In short, GPL uses copyright law to protect you, as an author of software, from exploitation better than MIT or BSD software licenses do. Here we have a case of the Anthropic corporation using MIT-licensed code in one of their software products, which is of course a for-profit product. The original author of that code received no compensation, as it is not required by the license. So the author applied for a job at Anthropic, and ironically, Anthropic responded with an AI-generated rejection letter. Corporations like Anthropic seem to have an allergy to GPL-licensed code however, due to the nature of how the GPL license grants much more specific rights and restrictions, both to the authors of the code, and the companies who use it.

Of course, nowadays LLMs can ingest GPL and MIT/BSD licensed code and spit it back out in altered form, essentially letting the makers of the LLM profit from your work without compensating you, so the GPL is probably due for an “upgrade” to prevent use for AI training. Unfortunately thanks to regulatory capture, and not-so-impartial courts of law mostly ignoring copyright law nowadays, it might not even be possible to use GPL or copyright to protect authors of software anymore. Probably a whole new legal framework is required first, and I don’t think this will be happening any time soon.

#tech#software#AI#GPL#MITLicense#BSDLicense#GPLLicense#FreeSoftware#FOSS#FLOSS