It's because it doesn't matter how copyrighted material ends up in a project. If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.

Both people with balls and people without balls belong in the community. Diversity is a strength in a decentralised system.

In emulators, there is Azahar which is an emulator without the ability to decrypt games, and there is Azahar Plus, by different people, which is downstream of Azahar and adds piracy-specific features. The Azahar developers, who do the majority of the work, do not need balls. Only the people making the piracy fork need balls.

It's not ironic, it's the flipside of exactly the same reason. Bigcorps can steal with impunity because they have unlimited money to pay expensive lawyers. FOSS projects do not, so they cannot.

The tiniest bit of contamination can get a whole project shut down and the creators heavily fined if the lawyers are aggressive enough. It's not worth the risk to a project like Asahi. Generally the law is going to side with whomever has the most lawyers.

Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).

Excited to see what you contribute to open source against one of the richest and most litigious companies in the world.

It may not just be about IP but also code quality. As an example, TFA calls the user mode portion "slop" in need of cleanup.