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Comment by distantsounds | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we know. Now can we please stop treating them as developer-friendly tools and more as a hostile theft of intellectual property?

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You are aware that, between the unix wars, the spats with microsoft, and the general people who grew up ripping music/games off of random places, you're probably in one of the most hostile places to IP... pretty much anywhere, right?

The entire subculture that this site takes its name from is hostile to IP.

I mean, except for the start-up founders that hang around here, but this site is mostly kept up as a way for them to recruit it seems like (and maybe a way to build good will).

Edit: To be clear, I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, but you could probably pick a more sympathetic argument from a strategic perspective. What you've done is kinda the equivalent to going to the Vatican and arguing that something is a threat to idol worship. You might be right, but a good chunk of your audience wants that.

It's shocking to me how many people in tech feel completely entitled to intellectual property that took someone years to master a skill to make. But talk about releasing a proprietary codebase and suddenly they want the lawyers involved because that actually threatens their livelihood.

Is that actually a commonly held position? I've seen IP abolishonosts here, and I've seen people argue the merits of proprietary software, but I don't get the impression that those are generally the same people.

They’re straw-manning, programmers are the best sharers in the world. Open source software has lead the drive for open source learning and information in general.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36900844

Right here the comment says they prefers Meta to keep the secret sauce as long as it allows they to (inderectly) access the copyrighted material etc. And the replies below are generally positive. So it's not a straw-man, at least in this thread, at all.

It should be noted, that they're explicitly taking this position because they think it will result in more capabilities. Not because of a respect of intellectual property.

So we should probably find a way for artists to be able to publicly share their work without some ass holes in San Francisco creating a massively profitable system based on that work that disrupts their livelihoods.

This is exactly right. Almost everything you see on the internet is copyrighted, even if you're allowed to view it for free. Even FOSS and CC-licensed content is copyrighted. It's just as copyrighted a proprietary codebase. But for some reason, you don't see coding LLMs trained on proprietary code, eg. you don't see Microsoft training Copilot on private GitHub repos. It all smells very hypocritical, like these companies feel entitled to harvest free labour from the internet to make their proprietary AI models, but they're not willing to do the same with their own.

Intellectual monopoly for me, destitution for thee.

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