Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way.
They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
I mostly agree with you, but public domain licensing doesn't get us software freedom by itself if the source code is not available.
OTOH as models get better at RE it may become moot.
[−]jonathanstrange · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:09 UTC ·
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No, the four freedoms rely on copyright. If there is no copyright, any company can take the open source code, modify it as they like, and never give back the modifications to anyone. It's the equivalent of an MIT license (technically, it's more like public domain but let's ignore this detail here). That's fine for many but far from the goals of the GPL.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.
Looks like the author wants to abolish copyright in a very round-about way. They are saying that AI-generated code should be released under CC0 due to complexities around the status of software copyright in various jurisdictions.
But if the concept of copyright was abolished as a whole, then licences such as GPL would also lose their power. Some people say that's a negative thing, but I do not necessarily think so, because it achieves the stated goal of the GPL, software freedom (i.e. you don't need to be granted a licence to copy and modify things)
OTOH as models get better at RE it may become moot.
No copyright doesn't mean you can't keep your source code a tightly kept business secret. You can even combine it with NDAs and contracts to re-institute something akin to copyright.