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> This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds va

> This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. That's fine if your project says that. But there are a very many of projects which specifically say otherwise.

ShamelessC 4y ago
Right I'm just saying your argument only holds for licenses like GPL, not in general as you suggested. edit: Not implying you're wrong, just moreso that there's a large chunk of people who aren't going to be motivated to fight on your behalf. I understand there are some useful areas such as hardware drivers for GPL, but it's simply not an IP constraint that sounds at all fun to work on as a volunteer.
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  It doesn't hold for licenses like MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 either, all of which require giving credit. You personally might not care; many people do.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me). I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice as well without having seen any of it.
    - zvr 4y ago
      If you really don't care, please make it known by choosing a license like MIT-0 (MIT No Attribution) or 0BSD (BSD Zero Clause License). You will at least save some people some effort they go to in order to collect and provide attributions to every piece of code used.
      - ShamelessC 4y ago
        Thanks that's very helpful, I'll check them out.
    - JoshTriplett 4y ago
      People are seeing the big picture. That's all the more reason to make sure that, as new tools get developed, they treat it as a requirement to actually respect Open Source (licensing, credit, provenance, copyleft, patent non-aggression, and all the other reasons people use such licenses), rather than just abusing it as an input.
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      > I guess this just all seems rather activist to me So? Is "activist" supposed to carry a negative connotation, or what?
      - ShamelessC 4y ago
        Perhaps I should have said idealistic. I mean I've seen several people make demands like they're somehow already in a courtroom with Microsoft. No mention made of the fact that this is likely covered under fair use. If it isn't, then basically every deep neural net trained on a web dataset is in violation. This means open works like from University at Heidelberg (Latent Diffusion, VQGAN) or EleutherAI (GPT-J) would be impossible. Like, maybe you could all get together and learn how machine learning works and train your own clean model? That feels far more positive and in the spirit of progress to me. I guess from my point of view it's clear - no laws will save you from the next wave of large language models. The weights are trivially distributed meaning once it's trained it's more just a fact of life we all have to deal with. So making demands when you have basically zero leverage rather than admitting defeat and working within the new constraints of progress. I just feel like it's an inherently philosophical position and people are acting like code theft hasn't been common practice for the history of all software.

ShamelessC 4y ago

Right I'm just saying your argument only holds for licenses like GPL, not in general as you suggested. edit: Not implying you're wrong, just moreso that there's a large chunk of people who aren't going to be motivated to fight on your behalf. I understand there are some useful areas such as hardware drivers for GPL, but it's simply not an IP constraint that sounds at all fun to work on as a volunteer.

JoshTriplett 4y ago
It doesn't hold for licenses like MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 either, all of which require giving credit. You personally might not care; many people do.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me). I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice as well without having seen any of it.
  - zvr 4y ago
    If you really don't care, please make it known by choosing a license like MIT-0 (MIT No Attribution) or 0BSD (BSD Zero Clause License). You will at least save some people some effort they go to in order to collect and provide attributions to every piece of code used.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      Thanks that's very helpful, I'll check them out.
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    People are seeing the big picture. That's all the more reason to make sure that, as new tools get developed, they treat it as a requirement to actually respect Open Source (licensing, credit, provenance, copyleft, patent non-aggression, and all the other reasons people use such licenses), rather than just abusing it as an input.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > I guess this just all seems rather activist to me So? Is "activist" supposed to carry a negative connotation, or what?
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      Perhaps I should have said idealistic. I mean I've seen several people make demands like they're somehow already in a courtroom with Microsoft. No mention made of the fact that this is likely covered under fair use. If it isn't, then basically every deep neural net trained on a web dataset is in violation. This means open works like from University at Heidelberg (Latent Diffusion, VQGAN) or EleutherAI (GPT-J) would be impossible. Like, maybe you could all get together and learn how machine learning works and train your own clean model? That feels far more positive and in the spirit of progress to me. I guess from my point of view it's clear - no laws will save you from the next wave of large language models. The weights are trivially distributed meaning once it's trained it's more just a fact of life we all have to deal with. So making demands when you have basically zero leverage rather than admitting defeat and working within the new constraints of progress. I just feel like it's an inherently philosophical position and people are acting like code theft hasn't been common practice for the history of all software.