Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?
[–] mschuster91 1 day ago
[–] graemep 1 day ago
Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.
I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.
[–] g-b-r 1 day ago
As others said, for closed source software it's a lot harder to detect plagiarism.
And it's in general very hard to detect plagiarized code; there's some product that does it, but it of course has only a partial inventory of the existing open-source code.
I think that some big company does use those products, though.
[–] graemep 23 hours ago
I have heard of this happening in response to prompts designed to do so, not inadvertently.
How many case of proprietary code inadvertently being included in open source projects, or even of copyleft code being included in permissively licensed projects do you know of?
I can just imagine it happening to a purely vibe coded project that lets an LLM do huge chunks of stuff with minimal instructions doing something like copying a chunk of a library, but its otherwise hard to just copy code that will work in a different context.
We read of huge LLM assisted projects on HN all the time. How many of those have been sued?
Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.
And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.