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The FSF considers large language models
The Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab concerns itself with many aspects of software licensing, Krzysztof Siewicz said at the beginning of his 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron session. These include supporting projects that are facing licensing challenges, collecting copyright assignments, and addressing GPL violations. In this session, though, there was really only one topic that the audience wanted to know about: the interaction between free-software licensing and large language models (LLMs).
Anybody hoping to exit the session with clear answers about the status of LLM-created code was bound to be disappointed; the FSF, too, is trying to figure out what this landscape looks like. The organization is currently running a survey of free-software projects with the intent of gathering information about what position those projects are taking with regard to LLM-authored code. From that information (and more), the FSF eventually hopes to come up with guidance of its own.
Nick Clifton asked whether the FSF is working on a new version of the GNU General Public License — a GPLv4 — that takes LLM-generated code into account. No license changes are under consideration now, Siewicz answered; instead, the FSF is considering adjustments to the Free Software Definition first.
Siewicz continued that LLM-generated code is problematic from a free-software point of view because, among other reasons, the models themselves are usually non-free, as is the software used to train them. Clifton asked why the training code mattered; Siewicz said that at this point he was just highlighting the concern that some feel. There are people who want to avoid proprietary software even when it is being run by others.