I have used the new template below to show how it looks. We can add more details to the linked CONTRIBUTING.md in the pop repo.
I have not included any LLM (also known as AI) generated content in...
I looked around for examples of open source project maintainers being sued for this sort of infringement out of curiosity, but I really couldn’t find any.
Since most corporate software is closed proprietary software, there traditionally wasn’t a lot of opportunities for an open-source project to even have the ability copy code, except in instances of a source code leak or perhaps the odd ex-employee. Back in the day, developers would do clean-room designs to avoid being sued for infringement. A famous example is the development of the PC compatible Compaq BIOS.
In comparison, every LLM on the market now is able to inject copyrighted code into any project, completely unknowingly to the contributor or the project. It’s such a recent issue with the introduction of this technology, there likely hasn’t been too many court cases on it yet.
If a FLOSS project was sued in the future over this, personally I think being able to point to a policy that completely rejects contributions from a known source of copyright infringement would give them a better legal defense compared to a project that explicitly says not to inform them of any use of a known copyright infringing tool. This is also why WINE has hard rules to not allow anyone who has ever seen Windows source code, either leaked or from working at MS, to ever contribute to the WINE project, as then if anyone submitted some source code anyway, they can point to their policy as a legal defense.
Since most corporate software is closed proprietary software, there traditionally wasn’t a lot of opportunities for an open-source project to even have the ability copy code, except in instances of a source code leak or perhaps the odd ex-employee. Back in the day, developers would do clean-room designs to avoid being sued for infringement. A famous example is the development of the PC compatible Compaq BIOS.
In comparison, every LLM on the market now is able to inject copyrighted code into any project, completely unknowingly to the contributor or the project. It’s such a recent issue with the introduction of this technology, there likely hasn’t been too many court cases on it yet.
If a FLOSS project was sued in the future over this, personally I think being able to point to a policy that completely rejects contributions from a known source of copyright infringement would give them a better legal defense compared to a project that explicitly says not to inform them of any use of a known copyright infringing tool. This is also why WINE has hard rules to not allow anyone who has ever seen Windows source code, either leaked or from working at MS, to ever contribute to the WINE project, as then if anyone submitted some source code anyway, they can point to their policy as a legal defense.