Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethan_smith | Hacker News Reader

These anti-competitive clauses are becoming standard across all major AI providers - Google, Microsoft, and Meta have similar terms. The industry is converging on a licensing model that essentially creates walled gardens for model development.

View on HN

You guys are tripping. EULAs have had anti-competition, anti-benchmarking, anti-reverse engineering and anti-disparagement clauses since the late 90s.

These unknown companies called Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, … et al have all had these controversies at various points.

I am not a fan of Apple or Oracle, but you are not contractually prevented from competing with them if you use Macs or Oracle Cloud to build software.

I wouldn't suggest building on Oracle's property as you drink its milkshake, but the ToS and EULAs don't restrict competition.

Oracle licenses 100% restrict reverse engineering it's product to build a competing once, which is probably the closest to what these AI giants are trying to restrict.

Oracle db products are not meant to build databases, unlike LLM code generator which are meant to build any kind of software, so the restriction sounds a bit different.

Imagine if Oracle was adding a restrictions on what you are allowed to build with Java, that would be a more similar comparison IMO.

Yeah but did you know you also can't publish benchmarks?

E.x. if you make a product that works on multiple databases, you can't show the performance difference between them.

That's just because they can't beat sqlite and they're too embarrassed by it.

You can you just have to ask. And that's not an oracle thing. All the commercial databases have that rule. It's too easy to make misleading benchmarks for such complicated products so that's why they do it.

IMO the closest analogy would be using JetBrains IDEs and being contractually obligated to not develop competing IDEs.

The ToS are not just about "reverse engineering" a competing model, they forbid using the service to develop competing systems at all.

Yeah, if I remember correctly iTunes had a clause it couldn’t be used for nuclear development.

Not sure what Apple lawyers were imagining but I guess barring Irani scientist from syncing their iPods with uranium refiner schematics set back their programme for decades.

I think Apple had it in all their software. It's a good stance and easy to ridicule by taking iTunes as an example.

It's not their decision, it's US law.

> and easy to ridicule by taking iTunes as an example.

Not just easy, but fun too!

That is hilarious if true.

Blame ITAR.

Glad to live in a sane jurisdiction, where provisions made available only after purchase and those that go against typical customer expectations are simply invalid, so I never had to care about EULAs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Eur...

"Everyone else is doing it" doesn't make it right.

It also makes it dangerous to become dependent on these services. What if at some point in the future, your provider decides that something you make competes with something they make, and they cut off your access?

When that provider's ToS allows them full access to the inputs/outputs you're sending through their system, there is a strong incentive to build something competitive with you once you're proven profitable enough.

I don't know how companies currently navigate that.

Does this mean you can’t make a potential competitor to Claude Code using Claude Code, though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com