by logicprog | 2026-03-09 17:07:23+00:00
> Ronacher notes this as an irony and moves on. But the irony cuts deeper than he lets on. Next.js is MIT licensed. Cloudflare's vinext did not violate any license—it did exactly what Ronacher calls a contribution to the culture of openness, applied to a permissively licensed codebase. Vercel's reaction had nothing to do with license infringement; it was purely competitive and territorial. The implicit position is: reimplementing GPL software as MIT is a victory for sharing, but having our own MIT software reimplemented by a competitor is cause for outrage. This is what the claim that permissive licensing is “more share-friendly” than copyleft looks like in practice. The spirit of sharing, it turns out, runs in one direction only: outward from oneself.

This argument makes no sense. Are they arguing that because Vercel, specifically, had this attitude, this is an attitude necessitated by AI, reimplementation, and those who are in favor of it towards more permissive licenses? That certainly doesn't seem to be an accurate way to summarize what antirez or Ronacher believe. In fact, under the legal and ethical frameworks (respectively) that those two put forward, Vercel has no right to claim that position and no way to enforce it, so it seems very strange to me to even assert that this sort of thing would be the practical result of AI reimplementations. This seems to just be pointing towards the hypocrisy of one particular company, and assuming that this would be the inevitable universal, attitude, and result when there's no evidence to think so.

It's ironic, because antirez actually literally addresses this specific argument. They completely miss the fact that a lot of his blog post is not actually just about legal but also about ethical matters. Specifically, the idea he puts forward is that yes, corporations can do these kinds of rewrites now, but they always had the resources and manpower to do so anyway. What's different now is that individuals can do this kind of rewrites when they never have the ability to do so before, and the vector of such a rewrite can be from a permissive to copyleft or even from decompile the proprietary to permissive or copyleft. The fact that it hasn't been so far is a more a factor of the fact that most people really hate copyleft and find an annoying and it's been losing traction and developer mind share for decades, not that this tactic can't be used that way. I think that's actually one of the big points he's trying to make with his GNU comparison — not just that if it was legal for GNU to do it, then it's legal for you to do with AI, and not even just the fundamental libertarian ethical axiom (that I agree with for the most part) that it should remain legal to do such a rewrite in either direction because in terms of the fundamental axioms that we enforce with violence in our society, there should be a level playing field where we look at the action itself and not just whether we like or dislike the consequences, but specifically the fact that if GNU did it once with the ability to rewrite things, it can be done again, even in the same direction, it now even more easily using AI.