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by Someone 29 days ago
> I think for coding, the wording of the MIT open source license makes it clear that copying and distributing the software is authorised on a small scale and it's very clear that the act of copying must involve a person.

I agree with “must involve a person. https://opensource.org/license/mit starts with (emphasis added) “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any PERSON obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”)”.

That means it doesn’t give an LLM any rights. The way I see it, LLMs run (directly or indirectly) by a person can do stuff on their behalf, though, just as your CI pipeline can download and compile MIT-licensed software.

I definitely disagree with the “on a small scale” as the license continues (again, emphasis added) “to deal in the Software WITHOUT RESTRICTION, including WITHOUT LIMITATION the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software”.
1 comments
jongjong 29 days ago
The CI pipeline is different because for a module to end up as a dependency in the CI pipeline, it had to be explicitly selected by a person first to be included in the package file or manifest. There was intentionality and awareness that the software was included.

A person already pre-consented to the licenses of all the software which the pipeline downloaded. Big companies go through those dependency lists carefully already and remove those which do not meet their policies. This is a very intentional process.

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Someone 28 days ago
> for a module to end up as a dependency in the CI pipeline, it had to be explicitly selected by a person first

I disagree. I think it’s entirely within the license to have your pipeline automatically pull in the latest version of a library, even if the new one happens to pull in a new MIT-licensed library (whether that’s a good idea and whether CI pipelines should, somehow, verify that code pulled in has an acceptable license are different discussions)

I also think it’s complete within the MIT license to tell a LLM that it can search for MIT-licensed libraries and use them without asking you.

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