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So by that reasoning all Microsoft software is open source
Not that we’d want it, it’s horrendously bad, but still
windows engineers have probably been copying snippets from stackoverflow for decades, which may have been copied from the kernel or some other copyleft product
How may Windows engineers have you met?
99% of the ones I met and worked with were very, very good.
Don’t confuse maintaining backwards compatibility and managing real concerns of large customers with bad engineering.
you can still be a good engineer and still copy code from stack exchange. i wasn’t saying windows engineers are bad
Aren’t you all forgetting the core meaning of open source? The source code is not openly accessible, thus it can’t be FOSS or even OSS
This just means microslop can’t enforce their licenses, making it legal to pirate that shit
It’s just the code that’s not under copyright, so if someone leaked it you could legally copy and distribute any parts which are AI generated but it wouldn’t invalidate copyright on the official binaries.
If all the code were AI generated (or enough of it to be able to fill in the blanks), you might be able to make a case that it’s legal to build and distribute binaries, but why would you bother distributing that slop?
Even if it were leaked, it would still likely be very difficult to prove that any one component was machine generated from a system trained on publicly accessible code.
Stallman: “Oh man, not like this.”
Shouldn’t all AI generated code be GPLv3?
Why would it be a specific license?
Due to how GPL work, basically if you include a GPL licensed code in your project, you must make all the project code under GPL
Yes I think most of it technically should due to the nature of GPL code.
I think, to punish Micro$lop for its collaboration with fascists and its monopolistic behavior, the whole Windows codebase should be made public domain.
Haven’t we been exposed to enough horror?
Probably wouldn’t work, at this point I doubt they’re capable of feeling shame anymore, if they ever were.
does the public really want more garbage than they already has?
Do you not want all the hardware support Linux is missing to suddenly become available?
We don’t have to use it for anything other than compatibility.
Personally I’d very much like for ACPI to be un-fucked
The kernel and NTFS seem decent from what i heard. Or at least was (the kernel, no guess what they vibecoded into it now).
About NTFS: it was actually pretty good for it’s time (90s), but the tooling makes no use of some of it’s better features and abuses some others close to breaking point. Literally pearls for the sows.
There were decent (at least, worked for me) NTFS drivers for Linux like 20 years ago. (Back when I felt the need to dual boot)
By that same logic LLMs themselves (by now some AI bro had to vibe code something there) & their trained datapoints (which were on stolen data anyway) should be public domain.
What revolutionary force can legislate and enforce this?? Pls!?
By that same logic LLMs themselves (by now some AI bro had to vibe code something there)
I’m guessing LLMs are still really really bad at that kind of programming. The packaging of the LLM, sure.
& their trained datapoints
For legal purposes, it seems like the weights would be generated by the human-made training algorithm. I have no idea if that’s copyrightable under US law. The standard approach seems to be to keep them a trade secret and pretend there’s no espionage, though.
The packaging of the LLM, sure.
Yes, totally, but OP says a small bit affects “possibly the whole project” so I wanted to point out that includes prob AIs, Windows, etc too.
Oh darn, our CEO told us to use LLMs to write all this code, and now the good parts might be used for something that helps people. Not our copyrights!
To the CEO, “helps people” means “spreadsheet line goes up”.
Counterpoint: how do you even prove that any part of the code was AI generated.
Also, i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
No, because you created the generation algorithm. Any code it generates is yours.
While nobody created neural nets and back propagation
Not how I understand it, but I’m not a lawyer. The user that uses the script to generate the code can copyright the output and oop can copyright their script (and the output they themself generate). If it worked like you said, it would be trivial to write a script that generates all possible code by enumerating possible programs, then because the script will eventually generate your code, it’s already copyrighted. This appear absurd to me.
If the script copies chunks of code under the copyright of the original script writer, I typically see for those parts that the original owner keeps copyright of those chunks and usually license it in some way to the user. But the code from the user input part is still copyrightable by the user. And that’s that last part that is most interesting for the copyright of AI works. I’m curious how the law will settle on that.
I’m open to counterarguments.
Computer output cannot be copyrighted, don’t focus on it being “AI”. It’s not quite so simple, there’s some nuance about how much human input is required. We’ll likely see something about that at some point in court. The frustrating thing is that a lot of this boils down to just speculation until it goes to court.
Uh, yes, that’s what they call a generative ai
Guess you can’t really prove that, unless you leave comments like “generated by Claude” in it with timestamp and whatnot 😁 Or one can prove that you are unable to get to that result yourself.
So nonsense, yes.
Or one can prove that you are unable to get to that result yourself.
Oh shit… I’ve got terabytes of code I’ve written over the years that I’d be hard-pressed to even begin to understand today. The other day I discovered a folder full of old C++ libraries I wrote 20+ years ago, and I honestly don’t remember ever coding in C++.
There is absolutely no way you wrote terabytes of code lmao.
True enough, and I expected to get checked on that.
Regardless… along with the archives, assets and versioned duplicates, my old projects dating back to the 90s somehow now fill multiple TB of old hard drives that I continue to pack-rat away in my office. Useless and pointless to keep, but every piece was once a priority for someone.
Cursor, an ai/agentic-first ide, is doing this with a blame-style method. Each line as it’s modified, added DOES show history of ai versus each human contributor.
So, not nonsense in probability, but in practice – no real enforcement to turn the feature on.
Why would you ever want this?
If you pushed the bug that took down production - they aren’t gonna whataboutism the AI generated it. They’re still going to fire you.
It makes little difference IMHO. If you crash the car, you can’t escape liability blaming self driving.
Likewise, if you commit it, you own it, however it’s generated.
It’s mainly for developers to follow decisions made over many iterations of files in a code base. A CTO might crawl the gitblame…but it’s usually us crunchy devs in the trenches getting by.
Sorry, but as another reply: pushing bugs to production doesn’t immediately equate to firing. Bug tickets are common and likely addressing issues in production.
Hence the “took down production”
I guess you mean like full outtage for all users? My bad just a lot of ways to take the verb “down” for me. Still, though, what a crappy company to not learn but fire from that experience!
OP is obviously ignorant of how much tooling has already helped write boiler plate code.
Besides AI code is actually one of the things that’s harder to detect, compared to prose.
And all that said, AI is doing an amazing job writing a lot of the boilerplate TDD tests etc. To pretend otherwise is to ignore facts.
AI can actually write great code, but it needs an incredibly amount of tests wrapped around and a strict architecture that it’s forced to stick to. Yes, it’s far too happy sprinkling magic constants and repeat code, so it needs a considerable amount of support to clean that up … but it’s still vastly faster to write good code with an AI held on a short leash than it is to write good code by hand.
That’s terrible news. There’s no way I want my code to be open source. Then other people would see just how much spaghetti you can have in a codebase and still have it run.
I think anyone forced to use Windows 11 in 2026 already knows that. Although there the term “run” is stretched to the limit.
Stick to the GPL licensencing of your code whenever possible and the garbage EEE can’t subdue you. (Embrace extend exthinguish.)
If they plagiarize it they kinda ow you the honor.
Hower, plagiarism is still plagiarism, so you better actually write some of your code by hand.
windows would be OSS, not FOSS.
if you can’t enforce copyright, how do you stop others from giving it away for free and editing it, making it foss…?
Patents, trademarks and ToS.
This is why CC0 should not be used for code. Its public license fallback explicitly does not give patent rights. Compare that to MIT which implicitly does by saying you can use the software however you want. CC0 literally has this clause in the public license fallback.
No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
Is Windows FOSS now?
Ew, no, thank you, I don’t want it.
Didn’t sources leak multiple times
Yeah, and it was ghastly.
And they weren’t even infested with slop yet, just spaghetti…
As it should. All the idiots calling themselves programmers, because they tell crappy chatbot what to write, based on stolen knowledge. What warms my heart a little is the fact that I poisoned everything I ever wrote on StackOverflow just enough to screw with AI slopbots. I hope I contributed my grain of sand into making this shit little worse.
Do it in a way that a human can understand but AI fails. I remember my days and you guys are my mvp helping me figure shit out.
Most “humans” don’t understand reality. So you’re postulative challenge invention isn’t going find a break you seek to divine. Few exist. I’m yet to find many that can even recognize the notion that this language isn’t made to mean what think you’re attempting to finagle it into.
Evil Money Right Wrong Need…
Yeah…I could go on and on but there’s five sticks humans do not cognate the public consent about the meaning of Will Never be real. Closest you find any such is imagination and the only purpose there is to help the delirious learn to cognate the difference and see reality for what it may be.
Good fucking luck. Half the meat zappers here think I am an AI because break the notion of consent to any notion of a cohesive language. I won’t iterate that further because I’ve already spelt out why.
That’s not even remotely true…
The law is very clear that non-human generated content cannot hold copyright.
That monkey that took a picture of itself is a famous example.
But yes, the OP is missing some context. If a human was involved, say in editing the code, then that edited code can be subject to copyright. The unedited code likely cannot.
Human written code cannot be stripped of copyright protection regardless of how much AI garbage you shove in.
Still, all of this is meaningless until a few court cases happen.
So wait, if my start up does a human written “Hello World” and the rest is piled on AI slop it can’t be stripped of copyright? Or is “Hello World” too generic to hold a copyright at all?
Granted, as you said this all has to be defined and tested in court, I’m just trying to understand where the line as you see it is.
“Hello World” is prior art.
Just add it after ai writes everything else then.
deleted by creator
https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be-authors-of-copyrightable-works
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
A human must be involved in the creation. A human can combine non-human created things to make something new, but the human must be involved, and the non-human created elements likely lack protection themselves.
People will believe anything if the icon on the tweet looks authoritative and the grammar is sound.
