It's just a side cost of doing business, because asking for forgiveness is cheaper and faster than asking for permission.
That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality. There have been no concluded court cases involving the virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on the GPL code itself.
The distinction is important because the article is about the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just about the GPL'd code itself.
I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.
You are then restricted by copyright just like with any other creation.
If I include the source code of Windows into my product, I can't simply choose to re-license it to say public domain and give it to someone else, the license that I have from Microsoft to allow me to use their code won't let me - it provides restrictions. It's just as "viral" as the GPL.
Conversely, to my knowledge there has been no court decision that indicates that the GPL is _not_ enforceable. I think you might want to be more familiar with the area before you decide if it's legally questionable or not.
I also have the feeling it will be much like Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., much of this won't really be clearly resolved until the end if the decade. I'd also not ve surprised if seemingly very different answers ended up bubbling up in the different cases, driven by the specifics of the domain.
Not a lawyer, just excited to see the outcomes :).
For those who are into freedom, I don't see how dictating how you use what you build in such a manner is in the spirit of free and open.
graemep•28m ago
A lot of it boils down to whether training an LLM is a breach of copyright of the training materials which is not specific to GPL or open source.
xgulfie•25m ago
maxloh•10m ago
Once training is established as fair use, it doesn't really matter if the license is MIT, GPL, or a proprietary one.
blibble•6m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#/media/File:Fair_use_...
and it is certainly not part of the Berne Convention
in almost every country in the world even timeshifting using your VCR and ripping your own CDs is illegal
OneDeuxTriSeiGo•5m ago
With proprietary or more importantly single-owner code, it's far easier for this to end up in a settlement rather than being drug out into an actual ruling, enforcement action, and establishment of precedence.
That's the key detail. It's not specific to GPL or open source but if you want to see these orgs held to account and some precedence established, focusing on GPL and FOSS licensed code is the clearest path to that.