I am incredibly skeptical that license is legally meaningful. (but obligatory IANAL.)

Generally speaking it is very very difficult to have a license redefine legal terms. Either this theseus copy is legally a derivative work or it isn't, and text of a license is going to do at most very very little to change that.

> It's not obvious if this will patch the clean room hole in licensing, but I'd rather see it play out in court than assume opensource is just fully dead

Are you willing to bear the burden of litigation?

I cannot imagine that license addendum is legally enforceable (let alone provable) in most jurisdictions on earth but it is interesting.

As long as it doesn't cost me anything, I'd like to see it play out in court and know for sure.

But that is very unlikely even if everyone adopted it, which they won't.

I mean you might as well write "any competing project will be considered infringement". It doesn't cost you anything either.

IANAL, but I don't think there is any "clean room hole in licensing": licensing is downstream of copyright law, and clean-room reverse engineering, if done properly, results in products that do not infringe the copyright of the originating work to begin with, so the license therefore never applies to them.

The "Ship of Theseus" license you've linked to attempts to define for itself what constitutes a derivative work, but what is and is not a derivative work is determined by copyright law itself, and there's no concept of imposing licensing conditions on works that your copyright never extended to in the first place.

Simply put, if something isn't infringing your copyright under the criteria established by the law, then your permission was never needed to do it in the first place, so the conditions under which you would or would not be willing offer that permission are irrelevant.

I like the spirit but I do find it a bit ironic to include it in a project where almost every commit is made by an LLM

I don't think you understand how copyright works.

Copyright can only deny the right to make copies.

If someone spends years using your software and they have learned a mental model of how your software works, they can build an exact replica and there is nothing you can do about that since there is no copy you can sue over. Said user is also allowed to use AI tools to aid in the process.

What you want is an EULA, which is a contract users explicitly have to agree with. A license file only grants access or the right to copy, it doesn't affect usage of your software.

>I don't think you understand

Whether or not this is technically correct, a comment that begins this way is unlikely to be persuasive.