightable, not patents, but some secret third thing, kind of what people mean when we say that someone "copied our idea".
Are you concerned that the LLMs generate nontrivial verbatim excerpts of copyrighted works?
Or that there is a hidden "intellectual property" in the deep patterns that they use?
Say, when an LLM was trained on a file I made with an interesting loop structure, and it emits code with a similar loop structure, even if the variable names, problem domain, details, or programming language differ.
What if a court says I can demand royalties for my "IP"?
@evan These data are already stored in JSON (as an extension, with FEP also in the approval process). However, being in JSON does not mean they will automatically appear across different systems. From a user’s perspective, this changes nothing - they still have to re-enter the data manually if they want it visible elsewhere. It is unfortunate there is no standardized way to display additional metadata added to a Note or Attachment so that other systems could automatically present it 🥺.