[License-review] [SUBMISSION] AI-MIT License 1.0 — permissive license for AI-generated code

[Joshua Gay]

Hi Josh,

I may not have been clear. I am not objecting to file level notices as a
practical approach to documentation.

Those are common and useful, and as you said licenses like Apache 2.0 make
good use of them. My point is narrower.

What I was reacting to was the idea that a file level label could reliably
determine something like "this file is fully AI generated and therefore
public domain." That moves from documentation into making a legal
conclusion about authorship based on the boundary of a file. In otherwords,
files are convenient implementation artifacts, but they are not reliable
boundaries for authorship. A given module may span multiple files, or a
single file may reflect design decisions, prompts, surrounding code
context, and integration work that occurred elsewhere in the repository. In
that sense the authorship of a portion of code often comes from the
development process and the structure of the larger work, not just the
literal text inside a particular file.

So my concern is less about file level attribution itself and more about
using file boundaries as the basis for determining the copyright status of
a portion of the work.

Josh


Joshua Gay
Sr. Manager SA Open Source Community & Infrastructure
https://saopen.ieee.org
m: +1 617.966.9792
meet: https://calendly.com/jgay-ieee

On Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 3:05 PM Josh Berkus <josh at berkus.org> wrote:

> On 3/14/26 9:36 AM, Joshua Gay via License-review wrote:
> > On file level rules
> >
> > Relatedly, framing authorship and licensing at the level of individual
> > files does not reflect how software authorship actually works. Files are
> > implementation artifacts, not reliable boundaries of authorship nor even
> > a reliable way to distinguish between modular components of a work.
> >
> > A "file" in the context of software is a helpful metaphor for computer
> > users but not a useful way to discuss a literary work in a legal sense.
>
> File-level attribution is a common approach across many popular open
> source licenses, including the APL2.0, one of the top three most used
> licenses in the catalog.
>
> If you have a better approach for "distinguishing between modular
> components of a work", please share it, because it hasn't appeared in
> any accepted license yet.
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
>
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