Microsoft has claimed that something like 30% of the code for Windows is AI-generated. (I have not verified that they even said that, maybe that’s totally fake.) Last i checked AI-generated stuff cannot be copyrighted. Does this mean that significant portions of Windows are un-copyrightable, and MacroSlop couldn’t do a damn thing if someone leaked those parts?

And then, reservations about including slop in a software project aside, what could this mean for things like ReactOS? They’ve been careful to avoid including any MS-owned code, but nobody owns slop code.

  • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    24 days ago

    AI gets it pretty close to working. Close enough that I can hire a dev to clean it up and get it going.

    This simply just isn’t how that works. 95% working can very, very easily be 100% shit. Because of the lack of professional guidance and structure, the last 5% could be very difficult or impossible without a complete restructure and rewrite or the whole code base.

    This has been true since outsourcing code become popular. So many times I’ve been asked to “just finish the last 5%” just to have to explain that the last 5% is actually 150% the amount of work (now I have to untangle this mess).

    At the moment, that project is not covered by the open source license since the original code is gone

    That’s not how most open source licenses work. Which is really the crux of the issue. If the new code was based on the open source code in any way it is now open source (at least for GPL code).

    If you took a popular open source project, looked at the code and rewrote it by hand, the resulting code is open source. Even if you wrote it in a totally new programming language. I don’t see how AI reading and reproducing the code is much different in this sense.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
      1·
      24 days ago

      If you took a popular open source project, looked at the code and rewrote it by hand, the resulting code is open source. Even if you wrote it in a totally new programming language.

      I completely agree with you BUT this is the mess that is literally playing out now. We need legal clarity because the scenario I wrote is not theoretical, it is happening now.

      Also, I am sad to say that I have already seen Claude Fable 5 spit out code to spec that a mid level dev got working in less than 30 minutes by fixing a few connection assumptions the model made. Afterwards, every iteration has been done with the less powerful Claude Opus.

      I refuse to believe that the LLM designed everything from scratch and I can almost guarantee that whatever it “knows”, it pulled from open source projects. It also explains why it is so good at Java, Bash, and Python, and absolute garbage at PL-SQL.