Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_biot | Hacker News Reader

The FAQ, under "How can OSE evolve in the long term, especially in an AI-powered world?" appears to state a very pro-AI view.

I think this is hopelessly naive. The LLMs crapping out code are shamelessly ripping off open source code, sans copyright notice. It makes no sense for a foundation supporting open source to also support this massive copyright massacre.

Also, I think you're going to get flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap, because if you have no skills or shame but want to make a little money off your AI-generated crap, why not try and extract money from this initiative? The curl guy showed this is very real.

View on HN

The curl guy is one of OSE founding donors, together with the terraform guy who recently released an open source trust management system to help with AI-generated crap: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

I think that AI eventually will solve technical maintenance problems, but not human-related ones: limited attention, trust, motivation issues. And we are going to support mostly "old" projects everybody relies on, not some new AI-gen stuff.

NPOs are constantly “running a tight ship.” I suspect a lot of HNers would be aghast at the limited resources available. I’ve been doing NPO work for decades.

LLMs represent a very important opportunity to force-multiply limited resources.

Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.

Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.

> flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap

And our plan is to willy-nilly give money to everyone who asks for it with no oversight or attention to other factors or human involvement. Game over. You win.

> It makes no sense for a foundation supporting open source to also support this massive copyright massacre.

Copyright is a fundamentally unethical concept and must die. Open source foundations should rightfully support the death of copyright, whether by LLMs or by other means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com