That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Keyword being "can"
The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
> The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.
It does
The original post in this thread was:
> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.
Skrebbel probably shouldn't have said that Carmack "doesn't really do OSS", but what they clearly meant was, Carmack doesn't participate in the sort of community development as the Linux kernel or Apache or whatever.
> technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point
Talking past people to argue on semantics and pedantry is a HN pastime. It may even be it's primary function.
If that was the intent don’t you think it would be stated somewhere, or in the faq?
>“Talking” past
It’s only text, there’s no talking past. You can’t talk past someone when the conversation isn’t spoken. At best, you might ignore what they write and go on and on and on at some length on your own point instead, ever meandering further from the words you didn’t read, widening the scope of the original point to include the closest topic that isn’t completely orthogonal to the one at hand, like the current tendency to look for the newest pattern of LLM output in everyone’s’ comments in an attempt to root out all potential AI generated responses. And eventually exhaust all of their rhetoric and perhaps, just maybe, in the very end, get to the
> It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice!
Carmack has extracted as much profit as he could care for from the source code. The releasing of the code is warm fuzzy feelings for zero cost, while keeping it closed source renders zero benefit to him.
The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”
From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.
And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.
While you can have a cathedral-like development and publish it under an open-source license, that's not what RMS was talking about in his essay.
I'm also not arguing about what is good or bad, but about what was meant by the term "open source" when it was introduced, and how it is still understood by many people since then.
SQLite is not Open Source, it is Public Domain. Which, I'd argue alas, is "better" than Open Source.
It is fair to say that the distinction to most people is inconsequential. Nevertheless they are different legal paradigms.
Free Software, and to a lesser extent, Open Source, impose restrictions which are not present in Pubic Domain software.
Of course, I could have misunderstood your comment, if so, mea culpa and feel free to ignore.
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
A bazaar is a chaotic market with a million vendors, not anything remotely cooperative. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is meant to convey the idea that OSS code develops without central organization, through endless forking and cloning.
The bazaar model definitely isn't the cooperation and vibes model that the HN crowd thinks it is...
In it, the bazaar is a metaphor for how Linux was being developed.
> No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here — rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, which would take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.
The expectations for language developers is currently huge burden and a massive undertaking, even for small languages that look to publicize at nearly any level. The amount of users that seem to insist on participation in the language’s progress, semantics, or implementation is the vast majority of any online/vocal user base and those same voices seem to view languages with different development models as inherently toys.
I’m sure this is where I am expected to reference Rich Hickey’s comments/post about Clojure development, but I don’t have the link on mobile. But the discussions are legion and legendary at this point.
Edit, see:
It was stupid of me to say that he does "not really do OSS" because that opened the door for all kinds of definition arguments. That's a super tired discussion and it wasn't really my point. I can't edit anymore but I meant to say something like "doesn't do OSS in the same way as a large % of the OSS community".
My day job uses a lot of open source libraries and projects, and do you know what we do when we fix things? We fork internally and don't upstream any patches.
Do you not see a loss here?
With LLMs, there's even LESS reason to keep up with upstream. We would probably just ask LLM to keep up with the changes commit by commit.
I personally don’t care about the community, its composition, or its internal structure for a lot of software I use. Even when I’m compiling from source and customizing smaller applications for personal efficiency, I’m not usually interested in being a part of some distributed community centered on that software. Some times I am engaged in the community and appreciate it and the work required to maintain that community. But in either case, the software is “open source”.
No there is not. That’s what you impose on it. My code is open, free, and unencumbered. If I don’t want you using it you don’t see it at all. The licenses are there to make people happy.
You're right and it's worth pointing out that a lot of open source has the opposite lifecycle: the authors make a thing, aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to eventually sell something peripheral, i.e. "open core" with paid plugins or enterprise support.
In these cases, open source isn't a gift so much as a marketing strategy. So it makes sense the maintainers wouldn't see LLM training on their code as a good thing; it was never a "gift", it was a loss leader.
Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.
There's an old tweet I can't find that was something like "We turned away from God when we invented the integrated circuit" that's always really spoken to the luddite in me.
I know it sucks but we need to admit that this doesn't work and we need to beat the hope out of people. You aren't going to make money later. The very few cases where it worked were flukes or fake.
For this class of open source development the authors essentially require the contributions and gifts of others for the project to even be realizable. I think this is the underlying basis for open source’s move toward a more “community” development model. It has led to open source being viewed by many as requiring a community and a “managed” community at that, to be open source. I think this class of open source is going to be impacted the most by LLM ‘assisted’ development (no matter how much distaste it generates for me and many others), where the hurdles of large scale development are more in reach (seemingly) for solo or very small groups of developers.
The really interesting thing is going to be to see how many of these projects move toward the Carmack ‘gift’ model and look to leave the community-centric model behind as an unnecessary externality.
He also started an AI company, right?
Yes, but IIRC it's different than the current "download the internet" large language model approach. More like learning to play video games or something.
Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.
I’m not sure whether this is implemented or not since I don’t use generative AI for coding.
As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.
> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
How?
Copyright protects only arbitrarily non-trivial parts of the original being reproduced, but that means that you have to be careful with learning from copyrighted material. Programming books will have direct clauses allowing snippet reuse, but not for teaching purposes.
Even if they did, if someone memorized copywritten code and then typed it back out that would still be a copywrite violation
Don't a number of open source licenses notably involve restrictions?
The current implementation has recently become obsolete.
Just like many cultural rules, they keep growing in complexity until they reach a phase change where they become ignored because they have become too complicated.
It's a little disheartening that someone can release their code and still be told they "don't really do OSS".
“I do open source. Oh, that guy? He doesn’t do real open source.”
> id Tech 4 is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, and is to date the last id Tech engine to be open-sourced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4
> At QuakeCon 2007, Carmack told LinuxGames that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release." Carmack resigned from id in 2013, and no source code release followed the launch of id Tech 6 in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_5#Marketing_and_licens...
The community is not the license. The “open source” development community is a user of that kind of licensing.
You might better describe them as the open source maintainer community. I do see how ai impacts maintainers. But I’ve dumped hundreds of thousands of loc into the bucket with no hope that anyone would really maintain it. With AI it might become part of something useful. The license has many uses.
The latter technically doesn't prevent anyone making money off it, but in practice it does (other than nominal fees).
That alone is a massive difference.
It can generate plausible code because the examples are already in the training set, the documentation, the how-to-write-a-database, other databases, etc.
But unless you could write SQLite yourself it will be hard to specify a good one and to get the generator to produce a correct implementation.
He didn't have to give it away, but he did, and for that I thank him
There's no need to shame or diminish people into a different open source contribution pattern.
We can be grateful for open source code dumps with no express or implied commitment to future performance. We aren't entitled to ongoing support or ongoing development.
So often the people with divergent thinking and creative problem solving abilities aren't apt to stay focused on one thing for so long.
It's normal for more operations-focused folks to handle the day-to-day on things designed by sometimes flighty, absent-minded, distracted, and unreliable chief engineers such as the aforementioned.
Unless they want to stick with a project, you probably don't want to force those types to do the normal operations daily grind that's so normal to most people.
"We'll take it from here"
"Actually I can code, but on that one [...]"
It has the same undertones as how rich people talk about philanthropy. “Look I donated a portion of my wealth that barely affected my life, I must be better than all those poor people who never donate to chariTy”.
I break down what you said as: "Sure, he's released code with an open-source license, but that's not real open source in the sense that matters."
I happen to disagree. OSS is OSS. AGPL is OSS. MIT is Open Source. Unlicense is OSS.
(I do agree that it's still OSS even if you never maintain it or anything.)
I agree there's a difference between publishing code under an OSS license and actively maintaining a project while fielding the flood of low-quality AI issues and PRs. Someone in the latter category is obviously closer to that pain.
I still wouldn't go so far as to dismiss Carmack's view on that basis alone, though. It just means his experience is less representative of maintainers dealing with that specific problem every day.
He only released his software as open source when there was no more money to be made with it. The idea being that even if it is of no use for him, is could be of use to someone else. In a sense, it is crazy to think of such actions as generous when it is what everyone should have done, but since being an asshole is the rule, then breaking that rule is indeed generous.
To me, working in open source means that your work goes to open source projects right now, not 10 years later when your software is obsolete and have been amortized. The difference matters because you are actually trying to make money here, and the protection offered by the licence you picked may be important to your business model.
John Carmack is making gifts, which is nice, but he wasn't paid to make gifts, he was paid to write proprietary software, so he worked in proprietary software, not open source. On one occasion, he gave away one of his Ferraris, which is, again, nice, but that doesn't make him a car dealer.
It was night and day between them and Epic back then, which I think is entirely why Unreal Engine grew to be such a juggernaut, and iD tech stagnated.
Any additional meaning or steps isn't open source, it's something else...
Skrebbel is largely referring to the OSS projects that need people to do consitent grunt work like shipping predictable releases, stable branch maintenance, backporting security fixes, etc. This is the kind of work maintains that the internet's infrastructure.
A bit like the Nebraska guy from the famous XKCD, dependecy: https://xkcd.com/2347/
He doesn’t need to keep maintaining it
OSS wasn't always endless PRs and other git-specific related crap, and I think that line of logic is fucking ridiculous.
Open source when I started was a website or BBS where a tarball of code was there waiting for me to download it. It wasn't PRs/issues/CI/career-finagling/virtue-seeking/etc; it was just the tarballl full of source code.
I agree wholeheartedly with Carmack and I am glad to see people with that perspective. I think exactly the same with regards to all of the OSS projects and code that I put out for 20+ years before LLMs were a thing. nothing changes; i'd do it again.
I didn't do it to make a career, I did it because I believe in the greater ethos of OSS.
The greater ethos of OSS, as it is conceived of by most of its practitioners isn't "source availability is the same thing".