For those interested. Newly released, self-hosted, team white boarding and collaboration tool on GitHub. There’s a lot of commercial collaboration tools out there but this is free to download, modify, host etc. (released as AGPLv3). This is initial release and can benefit from future enhancements like RBAC, etc. Some of that intent is in the roadmap. Collaborators are welcome. Cheers!
what separates an ‘open source dry erase whiteboard software’ from some software, like , say, paint dotnet?
vibecoded
Can it even be called FOSS if nobody owns the copyright?
It’s not a question of if anyone holds the copyright, but a question of whether the models themselves and their outputs are derivative works of the data the models were trained on.
If they are derivatives, it may be possible that the licenses of that training data place additional restrictions on the generated code or forbid derviative works outright.
Speaking practically, for a random “FOSS” project that isn’t very big, this is unlikely to ever come up. Courts would have to rule in favor of the training data owners, plus they would need to issue DMCA takedown requests and/or sue to have the content removed. That probably won’t happen.
However, you should probably question any project where the developers don’t understand the code well enough to write it themselves. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but that tends to be the case with vibecoded projects.
If nobody owns the copyright then it’d be public domain, which by definition is free software since you have the four freedoms with it.
The issue is that even that is legally dubious. Text generation programs have been shown to output chunks of copyrighted text verbatim, so it’s possible someone actually does hold the copyright to parts of that code, you just don’t know unless you do your due diligence on every bit of text that is output. Since neither the “author” nor the actual generator can “know” the provenance of the generated code it is very risky to assume it can be freely used.
we don’t know yet. it’s not been legally tested.
Does this mean it’s bad?
it means it’s legally dubious, it gives no guarantees about quality, and i don’t want to use it.
What type of quality guarantee are you looking for? That’s not something normally found in oss land. Feels like AI use would drag the quality up, not down, in my experience.
then your experience is certainly unique
What type of quality guarantee should I add to my human coded repos? Is “human coded” the guarantee? Seems odd.
if you say so
You’re encouraged to take a vibe-less look at the source which is open. And you’re welcome to make vibe-less contributions yourself. My comment here is vibe-less. Conversation is good.
if they didn’t take the time to write it why should i take the time to read it?
