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Comment by iloveoof | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if this author supports OSS but I’ll share this because HN generally is full of people with that mindset.

It’s deeply ironic that if you forget about LLMs and look only at the outcome—-we’ve found a way to legally circumvent copyright and the siloing of coding knowledge, making it so you can build on top of (almost) the whole of human coding knowledge without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission—-it sounds like the dream of open source software has been realized.

But this doesn’t feel like a win for the philosophy of OSS because a corporation broke down the gates. It turns out for a lot of people, OSS is an aesthetic and not an outcome, it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software, not for democratized access to knowledge.

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> it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software

The latter, i.e. corporate control of software, is exactly what copyleft licenses are trying to prevent. This is the very essence of the GPL.

The "license washing" of LLMs absolutely goes against the spirit of FOSS.

> without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission

Firstly, the ability to “build” the best and most capable software is still locked behind frontier models, so rent is still and will always be due.

Secondly, OSS is about giving users the option to be in control of and have visibility over the software they run on their machines.

But that doesn’t mean that humans do not want or deserve recognition for the work they do to provide these libraries and tools for free, which is IMO partially why copyright and attribution are critical to OSS as a movement.

That's not the reason why I publish OSS. I also publish that software under specific licenses that impose specific obligations (e.g., making the source available to users and attribution being given to the original author(s)).

I’m not sure this stands up to much examination when looking at (for example) copyleft, which seeks to give people access to source of binaries they are running. If an LLM can (for the sake of argument) spit out copyleft code which is then used on closed systems, we’ve done an end-run around the protections keeping that open.

Exactly. It looks like GP is guilty of the thing they accused others of - their understanding of what FLOSS is about is so shallow it resembles an aesthetic.

You don't seem to understand what FOSS is really about. The GPL has always been about the user. When a company license-washes a existing GPL software project and turns it into a proprietory product, the resulting code is not "free" anymore in the sense that the user has lost control. This is exactly what the author wanted to prevent in the first place by licensing their code under the GPL.

Did you reply to a wrong comment?

I don't think so.

Well, you seem to be in a violent agreement with me then.

Oh, you're actually right! I did reply to the wrong comment... Mea culpa! Now I can't edit it anymore and look like an idiot. Well...

I’m not saying this is aligned with FLOSS, FLOSS is a collaboration model. I’m saying the outcome of easier access to knowledge should be celebrated by supporters of FLOSS. Licenses and copyright aren’t good for their own sake, they’re tools for increasing people’s freedom to use, study, modify, and build on existing software. LLMs are another tool for increasing people’s freedom to make new software or improve existing software.

See, that's exactly what I meant - you are indulged in the aesthetics. FLOSS is very obviously not a "collaboration model" (as evidenced by the whole variety of diverse collaboration models used by FLOSS projects), it's not about licenses and copyrights either; it's all about power dynamics - more specifically, not letting the software creator/distributor constrain their users in unjust ways. GNU GPL does not even require public distribution, it allows selling the software to limited recipients as long as you don't take these recipient's rights away. It's not about collaboration, it's not about being developed out in the open and it's not about preventing the siloing of knowledge aside of very specific contexts - it can be (and is being) used as a tool for pursuing, bettering or enabling each of those matters, but these are not its core concern at all.

I think you're misunderstanding the OSS philosophy. If the outcome was all that mattered then piracy would be good enough.

I'd argue that this is the same situation as with Tivoization [1] where the final product is not truly free even if it follows the letter of the law. And as stated in [2], this breaks at least one of the four essential freedoms of free software because I don't have the freedom to modify the program.

It's also worth noting that preventing Tivo's actions is the reason for why the GPLv3 exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/tivoization.html

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