this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Freedom 1 of the four software freedoms is:
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Right, but I don't see a 'and you can feed it to a neural network on demand such that it can reproduce code that a user can then have plausible deniability that it was licensed on a certain way and be able to redistribute it under an incompatible license"
Free software licenses generally don't restrict what kind of study or what kind of changes you can make. A lot of licences explicitly say "for any purpose". There are licences that add additional restrictions, for example restricting the field of use to non-military, but they are not free software licenses.
ETA: the question of where liability lies for infringing terms of a source license occur should a LLM model launder for example GPL code into a propriety code base is something that will have to be decided by the courts.