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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strings isn't exactly a gift.

If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me, there were no strings. Your users presumably benefit from the software I wrote, unless you're using it for evil, but I don't have enough clout to use an only IBM may use it for evil license. You benefit from the software I wrote. I've made the world a better place and I didn't have to market or support my software; win-win.

I've done plenty of software for hire too. I've used plenty of open source software for work. Ocassionally, I've been able to contribute to open source while working for hire, which is always awesome. It's great to be paid to find and fix problems my employer is having and be able to contribute upstream to fix them for lots more people.

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I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit.

If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves.

For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".

MIT license requires credit.

Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".

The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong.

> My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".

The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.

So does the BSD license. Copyright must be reproduced

Most licenses do.

BSD0 doesnt

To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom".

The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom", not related to whether you profit from it or not.

> To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom

To clarify further: "freedom" for the end user, and not the developer leveraging GPL code in their software product.

Absolutely not. GPL is freedom for the authors. The end users have conditions they must meet to use the software. Those conditions are restrictions. That is precisely the opposite of freedom for end users.

To anticipate objections, the conditions keep the software "free for everyone", which is true. But that's still explicitly freedom for the authors. The conditions preemptively eliminate end users who would otherwise find the software valuable. Because it is not freedom for end users.

Presumably you are licensing your code as MIT or a similar license.

Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.

No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all stronger now. Don't fight AI, fight for open models.

there are no open models. none. zero.

there are binary files that some companies are allowing you to download, for now. it was called shareware in the old days.

one day the tap will close and we'll see then what open models really means

Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models .

For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.

At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.

> and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful

At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late.

> Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests

The companies training big models are actively respecting copyright from anyone big enough to actually fight back, and soaking everyone else.

They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.

They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.

China: lol

From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their models.

The thing is, copyright is not done. The legal framework still exists and is enforced so I am not sure how to read your reply as anything other than a strongly worded opinion. Just ask Disney.

I use AI every day in my dev workflows, yet I am still easily able to empathize with those who did not intend for their code to be laundered through AI to remove their attribution (or whatever other caveats applied in their licensing.)

> Just ask Disney.

Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI

If they saw the wind they wouldn't have chosen OpenAI

The thing is, nobody in China gives a rat's patoot about copyright. If we do, they win.

A compromise might have been possible, based on treaties engineered by the people who brought us the TPP, but nobody in the current US government is capable of negotiating anything like that or inclined to try. And it wouldn't exactly leave the rest of us better off if they did.

As a result, copyright is a zero-sum game from a US perspective, which matters because that's where the majority of leading research happens on the majority of available compute. Every inch of ground gained by Big IP comes at America's expense.

So they must lose, decisively and soon. Yes, the GPL will be lost as collateral damage. I'm OK with that. You will be, too.

I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been able to just force through their desired outcome (to the detriment of society), but I don't think they are going to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone once they have the leverage.

Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.

Great! So I assume it is now Completely Fine to rip Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / whatever and share it with everyone I know?

Copyright isn't "done", copyright has just been restricted to the rich and powerful. AI has essentially made it legal to steal from anyone who isn't rich enough to sue you - which in the case of the main AI companies means everyone except a handful of giants.

TIL I'm "rich and powerful." It doesn't feel any different, I've got to say.

If you want to attach strings which involve restricting access, open source is not the way to go.

You're right - the reality of the world today is that open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all questions of legality/ethics aside. But this was not the reality of the world that existed when the code was licensed and released. That is why it is easy to empathize with code authors who did not expect their code to be used in this manner.

Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.

By far the most popular strings involve restricting restricting access. That is, viral licenses which require derived works to also be open source.

> restricting restricting access

And that's exactly the point. The rule of copyright is explicitly used against itself, which makes it a legitimizing string.

> If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me

My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits

Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's milages vary.

My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."

Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd like to use my work to deny end users the rights to control their computing.

That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose.

LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.

So, definitely not just for corporations to make insanely massive profits off?

How much do you think people would pay for this patch?

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320

If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything?

And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.

I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly.

Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.

It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.

Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.

>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity

That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.

So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.

The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.

Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.

Seems pretty understandable to me. In the former, you work on something hoping that real people will find it useful. In the latter, you're explicitly doing work for a paycheck.

Most open source licenses have strings attached, the terms of the licence say what those “strings” are. Like requiring attribution.

That sounds fun. I am trying to find potential employers who need me to write or fix code, and ideally contribute upstream along with it. Any ideas where to start? I am thinking something "chill". I am trying to avoid large corporations.

One of the changes I have made in recent years is to move to the unlicence. I am ok with people using my code. I'm not ok with people saying that other people shouldn't be allowed to use my code.

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