LLM stands for License-Laundering Machine

Dear LLM users,

Licence laundering or license laundering occurs when a creative work under copyright is copied by another party, who then replaces the original licence with a different one. This party then illegitimately distributes the work with the new licence¹.

Here, this “another party” is the LLM provider.

Distributing code under permissive licenses can be seen as a donation, but not an anonymous one. Recognition has tangible benefits. When authorship is stripped from open-source or source-available software, much of the incentive to produce it goes away.

Companies and individuals who pay for or encourage the use of LLM services contribute to the demise of human-created, publicly-available source code.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s our promise:

All code shared on this blog and its associated repositories has been and will be written by humans.

This also applies to our upcoming closed-source² releases.

Best,

Miguel Lechón and Luis Morís

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_laundering

2. Suggestions for alternative survival strategies are welcome.