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We're also a lot older now and many realize the "us versus them" thing wasn't helpful. Shame the article opens with such a flattering retelling of a wonky strat
by tacos 10y ago
We're also a lot older now and many realize the "us versus them" thing wasn't helpful. Shame the article opens with such a flattering retelling of a wonky strategy.
It was always the data, not the code. Try and find an open dataset for any interesting machine learning problem and you'll realize that while "freedom" was busy doing things like setting back the use of precompiled headers in GCC a decade and making it virtually impossible for an artist to get a copy of ffmpeg that handles all the file formats she needs, the real value remains the data.
We don't need 15 open source PDF viewers. We need open access to the papers. And even hippie scientists at Berkeley seem unwilling to share those for some reason. So odd given the heritage.
I don't care much about Google's half-baked machine learning library. Give me the 128k neural output from the 250TB of voice queries if you wanna be "open" and advance machine learning. Unsurprisingly they've got that locked up tight. But culturally you can make the argument that's very much "ours" just like government-funded research papers are.
Given interesting data, nerds will ALWAYS find a way to read it. Focusing on code was a bit of a mistake; that's cheap and you get it for free. And the gap between open software licenses and Creative Commons licensing always seemed odd.
- kuba_ 10y agoI agree. Google open some of your data. This empire defense bullshit game doesn't belong in the 21st century. ...and hey you Snowden's inside Google leak that 128k model already.
- rpdillon 10y agoHrm. Looks like a neural net wrote this comment.
- grive 10y agoFocusing on code was not a mistake. It was a necessary preliminary step. It's easy to say in hindsight, but that openness was not at all seen as a viable option for a lot of people in the industry back in the day. Now that this has been solved (mostly), it is now necessary to take back control on the data. Thus, this article.
- tacos 10y agohttps://creativecommons.org/about/history/ https://creativecommons.org/about/history/
- dingaling 10y ago> Focusing on code was a bit of a mistake; that's cheap and you get it for free But as you said the people who spent their time writing the code generally didn't have the influence to release data, so there was very little lost time-opportunity. So I'm glad they focused on the code rather than idly pontificating about the inequality of data access. And through their efforts they managed to drag open concepts into the mainstream consciousness so that releasing data becomes a digestible mainstream concept instead of a crackpot manifesto.