From my understanding it does allow me to use the code for any purpose regardless of the license, does it not? Even if I dont own the LLM written code?
To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy.
Other licenses may be more permissive and do allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with it, but I don’t see why feeding some source code into an LLM would exempt you from its license.
It doesn’t matter if it’s you reading it or an LLM doing inference on it, you’re still taking the source code as a starting point to create a derived work based on it and as such you are subject to its license.
Yeah, but you also have to be aware that companies rarely care to (fully) comply with licenses to begin with, if their own code isn’t publicly accessible.
Basically:
If they actually open-source their own code, they have to fully comply (though the worst consequence is often just having to open-source your own code, which it already is, so it might not always be the highest priority either).
If they build a frontend, they generally do want to comply, because someone might be able to decompile the software and prove that licensed code is used inappropriately.
If they build a backend or build tooling or the like, GPL and AGPL is often still prohibited due to the high impact, but other than that, complying with licenses is seen as reducing risk for something that’s pretty unlikely to affect them. The chance of them being sued for code that no one sees is just practically 0, so it’s usually treated as an acceptable legal risk to not give a fuck.
From my understanding it does allow me to use the code for any purpose regardless of the license, does it not? Even if I dont own the LLM written code?
It does not.
From the GPL terms:
Other licenses may be more permissive and do allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with it, but I don’t see why feeding some source code into an LLM would exempt you from its license.
It doesn’t matter if it’s you reading it or an LLM doing inference on it, you’re still taking the source code as a starting point to create a derived work based on it and as such you are subject to its license.
Yeah, but you also have to be aware that companies rarely care to (fully) comply with licenses to begin with, if their own code isn’t publicly accessible.
Basically: