The Linux Kernel Will Soon Be MIT-Licensed and Copyleft Will Be Dead

https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-linux-kernel-will-soon-be-mit-licensed-and-copyleft-will-be-dead-within-5-years/

by bananamogul • 5 months ago

26 42 5 months ago

gpcz• 5 months ago

Good luck finding every contributor to the Linux kernel and getting them to agree to that.

lol that's not even their claim. their claim is that AI will rewrite the entire linux kernel from scratch with an MIT license. which. lmao

number6• 5 months ago

AI can't hold copyright (as for now) how will this affect licencing?

OneDeuxTriSeiGo3• 5 months ago

lmao good luck with using an AI to try to rewrite the entire linux kernel. Doubly so good luck doing so without accidentally recycling a bunch of GPL code in the process.

7e3• 5 months ago

The Linux kernel isn’t that complex. It’s mainly device drivers. Linus wrote the first version himself as a hobby, for crying out loud. AIs will be creating custom kernels within five years, from scratch, as customized as you wish. Probably based on BSD, or other liberally licensed code, for legal reasons.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo3• 5 months ago

v0.01 took Linus months of work and even then it barely ran anything. It wasn't POSIX compliant. It couldn't run GNU userspace. It only ran on one arch and had no concept of multi-arch support and limited to no real driver compartmentalization.

It wouldn't be until 2 years later that almost a hundred devs joined the Linux project and they'd gradually have achieved compatibility with GNU userspace. Full POSIX compliance wouldn't come until later.

And it wouldn't be until another year or two later that they'd finally reach a "production ready" 1.0 by which point hundreds of devs were contributing to the project.

You are vastly underestimating the insane amount of work that went into the Linux kernel in the early days to get it to where it is today that it can be developed at such scale and with support for so many intermixed, overlapping, or mutually incompatible features, devices, and platforms. To call that effort (just for core linux, not the drivers) anything less than herculean is frankly an insult to all the people who have dedicated so much time and energy towards that project.

tptacek2• 5 months ago

This piece was more interesting than I went in expecting it to be. But it hinges I think on a disputable claim, that the GPL's value is based on a network effect, so that the GPL gets dramatically less useful (and thus attractive to newer projects) as the base of mainstream GPL software shrinks. I'm not sure I understand why that would be the case.

The AI rewrite of the Linux kernel also seems farfetched. I don't think it really belongs in the title of this post.

ignoramous2• 5 months ago

  chardet is a Python module ... with 170 million downloads ... licensed under the GPL.  A different developer ... to include it in the Python standard distribution ... [reimplemented] it. With [Claude] ... in 5 days ... the reimplementation ... [has] better performance.

May be LLMs learning from all of the FOSS code out there, and out-performing a team of domain experts, is helping us realise the promise of free as in beer.

vips7L• 5 months ago

I guess the question is: was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room?

dTal5• 5 months ago

That's funny, because the "network effect" of the GPL was always extremely obvious to me as part of the point. The idea being that the more that GPL software forms a cohesive ecosystem, the less financially viable it becomes to operate outside of that ecosystem. It's viral, right? And software builds on software, we're about 15 layers deep at this point. The hope is that eventually, so much software is GPL that you effectively have two choices when writing something new: 1) join the GPL borg, or 2) boil the ocean reimplementing the entire stack from scratch.

Unfortunately, free software was successful enough that the latest generation takes it for granted, and has forgotten why radical software politics is necessary. They do not understand, if they even think to ask, why so many nerds ran GNU/Linux even when it was objectively kind of terrible - why so many people were motivated to pour time into a half-broken thing. I hope by the time they do understand, it will not be too late.

My controversial opinion: the problem with the GPL is that it isn't viral enough. It was written by nerds with a good understanding of computers, and poor understanding of people. As such, it focuses too much on technicalities like what it means "link" programs together, in an attempt to rigorously specify definitions that permit running proprietary programs on free operating systems, and vice versa.

But it doesn't work. Every time your Android phone downloads a firmware update, by rights that should be a GPL violation, as it's a single giant executable that mixes together GPL and proprietary code, deliberately made in such a way that separating them out after the fact is impossible - in fact, the program is explicitly designed to fail to run if you so much as tamper with a single bit (signed images). It is hard to imagine something further from Stallman's vision - hard to imagine something less respectful of user freedom. And yet this is permitted on technicalities, because this functionally unmodifiable binary blob happens to be structured in a particular way that computer nerds recognize as a type of database called a "filesystem", and the GPL parts are neatly organized into database entries called "files". And they all agree that that's okay, whereas if you mix the code in a different type of database called a "link table", well that's bad and wrong.

tptacek2• 5 months ago

Why does the GPL network effect mean that I, as a library developer, am incentivized to choose GPL over MIT?

akerl_4• 5 months ago

The hope is that eventually, so much software is GPL that you effectively have two choices when writing something

I’m really glad then that it didn’t work out this way, because I wasn’t really keen on all the individual freedom of joining the borg.

iamnothere• 5 months ago

AI hopium/copium.

Why would you even rewrite it rather than finishing out Redox or Genode OS, which are built on better principles? This is silly.

WhereIsTheTruth• 5 months ago

Linux was compromised by Big Tech a loooong time ago, we are lucky to have solid alternatives, but for how long?

notepad0x906• 5 months ago

I've always wondered how many proponents of open source software also support the concept of copyrights in general. On one hand I see lot of people in these communities support the right to do whatever you want with the things you own, but on the other hand copyright licenses.

I've always liked the MIT license because it is closer to copyleft than GPL variants. I get having to use a license so that people who use the software are legally protected, and attribution can be nice too, so while I don't agree with the legitimacy of software licensing as a whole, in practical terms the MIT is a good and safe license that doesn't impose lots of restrictions on its users.

WTFPL and unlicense are better in my opinion, but lawyers might not like them. if you don't like the idea of lawyers running the world though, they're great. Public domain is the way. Even then, I despise the idea of even acknowledging "Public Domain" as a concept.

But back to my original question, are most people using these licenses because they actually believe in their legitimacy? I always assumed it was to facilitate nonsensical copyright laws.

From wikipedia:

""" Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, and scientific discoveries. Similar approaches have been applied to certain patents.

"""

Ugh..yeah. Then I don't get it OP, I hope copyleft does indeed die. Either you have a commercial agreement or a contract with a person or you don't. The idea of publishing some work (software, book,etc..) and then by default and without any contractual agreement, dictating what a person does with that work that you published publicly is ridiculous. I know it is the law, but that doesn't make it right. What you put out there to the public, you have no right to control. Either close source your software and require a proper contractual agreement to use it, or make it actually free and actually open. It isn't free if you're going to tell me what to do with it later on, that's a deceptively hidden cost, it isn't really free.

Wouldn't it be in the true spirit of open source and the Linux kernel if absolutley anyone can do whatever they want with the kernel's source code?

The thing that irritates me is that if they want money, let them charge for it. No problem with that. You can charge for your work. But to make it "free" and then demand that the law enforces control over the software after someone has adapted it feels like such a crooked way of doing things. I would prefer to pay for it, so that I too can get some guarantees of the software being viable in return as well.

It sounds to me like 1) You don't truly own copyleft software 2) You don't get any warranty, or expectation of viability 3) certainly, there is no expectation of support of any kind 4) It is marketed as 'free' (deceptively)

if people make modifications to the software and keep that private later on, let them. it's free, it's theirs now, they can do what they want. If they value it though, it is in their interest to keep the upstream project viable, so sensible users will contribute back. Especially considering how globalized software dev has been, you can't even practically enforce something as weak as copyleft outside of the EU, Canada, Japan, and maybe (long shot) in the US.

472828473• 5 months ago

It isn't free if you're going to tell me what to do with it later on, that's a deceptively hidden cost, it isn't really free.

You are confusing two different definitions of the word free. And overall you seem to operate from a place of very little understanding of why protection of authorship, copyright, licensing of works etc exists. Please go and research some more. I hope you learn something. You will not be taken seriously by anyone if you continue like this.

notepad0x906• 5 months ago

I am fine with you not taking me seriously. I understand the "free as in free beer" definition of free (gratis vs libre) FSF and others deceptively propagate, just because you call it free doesn't make it actually free. That concept would have been fine, if they didn't drag the law into it and made it a legal burden.

A person either owns or doesn't own something. A person either enters a licensing contract or they don't. When I download a piece of source code from github, I did not agree to any license, even if you include LICENSE.txt. Despite what the law says, i did not enter into any agreement of any kind with anyone. When that software is in my possession it is mine. Any attempt to deprive of my rights over my property, I'll classify it as the same scummy practice as DMCA threatening corporations. You don't get to criticize apple and microsoft for keeping things closed source, and preventing you from doing whatever you want with your own hardware and software, and then tell other people your software is free but you can do the same things that caused you to despise those corporations to begin with.

In short, I understand the distinction fine, I just happen to despise it. It is a backhanded fence-sitting litigious mindset. that was my original question though, I guess enough people like you exist, I just couldn't believe it initially.

delotrag3• 5 months ago

You seem to misunderstand the GPL.

if people make modifications to the software and keep that private later on, let them.

This is perfectly legal under the GPL. What's not legal is redistributing that software you modified but not giving _your_ users the same rights to modification that you yourself got.

Nothing in the GPL requires you to release or distribute personal modified versions of GPL software.

If by "keep that private later on" you mean "plagiarize GPL code to add to a proprietary program and distribute it," yeah that's not allowed- but unless you're a fan of pilfering the commons for personal profit, this is an unmitigated good feature of the license.

As an aside, copyleft is on the exact same legal foundation as the EULAs you seem to respect. It is extremely confusing that you think copyleft is bad but EULAs which provide significantly more restrictions are good.

notepad0x906• 5 months ago

This is perfectly legal under the GPL. What's not legal is redistributing that software you modified but not giving _your_ users the same rights to modification that you yourself got.

That's still controlling what users do, and worse, it's what they do with modifications, not even your own original work!! and without even agreeing to a contract of such terms.

It's plagarism if the activity was done under some system that required attribution, or if they misrepresented the change's provenance. neither is the case.

I agree with you on EULA's, they've been rendered useless in some cases and jurisdictions. But at least EULA's have a software prompt that enters their users into an agreement. There is a reason they require you to scroll all the way down and read it before agreeing, it is because how inherently weak they are.

I don't necessarily think EULA's are good, but at least as a user, i actually agreed to them. No one is trying to force me to agree to an EULA simply because EULA.txt exists somewhere in the directory tree of the software. And even if they did and had legal grounds, I still would disagree with any terms I didn't explicitly agree to, or any terms of agreement that are lopsided to the advantage of one side.

copyleft is an attempt at corporate greedy litigious manipulative behavior, except the greedy party doesn't actually want money, they just want control.

friedtofu• 5 months ago

Gross. Not sure about y'all but seeing an obviously AI-generated image at the top of the article is an instant nope/close tab for me. Not going to flag but these articles should be DOA.

ctoth• 5 months ago

There is no test suite that captures kernel correctness. This is simply wrong. and will not happen.

7e3• 5 months ago

Well the UNIX certification and POSIX comes close. But man pages might be all an AI needs.

up2isomorphism• 5 months ago

Even GPL never seems to be great idea to me. But at least it considers a core problem of any knowledge sharing seriously. Can you just steal other people’s work? I would rather trust GPL folks than this guy.

7e3• 5 months ago

GPL licenses are already only a small minority of the total OSS world. But the GPL will die because AI can write equivalent software easily, and it’s more customized to boot. And for that reason OSS will also wither away; there’s little reason to upstream AI changes. Code is cheap and the FSF is a dinosaur.

bloppe• 5 months ago

This article ignores the other side of the coin. You can argue that AI makes "clean room" re-implementation so cheap that copyleft is doomed. But then it follows that re-implementing proprietary software as free software would also become "free". So mb AI will kill copyleft, but then it would also kill the need for copyleft in the first place.

The Linux Kernel Will Soon Be MIT-Licensed and Copyleft Will Be Dead

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