I never thought I would move away from FOSS/AGPL by default. The more I read about this issue, the more I consider providing free services instead of FOSSing. It’s a shame.
FOSS is still important and necessary to a degree, for auditability and self-hostability, very important for security and control, even as a conscious/careful user.
Maybe this puts us more towards “pay to free the code” or something, so there is at least some compensation. Won’t make verbatim regenerated AGPL to MIT any less hurtful though.
If you publish a free service, at least they’re not feeding from your code too.
Tragic.
He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch.
What was the test suite licenced under? If it was in the same repo, then it was probably LGPL code as well.
If the MIT rewrite uses the LGPL licensed test cases, including them in the repo, then it probably must be LGPL as well.
I find “from scratch” a questionable claim as well. The model was probably trained on the code it is supposed to replace. Interfacing with the concrete tests and interfaces makes the result even more likely to be and puts it conceptually closer to the original code fed as training data.
