this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
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Programming
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What's wrong with copyleft code?
Nothing in itself. I just felt it was antithetical to the intention behind copyleft to train on it then share the result.
It's a good question, I'll think on it more.
I don't see why it would be. Isn't 'copyleft' basically: "You may modify and redistribute this code for free, but whatever you produce with it has to be copyleft as well"?
Extending that to coding agents trained on copyleft code, I would say that any code that agent writes is also copyleft. How is that anti-ethical?
You're probably looking for explicitly public domain code, not just avoiding copyleft. That will be rare to find. Permissive licenses such as MIT share with GPL and other copyleft licenses the aspect that they require attribution, while LLMs act as an attribution stripper.