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Comment by metagame | Hacker News Reader

You can't use any of it commercially. Nothing within is under an acceptable software license (nor an open source license, nor a free software license). Advanced warning.

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Just run the whole codebase through OpenAI Codex, then regenerate the source code.

Can't copyright an inferred artifact ;)

You are talking about the models, right? If you train your own model on your own data without transfer learning (or with transfer learning from a liberally licensed third party model once those exist) then you can do whatever you want to with your model, no?

I'm talking about the code. Models are distributed separately.

But you can create models with the code. And then take those models you created and use them commercially. So I don't see a problem.

Nobody will be able to tell if you stick it in a tiny thumbnail and give it enough jpeg artifacts.

Computer-generated artifacts are non-copyrightable. This is not the problem. (That said, as the law is written, no binary should be, but we already threw that baby out with the bathwater.)

The problem is that the software is not free software, but encourages you to stop using its free predecessors and competition sneakily.

Or it’s just a paranoia and they plan to license this to non-free use after a period of testing, leaving non-commercial use for those who want to play with it. That is basically what every non-free software does except the commercial support is not yet provided.

Also, I second the question about free predecessors/competition, not to argue or compare, but out of pure curiosity.

I’m not sure I understand your claim, why is this encouraging anyone to stop using any competition? The license says plainly it’s not for commercial use, what’s so sneaky?

What do you define as free software? This software is open source, always free as in beer, and free as in freedom for research and evaluation purposes (and seems fairly permissive to researchers…)

It by definition is not open source. The term has a definition. This breaks literally the first rule.

https://opensource.org/osd

I used, or maybe misused, the term open source. You used “free”. The license & project used neither, and made no claim to align with opensource.org’s philosophy or definition. Whatever you call it, the source code has been released for anyone to read and “evaluate”, that’s what I meant by ‘open’.

You didn’t answer the question - how is this sneaky, and how does it prevent using previous projects?

The Open Source Initiative coined the term to begin with. Using it incorrectly is harmful, and is how we've ended up with "literally" meaning "figuratively" in modern English. By insisting on the correct definition, I'm trying to prevent the same from happening to open source. It's pretty offensive to act like it's not a big deal to use something so essential to computing freedom in a cavalier way to intentionally lessen freedom.

OSI was not the first to use the phrase "open source". This phraseology was in commonplace use to refer to other types of publicly available material for decades prior to 1998, when OSI decided to use the term to describe software licenses.

One example from 1971: https://www.google.com/books/edition/United_States_Code/3j2P...

There are also other (quite valid) authorities on software licensing other than OSI which have differing opinions on which licenses specifically qualify.

For example: most people would probably agree that BSD was open source, despite OSI's lack of approval on its original license. And I hardly think thats 'harmful' in any way.

Another problem with assuming that a non-commerce clause in the license automatically means software is not open source is that the US government defines commercial software as any software that is licensed to the public, which includes most open source software, even by OSI’s standards.

“in nearly all cases, open source software is considered "commercial software" by U.S. law, the FAR, and the DFARS. DFARS 252.227-7014 specifically defines "commercial computer software" in a way that includes nearly all OSS”

https://dodcio.defense.gov/open-source-software-faq/#Q:_Is_o...

Literally has meant figuratively for hundreds of years, Dickens used it that way. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

There is no “correct” definition of the term “open source”. People use it to mean many things. If it has any license other than “public domain”, then it limits some freedoms in some ways.

You still didn’t back up your claims: what is sneaky, what predecessor does this license prevent use of?

I agree with you, but I don't think anyone from Nvidia called it "open source" (I agree that 'dahart incorrectly did so). It's a shame that GitHub allows non-open-source code, but it does, and nothing else about it implies that it's open-source.

Fwiw, Dave (dahart) currently works for NVIDIA :).

Hang on, that’s purely incidental in this context. I don’t represent this project in any way, and I only called it open source on accident here. Nobody associated with the project has suggested that it’s open source by OSI’s standards.

the word 'free' in English to decribe the software has been, and is problematic. It leads to a lot of heat minus light in conversation, it seems. I support direct GPL software, and, its important to make sure the person you are talking to, is using the same terms to mean the same thing, right away.

Just use the code to build a source-code auto-completion model, then wire the model up to your text editor and write new source code.

Oh really? https://nvlabs-fi-cdn.nvidia.com/stylegan3/images/stylegan3-...

Obviously if you're using the GAN equivalent of a Megamind meme you won't get away with it, but more reasonable ones you can.

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