this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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The problem isnt the fact snippets exist in a codebase. The problem is, the entire fucking website is scraped clean of every codebase that has ever existed without paying a dime to their owner, notifying of their usage, and being transparent of their datasets.
How can it be verifiably responsible if their activity is handwaved under the guise of "business secret"? Its literally people using other peoples work without fair compensation, which means stealing, which means someone has to pay.
No, that IS the problem legally, but it goes slightly beyond snippets, it's also about having similar overall design.
That is also how humans work. Any code you write is going to be subconsciously influenced by code you've seen before, especially code you yourself have written in other projects that you may not legally own. Much like an LLM, the human brain is a black box in that you don't always know where an idea or something comes from.
This is why clean-room designs are often necessary. You need to replicate something a GPL project does, you should only use devs that have never seen that GPL project's code. Same for replicating proprietary projects, you don't use people that have seen that project's' code. So again, either the whole issue is stupid and we can use LLMs too, or it's a real issue and everything should be clean-roomed to avoid any chance of an accidental licensing issue.