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Yes, open source works whose licenses constrain derivative works.


Some licenses do.

In my experience AI coding is not going to spew out a derivative of another project unless your objective is actually to build a derivative of that software. If your code doesn't do the same or look the same it doesn't really meet the criteria to be a derivative of someone else's.

I mostly use Cursor for writing test suites in Jest with TypeScript, these are so specific to my work I don't think it's possible they've infringed someone else's.


> unless your objective is actually to build a derivative of that software

The objective of a for-profit corporation may well be to build a derivative of free software, benefitting from the work volunteer engineers put into it. Previously, if that software is GPL, it would imply a clean-room reimplementation of a massive codebase. With LLM laundering, relevant companies could as well simply claim “we got this from copilot” and they would be right (note that they don’t need to have used an LLM—the mere legality of these license-laundering LLMs means you can simply copy this from a GPL codebase and claim that an LLM output it due to its non-deterministic nature). This goes contrary to the promise of copyleft licenses that volunteer contributor work will remain to benefit the public and could not be expropriated this way, which led to OSS explosion in the first place.




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