The Job Is Not Yours to Ban
Sun, 23 Aug 2026
Some people seem to be tempted to say, "I dislike LLMs, so my license should forbid LLM training." Four essential freedoms define free software. The first of those freedoms, Freedom 0, is for any purpose. That phrase - "any purpose" - doesn't come with hidden footnotes. It doesn't mean "any purpose except training a language model." It doesn't mean "any purpose I personally approve of." It doesn't mean "any purpose performed directly by a human hand without any kind of automation."
A free software license can't prohibit use by a large language model, a bot, or any other non-human thing.
Training an LLM on source code, or having a bot download and then do something with it, is a job a user is doing with some computer somewhere. Perhaps even some group of computers. A "non-human" restriction is really a restriction on the human. The machine isn't the user; the person directing the machine is. If the license doesn't allow LLM use, you're banning the person from using a tool. That's no different from banning grep, wget, or a compiler because a script automates it. Free software can't draw its freedom line at the process level.
The moment it does, it ceases to be a free software license and opens a slippery slope because once a license can forbid one use, it can forbid any use.
One developer might forbid military use, another police use, a third fossil fuel use. Still more might ban surveillance, political uses they dislike, or commercial competitors. Each restriction may feel righteous to the person adding it. But the result is a fractured, unusable world in which no software is reliably free for everyone.
This isn't hypothetical. It's the logic of proprietary software: the developer grants permission for approved purposes and withholds permission for unapproved ones. Free software was built to reject that power. If we allow usage restrictions into free licenses, we haven't improved free software; we've abolished it and replaced it with a thousand little proprietary licenses, each carrying different conditions on what's allowed.
The software freedom harm from LLMs isn't training. It's the reproducing of code without preserving the copyright and license notices. That's an output problem, not an input problem.
Almost every free license already requires preserving copyright and licensing information. The MIT license requires including the notice. The BSD licenses require it. The GPL requires it and goes further. Those obligations attach to redistribution, and already address the real problem. If a model emits copyrightable portions of someone's code and doesn't preserve the required notices, that's already a license violation under most free software licenses.
The injury isn't that the code was read. The injury is that the code was redistributed without honoring the license.
Further, whether training a model requires copyright permission hasn't been settled yet. Depending on how that goes, a copyright license may not even work even if we wanted to go there. I expect that question will eventually be sorted out in time.
We don't need a new license, a new clause, or a new definition of free software to deal with LLM output. We need to enforce the licenses we already have, not burn down Freedom 0.
I write this from direct experience. My own freely licensed blog has been hit heavily by LLM bot scrapers. I don't enjoy watching bots hammer the site, and I have implemented some blocking methods to keep it alive. But that's not the same as changing licenses.
If my work is later reused without following the license conditions, I won't respond by demanding a new license that bans bots. I'll enforce the license I already have, in line with The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement.
That's the principled response. It keeps things free while holding violators accountable.
None of this means we have to like LLMs. Nor does it mean they don't have problems, but licensing isn't the way to solve them. But if you're bound and determined and do it regardless, you may call it many things, but you cannot call it free software. Free software must remain free for any purpose - or it's not free at all.