AI would appear to allow open source licenses like the GPL to be circumvented by rewriting the code without copying anything directly from the original. That’s possible because AI is now so good at coding that the results can be better than the original, as Blanchard proved with version 7.0 of chardet. And because it is new code, it can be released under any license. In fact, it is quite possible that code produced by genAI is not covered by copyright at all, for the same reason that artistic output created solely by AI can’t be copyrighted. If the license can be changed or simply cancelled in this way, then there is no way to force people to release their own variants only under the GPL, as Stallman intended. Similarly, the incentive for people to contribute their own improvements to the main version is diminished.

El código ya no es negocio. Ni viable económicamente, ni defensible ante la ley.