this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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How can calibre be distributed under GPL and have AI mixed up in its code? That stuff can't be GPL can it?
from the git it's AI integrations rather than distributing AI-written code or the like.
Then again, Torvalds has greenlit AI code in the Linux Kernel, which alone sets a massive precedent as it's by far the biggest GPL-based project.
Hmmm I guess my understanding of the GPL is that it can't rely on incompatibly-licensed components. It must be runnable with all GPL type toolchain.
Since the AI blobs/components/dependencies cannot be inspected prior to compiling dont they make the software non-gpl?
I could be wrong understanding something.
Models never touch the GPL licensed code. Invidious/yt-dlp are GPL compliant because it pulls data from a proprietary service, but everything that happens with the data pulled from the API is open source. What Calibre does is it has an option (that users can easily ignore) to make a request to OpenAI/Anthropic/openrouter/deepseek/etc to perform actions. None of the code from any model provider touches the Calibre codebase. It's just an API call (again, like yt-dlp or whatever frontend of the week).
Oh ya that makes sense.
Too bad the calibre Dev didn't just make this feature an add on.
Thankfully it's very easy to not use