Total Reciprocity Public License: A high-reciprocity copyleft license designed to close the SaaS, API, and Code Generation loopholes. If they use your code, they must share theirs. - trplfoundation...
It seems interesting, and we have needed new thinking on licenses for a long while, but a few details mildly concern me.
First, while not universal, brevity improves readability, but often leads to loopholes. Mature licenses grow so long because lawyers have needed to repeatedly game out threats and how to resolve them before arguments break out.
Then, I don’t quite know how to phrase such a thing, but it’d be nice to bar Contributor License Agreements and other copyright assignments. Prior to LLMs laundering Free Software and helping novices flood everybody with low-quality patches, the biggest threat to Free Software was (and probably will be again when the AI bubble pops) was projects exercising the copyright holder’s authority to re-release without a license, taking the community’s work with them behind the paywall.
The LLM condition also seems concerning. I don’t like how the big companies have behaved either, but the problem is corporate exploitation, not the technology. If a teenager wanted to train their own model with a selection of projects, we don’t want to tell them to stop, and if a company wants to repeatedly scrape projects for a PowerPoint deck, that’s just as bad. Plus, training a neural network probably falls well inside the bounds of Fair Use, though publishing the output probably wouldn’t.
Otherwise, you might want to reach out to the folks working on Copyleft Next, which has a similar interest in building on the GPL, since Kuhn and Fontana have been at this for a long time.
It seems interesting, and we have needed new thinking on licenses for a long while, but a few details mildly concern me.
First, while not universal, brevity improves readability, but often leads to loopholes. Mature licenses grow so long because lawyers have needed to repeatedly game out threats and how to resolve them before arguments break out.
Then, I don’t quite know how to phrase such a thing, but it’d be nice to bar Contributor License Agreements and other copyright assignments. Prior to LLMs laundering Free Software and helping novices flood everybody with low-quality patches, the biggest threat to Free Software was (and probably will be again when the AI bubble pops) was projects exercising the copyright holder’s authority to re-release without a license, taking the community’s work with them behind the paywall.
The LLM condition also seems concerning. I don’t like how the big companies have behaved either, but the problem is corporate exploitation, not the technology. If a teenager wanted to train their own model with a selection of projects, we don’t want to tell them to stop, and if a company wants to repeatedly scrape projects for a PowerPoint deck, that’s just as bad. Plus, training a neural network probably falls well inside the bounds of Fair Use, though publishing the output probably wouldn’t.
Otherwise, you might want to reach out to the folks working on Copyleft Next, which has a similar interest in building on the GPL, since Kuhn and Fontana have been at this for a long time.