this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Nice post. Relatedly, see also malus.sh and this talk by the people that made it (both of which I posted in this lemmy community here).

A couple of minor corrections to your text:

Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly.

Blanchard doesn't say that he never looked at the existing code; on the contrary, he has been the maintainer (and primary contributor) to it for over a decade so he is probably the person who is most familiar with the pre-Claude version's implementation details. Rather, he says that he didn't prompt Claude with the source code while reimplementing it. iirc he does not acknowledge that it is extremely likely that multiple prior versions of it were included in Claude's training corpus (which is non-public, so this can only be conclusively verified easily by Anthropic).

The GPL's conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.

The GPL does not require you to offer GPL-licensed source code when using the program to provide a network service; because it is solely a copyright license, the GPL's obligations are only triggered by distribution. (It's the AGPL which goes beyond copyright and imposes these obligations on people running a program as a network service...)

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 1 points 1 day ago

That's part of what I picked as a teaser:

Start with what the GPL actually prohibits. It does not prohibit keeping source code private. It imposes no constraint on privately modifying GPL software and using it yourself. The GPL's conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms. This is not a restriction on sharing. It is a condition placed on sharing: if you share, you must share in kind. The requirement that improvements be returned to the commons is not a mechanism that suppresses sharing. It is a mechanism that makes sharing recursive and self-reinforcing. The claim that imposing contribution obligations on users of a commons undermines sharing culture does not hold together logically. The contrast with the MIT license clarifies the point. Under MIT, anyone may take code, improve it, and close it off into a proprietary product. You can receive from the commons without giving back. If Ronacher calls this structure “more share-friendly,” he is using a concept of sharing with a specific directionality built in: sharing flows toward whoever has more capital and more engineers to take advantage of it. The historical record bears this out. In the 1990s, companies routinely absorbed GPL code into proprietary products—not because they had chosen permissive licenses, but because copyleft enforcement was slack. The strengthening of copyleft mechanisms closed that gap. For individual developers and small projects without the resources to compete on anything but reciprocity, copyleft was what made the exchange approximately fair. The creator of Flask knows this distinction. If he elides it anyway, the argument is not naïve—it is convenient.