Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakompella | Hacker News Reader

this is not how CC / FOSS licenses work. if this is how FOSS worked not a soul would use it

I don't think it's at all clear that some foss licenses (MIT for instance) are irrevocable. Not in the US, and certainly not in any possible relevant country... It's not clear that they are revocable either. As I understand the law it at least in part rests on the question of whether there was consideration in exchange for the license, which might even make it a case by case analysis.

CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".

Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).

Whether the license is revokable or not is irrelevant when the action isn't permitted by the license anyway.

In particular, the primary purpose of AI as we know it is to strip off attribution, which is explicitly forbidden by basically every license in existence.

True, license is probably irrelevant here because they aren't even intending to comply with the terms of it.

To nitpick "explicitly forbidden" isn't quite right. Licenses basically only grant more permissions, they can't remove them. It's explicitly excluded from the rights granted by the license, but it's not explicitly forbidden because it is the law that might or might not forbid the activity, not the license.

It's a disappointing that after decades of free software movement, people can't understand this basic fact about license and the concept of "free".

And the fact 20+ years Mozilla contributor didn't understand it too. You can't restrict the usage to things you don't like it under CC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com