> So as of today, the Copyright system does not have a way for the output of a non-human produced set of files to contain the grant of permissions which the OpenBSD project needs to perform combination and redistribution.
This seems extremely confused. The copyright system does not have a way to grant these permissions because the material is not covered under copyright! You can distribute it at will, not due to any sort of legal grant but simply because you have the ability and the law says nothing to stop you.
Eh … the argument will likely be things created by Thing at the behest of Author is owned by the Author. It’ll take a few cases going through the courts, or an Act of Congress to solidify this stuff.
Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply
The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted.
It's not settled. The monkey selfie copyright dispute ruled that a monkey that pressed the button to take a selfie, does not and cannot open the copyright to that photo, and neither does the photographer who's camera it was. How that extends to AI generated code is for the courts to decide, but there are some parallels to that case.
> Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now.
Can someone explain this to me? I was under the impression that if a work of authorship was not copyrightable because it was AI generated and not authored by a human, it was in the public domain and therefore you could do whatever you wanted with it. Normal copyright restrictions would not apply here.
I vibe-configured an Edgerouter 4 as a hot-drop box that would establish a secure tunnel and create a fake WAN for some servers that had to be temporarily pulled from service but remain operational in someones home garage. I overnight shipped it to them with two of the ports labeled, they plugged in home internet on one port, the rack on the other port, and it secure tunneled to a Linode VPS to get a public IP, circumventing all the Verizon home internet crap. I used OpenBSD. Claude did most of the work.
Wow that thread just kept going. Whilst the LWN article covered most of the "highlights" I think this reply from Theo is pretty suscient on the topic at large [1].
> Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we
don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it
into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming
less free than it is now.
that's not a statement from a lawyer, and it's confused. there is one true thing in there which is that at least under US considerations the LLM output may not be copyrightable due to insufficient human involvement, but the rest of the implications are poorly extrapolated.
there are lots of portions of code today, prior to AI authorship, that are already not copyrightable due to the way they are produced. the existence of such code does not decimate the copyright of an overall collective work.
Well this is ironic, GPL advocate(s) declaring a clean implementation based on specifications infringing due to someone/something reading specs provided under license. Didn't Oracle lose that argument in court as pertains to Android implementation of Java libraries?
The Windows 2000 and Windows XP sources are readily available and must have made it into the training data. But most software has dropped XP support. You really need at least some of the Win 8 and Win 10 APIs to claim compatibility with modern software, and I doubt claude has seen those from the inside
To me, SOTA is just bad at DRY, KISS, succint, well architected, top down, easy to test code and has to be constantly steered to come close. Even the article suggests that. YMMV.
Eh, well, if your guns are trained on the "copyright" portion of the ship and you can sink it from there, no need to waste ammo or time trying to figure out if code bits are as explosive as the copyright bits are. Probably the code is just as sinkable, e.g. here's a recent response to some other AI slop:
I didn't look closely at most of the code but one thing that caught my eye, pid is not safe for tempfile name generation, another user of the system can easily generate files that conflict with this. Functions like mktemp and mkstemp are there for a reason. Some of the other "safety" checks make no sense. If the LLM code generator is coming up with things which any competent unix sysadmin (let alone programmer) can tell are obviously wrong, it doesn't bode well for the rest.
> This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge?
This comment on the article is spot on. I don't vibe code or care about AI really, but it's so exhausting to see people playing lawyer in threads about LLM-generated code. No one knows, a ton of people are using LLMs, the companies behind these models torrented content themselves, and why would you spend your time defending copyright / use it as a tool to spread FUD? Copyright is a made up concept that exists to kill competition and protect those who suck at executing on ideas.
This seems extremely confused. The copyright system does not have a way to grant these permissions because the material is not covered under copyright! You can distribute it at will, not due to any sort of legal grant but simply because you have the ability and the law says nothing to stop you.
The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Also, it is essentially an ext2 filesystem as it does not support journaling.
Can someone explain this to me? I was under the impression that if a work of authorship was not copyrightable because it was AI generated and not authored by a human, it was in the public domain and therefore you could do whatever you wanted with it. Normal copyright restrictions would not apply here.
Must be a bug in the linux kernel, let me git clone and build an out-of-tree module...
[1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2
Thats awesome lmao
there are lots of portions of code today, prior to AI authorship, that are already not copyrightable due to the way they are produced. the existence of such code does not decimate the copyright of an overall collective work.
Fast forward to 2026, Theo says no to vibe-coded slop, prove to me your magic oracle LLM didn't ingest gobs of GPL code before spitting out an answer.
People are big mad of course, but you want me to believe Theo is the bad guy here for playing it conservatively?
The next AI winter can't come soon enough…
Copyright prevents copying. It doesn't prevent using knowledge.
This comment on the article is spot on. I don't vibe code or care about AI really, but it's so exhausting to see people playing lawyer in threads about LLM-generated code. No one knows, a ton of people are using LLMs, the companies behind these models torrented content themselves, and why would you spend your time defending copyright / use it as a tool to spread FUD? Copyright is a made up concept that exists to kill competition and protect those who suck at executing on ideas.