(1/5) [ Meta-info to start the thread. Here and the posts that follow reply to lots of people's comments (from various threads) together here. Can we consolidate this conversation into this single thread to discuss sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/ap… ? ]

Cc: @wwahammy @silverwizard @mjw @cwebber @josh @jamey @mason @spencer @rootwyrm @drwho @mmu_man @mathieui @beeoproblem

#LLM #AI #OpenSource #FOSS #SoftwareFreedom

Eternal November — this new influx of users may be better than the last one

Update: We see this has gotten much immediate response. TL;DR: the point of this post is to propose some still-developing thoughts and invite everyone to two real-time discussions on: $ date -d '2026-04-21 15:00 UTC' $ date -d '2026-04-28 23:00 UTC…

^{Software Freedom Conservancy}

@ossguy I have to admit that I am pretty surprised by this post. Not in terms of being welcoming to newcomers, which is something I have advocated for and made the center of all of my FOSS work.

However, the post says the following:

> I encourage all of us in the FOSS community to welcome the new software developers who've adopted these tools, investigate their motivations, and seriously consider cautiously and carefully incorporating their workflows with ours.

While the sentence which follows acknowledges that "seasoned software developers understand the benefits and limitations of LLM-assisted coding tools", there are two big things I expected at least acknowledged:

- Many maintainers are facing *burnout* over the situation. However, I agree that addressing this in terms of norms is something we can consider
- The biggest thing I am surprised to not see addressed at all is the licensing and copyright implications

(cotd)

@ossguy The surprising thing about saying "seriously consider cautiously and carefully incorporating their workflows with ours" is that it doesn't address at all my *biggest* fear: the copyright status of LLM generated contributions seems currently unsettled.

I know there's been assertions to the contrary floating around: the Supreme Court deferred to a lower court in the US. However that is not the same thing as the Supreme Court making a specific decision. And internationally, the copyright situation of output is even murkier... it will take a long time for this to settle.

Does Conservancy not think this is the case? I would be surprised if so, but perhaps you all have an interpretation that I am not currently aware of.

If there *is* concern, then we hit a serious risk: we may be seeing many contributions with legal status which has *yet to be determined* entering seasoned codebases. And this worries me a lot.

@cwebber I think maybe you missed sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/ma… where #SFC analyzed that situation?
Also, follow @ai_cases & see the *firehose* of litigation on this & remember the “Work Based on the Program” issue under GPLv2 has still never been litigated directly but lots of cases about 100% proprietary software have bolstered GPL's strength.

Big Content has legal battles with Big Tech on 100s of fronts rn. Yes, we're adrift on their sea, but the situation is not as dire as you imagine.

#AI #LLW

SCOTUS Declines to Hear LLM-Backed AI Case Regarding Copyright

No Serious Implications for FOSS from SCOTUS' DenialEarlier this week1, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) denied certiorari (cert) in Thaler v. Perlmutter.

^{Software Freedom Conservancy}

@ossguy @richardfontana Continuing here, because it's the relevant subthread.

I am sympathetic to choosing to narrow a topic. However, the post, in implying that we should start accepting partially AIgen contributions, inherently pulls in the topic of whether or not that is legally safe.

Yes, I have read the previous Conservancy post about the existing cases. This partly contributes to my surprise and confusion about the post.

Acknowledging that the plan is to have continued conversations and meetings about this, I still feel it is important to lay down my current concerns, even before such a meeting. I am leaving the "quality of contributions" and many other details out of here, and instead focusing on whether of not it is *safe to accept* contributions on copyright grounds at the moment, and what the implications of thinking on that are.

(cotd)

@ossguy @richardfontana So the question is: is it safe, from a legal perspective, given the current state of uncertainty of copyright of such contributions, to encourage accepting such contributions into repositories?

Now clearly, many projects are: the Linux kernel most famously is, and their recent policy document says effectively, "You can contribute AI generated code, but the onus is on you whether or not you legally could have".

Which is not very helpful of a handwave, I would say, since few contributors are equipped to assess such a thing. I've left myself and three others addressed in this portion of the thread, and all of us *have* done licensing work, and my suspicion is, *especially* based on what's been written, that none of us could confidently project where things are going to go.

@ossguy @richardfontana Part of the problem here is that the AI companies have set the stage themselves. Their presumption is that it's fine to absorb effectively all open and "indie" content, and that this is entirely fair to pull into a model without any legal implications, whereas potentially yes, you may need to "license" something that looks like a Disney character. In the land of code, I also sense that Microsoft is perfectly fine with the idea that you can "copyright launder" a codebase from the GPL to perhaps the public domain, but if someone did that to their own leaked source code, they would be very upset.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine who works in films has said that he keeps hearing rumors that OpenAI would like a cut of stuff made with their stuff. We should presume tthat true.

Regardless, I'm sure everyone on this thread wants an *equitable* situation for proprietary and FOSS licensing. I'll expand on that more in a moment though.

However, it's not actually the laundering angle I am concerned with here entirely, it's whether we're turning FOSS codebases into potential legal toxic waste dumps that we will have a hell of a time cleaning up later.

The previous Conservancy post, which @bkuhn linked upthread, indicates that Conservancy does indeed consider the matter unsettled.

Current LLMs wouldn't "default to copyleft", since they also include all-rights-reserved mixed in there. If the result of output of these systems is a slurry of inputs which carry their licensing somehow, their default licensing output situation is one of a hazard.

I note that @bkuhn and @ossguy seem to be hinting at hoping a "copyleft based LLM" with all-copyleft output it a winning scenario. I'm going to state plainly: I believe that's an impossible outcome.

@richardfontana

@ossguy @richardfontana Rather than focus on the GPL, let's choose a different copyleft license. In fact, let's choose a gradient of licenses.

- CC0's public domain declaration w/ minimal fallback license
- CC BY
- CC BY-SA

Imagine for a moment an LLM trained entirely on the above three licenses, and then one that's CC BY and CC0, and then one that's just CC0.

Let's look at both extremes and then we'll find out the real dangers come from observing the middle.

@ossguy @richardfontana First let's imagine the only-CC0 based LLM.

I would fully agree that no matter the law and legal case law passed and established, the CC0 based input LLM is clearly effectively in the public domain, or like CC0 itself, equivalent to it. This one is relatively simple.

Let's make things more complicated.

@ossguy @richardfontana Regarding the one containing CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA, the situation is more uncertain and seems highly affected by legal outcomes in upcoming law and cases to be set. There is the possibility that indeed, the LLM is considered a slurry of inputs and this is legally acceptable, and effectively any output which is not verbatim of its inputs in some way is effectively under the public domain.

Now, of course, the problem is that we don't have to just worry about the US, we have to worry *internationally*. When considered from this angle, that FOSS is an international endeavour, this hope that things are in the public domain feels a lot dicier.

The assumption is that then this effectively leads to the output being under the terms of CC BY-SA. This is fine, great even, right?! Because effectively everything is share-alike (Bradley I don't wanna get into whether BY-SA is copyleft or something weaker). We slap CC BY-SA on the output, it's fine. Right??????

@ossguy @richardfontana Except, I actually believe this scenario isn't legally viable. And it's easier to understand if we scale back to the middle case.

Let's now look at the LLM trained on CC0 and CC BY. Because it's the BY aspect that makes everything complicated.

There is *NO WAY* in current LLM technology, nor I believe from studying how neural networks work, any viable computationally performant LLM, that they can track provenance. The BY clause cannot be upheld.

This isn't a theoretical concern for me; someone built another vibecoded Scheme-to-WASM-GC compiler that looks an awful lot like Spritely's own Hoot compiler in places. They didn't attribute us. They probably didn't know. But like many FOSS licenses, Apache v2 does require certain levels of attribution to be upheld. Most FOSS projects do.

You can't uphold the CC BY requirement, as far as I can tell.

@ossguy @richardfontana Now here is a counter-argument: how do people attribute Wikipedia? They generally just attribute Wikipedia! And people seem to be mostly fine with this.

It feels fine, when you were a contributor to the Wikipedia project.

It feels a lot less fine when you are a contributor to a specific project, to have everything just sucked up into "the generic LLM". Claude did it! Claude did it all by itself.

@ossguy @richardfontana If we are pushing for an *equitable* scenario for copyright output, there is only one "good outcome" in terms of copyright, and that is that everything is effectively in the public domain. The dream of having a "copyleft LLM" doesn't work.

And even if it did, there are several problems:

- Nobody is using that *now*, and contributors are facing contributions *now*, and there is legal uncertainty about accepting those contributions *right now*.
- It is unlikely that the "copyleft LLM" would be very useful. The way people use these tools is conversational in a way that requires them to effectively have to be trained on the entire internet to be functional. Not just copyleft codebases.

The copyleft LLM dream is a joke.

@ossguy @richardfontana I say "good outcome", and I'm not saying it's an outcome I want, because "what I want" is pretty complicated here. I'm saying, it's the only one where there is the possibility of legal output from these tools that can safely be incorporated into FOSS projects *at all* that is *equitable* for both FOSS and proprietary situations.

And yup, unfortunately, that would mean copyright-laundering of FOSS codebases through LLMs would be possible to strip copyleft.

It would also mean the same for proprietary codebases.

Frankly I think it would kind of rule if we stabbed copyright in the gut that badly, but there's so much vested interest from various copyright holding corporations, I don't think we're likely to get that. Do you?

@ossguy @richardfontana So let me summarize:

- Without knowing the legal status of accepting LLM contributions, we're potentially polluting our codebases with stuff that we are going to have a HELL of a time cleaning up later
- The idea of a copyleft-only LLM is a joke and we should not rely on it
- We really only have two realistic scenarios: either FOSS projects cannot accept LLM based contributions legally from an international perspective, or everything is effectively in the public domain as outputted from these machines, but at least in the latter scenario we get to weaken copyright for everyone.

That's leaving out a lot of other considerations about LLMs and the ethics of using them, which I think most of the other replies were focused on, I largely focused on the copyright implications aspects in this subthread. Because yes, I agree, it can be important to focus a conversation.

But we can't ignore this right now.

We're putting FOSS codebases at risk.