I did not read about any ongoing legal action about the trademark. Instead both sides mentioned in the story are going to try to fight it out taking the project their own way.

I explained already whoever can invest more effort typically ends up driving the project. And that the guy who uses AI will be able to invest more effort than the team with more people, who exclude using AI.

If you have a different take, fine; it should be easy to show what's wrong with my points?

... case in point is scopecreeppress, who sprayed his opinion here as if it especially mattered and then blocked me presumably for simply politely disagreeing with him.

Instead of arguing and defending (or heaven forbid, modifying) his point and maybe we all learn something, his claims are vomited out and left like a bad smell, and then he's gone, forbidding any reply and guaranteeing the last, useless word and turning off the pain receptors.

I was thinking that not disclosing the AI was witholding pertinent information.

If you are looking after the code and forcing the incremental drops to be maintainable iteratively, AI code can be fine even in Apr 2026.

Depends what you mean by 'compatible'... in the sense of AI holding copyright in its output like a human, it seems it's not going to play out like that.

In the sense of a human owning the copyright on AI output, sure. A photographer definitely owns the copyright on images his camera took, and he essentially just pointed it in a direction and pressed a button. I don't think copyright + AI coding assists is going to be any special problem.

But trademark law is a different animal. And in any case, it's presumably just the name, and maybe the wordmark, at issue, so I don't think a vibe-coded product would matter. (IANAL)

Are copyright and AI compatible?

Official Website: https://meshcore.io
Latest Updates: https://blog.meshcore.io
Technical Docs: https://docs.meshcore.io
Official GitHub: https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/meshcore
Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/meshcore
Discord: https://meshcore.gg

I suspect that quite a number of people have a similar stance towards ai-generated code, especially amongst those running mesh networks.
@tomgag

There are a lot of claims but they don't rise to the level of coherent argument in most cases. What exactly is 'unethical' about a machine reading liberally licensed FOSS that allows it? Most of Github is liberally licensed FOSS.

As I said whoever pours more effort in their fork "wins". We'll have to see how it actually turns out, but with that in mind, the non-"MIINE" guys seem to have made a tactical error eschewing AI... the upstart bro will increasingly out-compete them via AI.

That said, it is always important to distinguish facts (above) from opinions (below):

In my personal opinion: 1) Given the current (lack of) consensus on the ethics, quality, and legality of AI in code production, I think it is just good sense to disclose the use of AI when contributing (note this is also our policy at Shufflecake: AI code use is not forbidden, but must be disclosed); 2) in any case, appropriation of trademark in a community project can only be seen as community-unfriendly behavior at best, a jerk move at worst.

And of course take this as a gut reaction without having still heard the other side of the story, which I'd be curious to hear since I started recently playing around MeshCore and I found it an interesting project.

Reading the blog, it's not really about AI --there's no law that gives you the "right" to be told it's AI code -- it's an oldstyle "It's all MIIINE" split by the sound of it.

These are not new... normally what happens is whoever pours more effort in moving it forward, "wins".

In this case a) the upstart guy will generate more effort using AI, and b) the Ancient Regime will imply it's tainted. Compatibility will likely go by the wayside. So it will be an interesting litmus test.