I don't really understand how that isn't allowed/disallowed simply on the basis of whether the licence permits use without attribution?

The hard truth is that if you're big enough (and the original creator is small enough) you can just do whatever you want and to hell with what any license says about it.

To my understanding, the expensive lawyers hired by the biggest people around, filtered through layers of bureaucracy and translated to software teams, still result in companies mostly avoiding GPL code.

Which was in fact the very intent of the GPL from day one, putting all the marketing material and lies aside: to cripple and hinder the burgeoning open source ecosystem as long as possible.

This also explains decades of questionable decisions of projects like gcc, glibc, gimp (it's right there in the name!), gnome, etc. Richard Stallman is a plant.

Note his recent speech at the Georgia Tech, where he says a lot of very nice things, I'm sure...while wearing some goofy face mask like he's still scared to death of COVID. He is also well known for his lack of personal hygiene and well developed body odor, which is quite curious actually, as at least one person who put this character up for a few days reports that he is a fan of long, hot showers. It's almost like the whole "crusty bearded geek weirdo" thing is just an act, meant to give Free Software a bad reputation.

Reminds me very much of David McGowan's book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, in which he explains exactly who created the hippie movement and to what end. Exactly like that, in fact.

Great thing so many open source projects have willingly donated all their copyright ownership to the hands of this GNU organization, right? It will be closely guarded and protected, I'm sure.

I’ve been thinking that information provenance would be very useful for LLMs. Not just for attribution (git authors), but the LLM would know (and be able to control) which outputs are derived from reliable sources (e.g. Wikipedia vs a Reddit post; also which outputs are derived from ideologically-aligned sources, which would make LLMs more personal and subjectively better, but also easier to bias and generate deliberate misinformation).

“Information provenance” could (and I think most likely would, although I’m very unfamiliar with LLM internals) be which sources most plausibly derive an output, so even output that exists today could eventually get proper attribution.

At least today if you know something’s origin, and it’s both obvious and publicly online, you have proof via the Internet Archive.