On July 29, 2026 5:15:12 PM EDT, [email protected] wrote: >DC> [obvious points] > >Someone asserted the paranoia wasn't about defending our own asses so >much as preserving the legal basis to sue other asses, which of course >is the height of self-absorbed delusion. This guy always reminds of the >Japanese holdout who continued prosecuting WW2 long after it was over.
Do people really think that society will tolerate the output of AI coding agents as copyright-free? Oops, MS-Windows is free software now? Wildly implausible outcome. I would bet a very large amount of money that, five years from now, courts do not see a co-authored-by line as gifting a work to the public domain. As technologists, we're tempted to see the law as a kind of operating system for humanity, a stable platform on which we build our projects and lives. And it is, in part. But the API stability guarantee it provides isn't anywhere near as stable as we might think. When the law conflicts with an important-enough goal, we make a breaking API change. So it is with AI. As the old quote goes, the law was made for man, not man for the law. >Incidentally, I had a sudden bout of diarrhea when I read this: > > [Emacs] developers are some of the best programmers out there. TBF, we have some good ones. Emacs has a better internal API platform, VM, and (soon) GC than a mere editor has any right to have. We have, IMHO, one of the best Lisp dialects available today too. It's because of this long record of excellence that turning our nose up at the new AI world is tragic. --- via emacs-tangents mailing list (https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-tangents)
