There is nothing far fetched about this. GNU is an ideological organization and their ideology is "free software." Free software exists because of the copyright system. Now imagine if someone can just fork your GPL licensed software and distribute it under an incompatible license, and when you go to court, the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted.
I am not saying this is not what will happen — the actual law seems to be still up in the air. But if it does happen it will be an existential threat to the GNU and the whole free software ecosystem.
> the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted.
1. There is no indication that is at all likely except for purely vibe-coded projects. It seems highly unlikely and in some countries (e.g. the UK) the law clearly says otherwise.
2. There have been quite a few rulings in countries where it is unclear, and they all set some level of human input that will make AI generated code covered by copyright. Look at the cases that have been in HN stories about cases in the US, Germany and Japan, for example.
2. It would have to be all AI generated, and you would need to replace all the human written parts. Not a practical problem for a large, old project.
If this is their real reasoning they are jumping at shadows. However, this might be like where, the copyright (which is the explanation given in the ToS) is not the real reason (which was explained in the subsequent blog post).
It is interesting that proprietary software businesses, who have an even stronger interest in ensuring their software is covered by copyright in all countries seem to be quite happy to use LLM generated code. Microsoft and many others boast about how much of their code is now LLM generated.
Without code copyright we are inherently free to modify, improve and share code we have access to. FSF used copyleft as a legal hack to maintain that right in an environment where corporations where using copyright to deny that right.
I don’t think taking copyright off the table harms the practice of sharing code. They will still try to use trade secrets to restrict code sharing and contracts, but using GNU software won’t be stopped. It will reduce the ability to sue people not sharing their modifications but that was always outside the mainstream, and places like AWS, Apple, and Google find ways around it anyways since it doesn’t cover hosted services or non-linked code.
The core stream of openly developed and exponentially improving software does not need copyright to win if it cannot be sued for copyright violation.
Now I suppose some OpenAI lawyer is trying to find a way to sue humans for copyright infringement while keeping them safe from lawsuits, so we can worry about that attack.
I am not saying this is not what will happen — the actual law seems to be still up in the air. But if it does happen it will be an existential threat to the GNU and the whole free software ecosystem.