Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while…

Companies are already using AI to generate their own versions of expensive proprietary software (Triggered no doubt by https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/29/1733238/new-claude-model-runs-30-hour-marathon-to-create-11000-line-slack-clone - a project that is entirely closed source)

As prompt engineering gets better and more reliable, why wouldn’t they? And honestly, I’d cheer. Commercial software pricing is so blatantly predatory (We won’t give you a price until you tell us who you are so we can charge you what we think you can pay, rather than what it’s worth) that skipping it entirely is a no brainer if you have some in-house support.

The simplest answer-- okay the simplest answer is, fuck copyright.

The simplest nuanced answer is, “rewrite this” isn’t original. No more than throwing someone’s photograph through a filter and claiming you made it. So you can’t un-GPL any block of code just by changing all the variable names, or minifying it, or telling Claude to translate it to Rust.

But if you delete everything besides the comments - is that the same program? I would say probably, especially if you’re already familiar with the missing code. Even a human author might recreate some parts verbatim. Even a wildly different result could have been achieved by not deleting anything, and just shuffling things around for the sake of difference. If you turn the ship of Theseus into a house it’s still made of the same wood.

So at what point is a human-authored do-over not the same program?

Say this guy took a sabbatical, cabin in the woods situation, and came back with exactly the code Claude would write. Of course he’s deeply familiar with the existing library. It sounds like he’s been primarily responsible for it, for a while. Is he now incapable of writing a differently-licensed alternative that does the same thing?