I think, to punish Micro$lop for its collaboration with fascists and its monopolistic behavior, the whole Windows codebase should be made public domain.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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does the public really want more garbage than they already has?
As much as I wish this was true, I don't really think it is.
It's just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There's only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn't significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can't be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, it's like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo...)
If the AI generated code is recognisably close to the code the AI has been trained with, the copyright belongs to the creator of that code.
I may be wrong but I think current legal understanding doesn't support this
Under U.S. law, to prove that an AI output infringes a copyright, a plaintiff must show the copyrighted work was "actually copied", meaning that the AI generates output which is "substantially similar" to their work, and that the AI had access to their work.[4]
I've found a similar formulation in a official German document before posting my above comment. Essentially, it doesn't matter if you've ~~"stolen"~~ copied somebody else's code yourself and used it in your work or did so by using an AI.
Even if it were, it would be for you or I, but not for Microsoft, apple, Google, or Amazon.
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(27 replies)
Shouldn't all AI generated code be GPLv3?
Anything built by AI/LLMs should be FOSS by law. Oh I dream of the day.
Your wish is granted.
But you can only view the source code through an LLM
a finger on the monkey paw curls
What a vibe
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(4 replies)
There's still copyrighted code in windows, so no this is bullshit.
Code contains a lot of elements that are not copyrightable (elementary maths etc), that does not prevent the overall program from being copyrighted.
Windows is not even source-available. Windows XP is source-unintentionally-available thanks to a leak but there's no AI loophole in that.
Maybe I need to add yet another reason to
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