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Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what?
I'm at a loss here.
That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.
I have no such expectations. They believe that they own the world and owe nothing, as you said.
OTOH, do you think they care about source available restrictive licenses or Copyright laws, or laws in general?
If you believe so, I have a bridge which you can customize with a text prompt for sale.
I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability of the project a whole bunch!
We're absolutely on the same page with you, and I try to do my best with what I can in that regard.
On the other hand, I see a perspective which thinks that companies are entitled to use everything for free and don't need to support the Free Software ecosystem because it's an externality that they don't have to care for, which bothers me a lot.
What I was trying to understand that whether this comment was supporting that perspective, or is there something I'm missing entirely.
The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.
* Michael Weghorn (accessibility)
* Jonathan Clark (language and scripting support)
* Neil Roberts (scripting improvements)
* Dan Williams (macOS support and general UI improvements)
[1] https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/
You do realise there's an insanely large gap in-between "everyone is a volunteer" and "everyone is full-time staff", right?
If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.
This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual.
How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?
Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.
Related: how do you think you can attract more people, by setting a restrictive copyleft that some people will use in their spare time or by attracting even corporations with money that will end up committing to a repo that is used in half of the world?
Note that I am talking about adoption bc thanks to adoption things just do not get rotten. If you make a piece of software and set a license that noone wants to touch, you will see it stall and die in front of your face.
Do not take me wrong, I mean, I think it is fair to contribute back, collaborating, sponsoring and so on. But it is a fact of life that if you make certain choices you make adoption more difficult with all the consequences it entails.
I do know what the original spirit of such licenses is. I was talking about real side-effects these choices have.
I see it more as a piece of software being feasible to be maintained over time: if it is only me, it is more likely to end up dying soon, if it attracts adoption, it just gets better, more battle-tested, etc. independently of the economic factor.
Do you believe that in an ideal world, any instance of not "doing the right thing" should be illegal?
It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo.
Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.
The question of "are laws there to enforce morality, or enforce public order?" is the key one. And, I think, very easily settled by looking at the laws we choose to implement. Almost none of them enforce moral behaviour (e.g. you must give 10% of your income to charity), they're all about enforcing how we interact and how we're ruled.
But they all reflect the morality of society to a degree, whether the democratic majority, or the powerful minority.
Yes, of course. Morality is relative. In a slave-owning society, harbouring escaped slaves is immoral.
"Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years).
"Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years)
They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it.
Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.
We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it.
It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral and indefensible.
Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.
And there are plenty of people who would vehemently argue that eating their pet puppy is very, very, very, different from eating a plant.
Good arguments, particularly in Australia, for eating wild pigs, clean skin bulls, camels, donkeys (mainly for pet meat IMHO), etc. Kangaroos, unculled, explode in number past the sustainability of their landscape and litter the ground with bones - humans estimate a cull target and shoot to reduce populations, only eating a few themselves (leaving many on the ground for "nature").
I will say though, I would only ever consider eating a dog in a life or death situation.
If there was no absolute need for me to eat a dog then I would not do it, and even if there were it would be a difficult moral dilemma for me that should I survive could possibly haunt me for life, but for my ancestors it was a common occurrence.
In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.
Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.
And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.
The question at hand is of the form: Is it right to do X (to donate, in this case)? Your reply amounts to: yes, because X is the right thing to do. This merely restates the query as its own conclusion.
"Donations" are - by definition - entirely voluntary.
If people want to donate, that's fine. If they don't want to donate -- also fine. That's what "donation" means.
Therefore anyone's decision not to donate is entirely consistent with the author's own expressed preferences.
Whether an actor happens to be large and rich (OpenAI) is irrelevant. The license -- the author's formally expressed preferences -- does not say anything about "free unless you are rich." They could certainly have done so if they had wanted to. They didn't. You are taking it upon yourself to claim that you know what's best for them.
People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine...
In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear.
> In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine.
"Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.
Requirements are about legal obligations, not moral ones.
> Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine.
It's in general fine not to donate to libreoffice. But that doesn't extend to 100% of circumstances.
> "Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.
As a third party I can judge someone for not donating based on their circumstances. It's not irrelevant. The moral implications are not part of the definition of donation.