If companies can recreate open source projects to change their license, I don't see why commercial software should be more protected. Let OpenAI and others justify to Adobe why it's ok and legal to do instead of policing it yourself.
While I'm not pro "LLM rewrite everything", this is the best case scenario for the tech: unleashing software from the grips of their master, and free their users from predatory practices.

I haven't seen that, but I have seen a lot of open-weight AI models being described as open-source, which they really are not, and that misuse of the term is something that I really don't like. Open-weight models are basically analogous to getting the binary for a closed-source software package, rather than only having to interact with it via a remote server. That's not to say that that can't have value, but it is not the same as having the source, which would be getting the training corpus and procedures that would let one reconstruct the model.

I'm not following your logic here. Decompilers like the N64 decomp tool are open source. They do not contain any proprietary code or copywritten assets, and their source code is freely available to review. The copyright holder of the decomp tool is not the same entity as the copyright holder of the game being decompiled.

Yes, to do anything useful, you need a proprietary file (usually, a very specific ROM). But that is true for a lot of software that can read or interact with copyrighted content. GIMP doesn't stop being open source the second I import a Google logo in for editing.

The Adobe suite thing you linked in your post isn't a decompilation, it's a clean-room reimplementation.

Reverse engineering, especially clean room reverse engineering, is not illegal, and there are several legal precendents documenting this; although AI kinda blurs the line between clean and not clean.

Also, IDGAF, companies like adobe deserve this 100%

opened source != open source

Indeed. Having something decompiled doesn't make it right in multiple meanings.

Uncomfortable but very valuable YSK in this context.

In the U.S., copyright protections don't extend to functionality, though. So copying even copyrighted code in a manner to replicate functionality is fair use when there's no other way to accomplish the same thing.

For example, if you have a piece of equipment that checks the software on a cartridge for a string of text that says "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises Ltd." before running that software, then it's fair use to copy that exact text so that your software can run on that equipment. And it's fair use to reverse engineer and decompile licensed cartridges to see what the bare minimum necessary to make it work.

One way to prove that you didn't copy the software any more than is strictly necessary for functionality is to fully document the functionality, and then have a skilled programmer take the documentation and write new software from scratch, without ever having seen the original software whose function is being copied. That's a "cleanroom implementation." Compaq and other IBM clones built their own BIOS software to implement the exact same functionality of copyrighted IBM code, and created an entire industry of IBM compatible PCs that weren't actually licensed from IBM. Similarly, Google moved Android off of Sun-licensed Java using a cleanroom implementation (when Oracle bought Sun and Google wanted to get away from Larry Ellison's abusive pricing practices).

Ok, so if it's permissible to reverse engineer the code to create documentation of how it works, and then have someone else take that documentation and implement the functionality using new code, how do AI/LLMs fit into this? Can it be said that it's truly a "cleanroom" when the reverse engineering and decompilation functions are done by the same software that converts the decompiled code into documentation in human language, and then is the same software that converts the documentation into newly implemented code? Doesn't quite hit the same way, and I'm not sure the courts would see it the same way.

All of this is a gray area, and people shouldn't confidently predict what the courts will decide in specific nuanced examples. A lot will depend on the specific details, so there isn't going to be much room for sweeping generalizations.

we're bringing back the term "freeware"

IMO the most important part of open source licenses is the obligation that anyone who modifies and shares the code publishes the changes with the same license. It’s not just that the original creator is giving permission to use the code, they’re doing it so the code can become the foundation of something everyone can add to in perpetuity.

So calling unlicensed software “open source” isn’t just abusing the original creator, it’s abusing everyone who invests their time in it with the thought of potentially adding their own improvements.

also, anything created by an llm can, by definition, not be open sourced, because the prompter does not have any rights to give away.

Could you walk me through the damage that this mistake does to well-and-proper open source developers?

I don't think it is likely that they would be harmed by things like new regulation on 'public source code' projects? Anybody looking to hire a developer who confuses these two wasn't serious/relevant in the space. Open source developers do not, at least in my media diet, seem to get a lot of airtime or respect for their work (or money, for that matter). And the places they do get these things are sufficiently literate that I'm not concerned.

Could you help me out with this claim? What's the model of harm?

Too bad most lemmites won't understand.

They want to look like tech experts when they're not, so they use a bunch of buzzwords they vaguely understand and hope for the best.