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If you want to destroy open source completely, the more models the better. Microsoft's co-opting and infiltration of OSS projects will serve as a textbook examp

If you want to destroy open source completely, the more models the better. Microsoft's co-opting and infiltration of OSS projects will serve as a textbook example of eliminating competition in MBA programs. And people still support it by uploading to GitHub.

dartos 2y ago
> And people still support it by uploading to GitHub. It’s slowly, but noticeably moving from GitHub to other sites. The network effect is hard to work against.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
  Migration is on my todo list, but it’s non trivial enough I’m not sure when I’ll ever have cycles to even figure out the best option. Gitlab? Self-hosted Git? Go back to SVN? A totally different platform? Truth be told, Git is a major pain in the ass anyway and I’m very open to something else.
  - kubanczyk 2y ago
    A classic case of perfect being the enemy of the good. The answers are Gitlab and jj, cheers.
  - mike_ivanov 2y ago
    Mercurial was better than git IMO, at least for smaller projects.
amelius 2y ago
> If you want to destroy open source completely The irony is of course that open source is what they used to train their models with.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  That was the point. They are laundering IP. It's the long way around the GPL, allowing then to steal.
  - ianeigorndua 2y ago
    How many OSS repositories do I personally have to read through for my own code to be considered stolen property? That line of thought would get thrown out of court faster than an AI would generate it.
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      I assume you're not an AI model, but a real human being (I hope). The analogy "AI == human" just... doesn't work, really.
      - ianeigorndua 2y ago
        That’s beside the point. Me teaching my brain someone’s way of syntactically expressing procedures is analogous to AI developers teaching their model that same mode of expression.
        seoulmetro 2y ago
        No, a program that copies files is quite different to a human that writes those files data down and recalls them.
      - tensor 2y ago
        I think in this regard it works just fine. If the laws move to say that "learning from data" while not reproducing it is "stealing", then yes, you reading others code and learning from it is also stealing. If I can't feed a news article into a classifier to teach it to learn whether or not that I would like that article that's not a world I want to live in. And yes it's exactly the same thing as what you are accusing LLMs of. They should be subject to laws the same way humans are. If they substantially reproduce code they had access to then it's a copyright violation. Just like it would be for a human doing the same. But highly derived code is not "stolen" code, neither for AI nor for humans.
atomic128 2y ago
Yes. Thank you for saying it. We're watching Microsoft et al. defeat open source. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- bastardoperator 2y ago
  Can you name a company with more OSS projects and contributors? Stop with the hyperbole...
  - atomic128 2y ago
    Embrace, extend...
    - bastardoperator 2y ago
      Sure, Let me know when they extinguish kubernetes, helm, vscode, LSP, playwright, powershell, typescript, npm, or the other 6000 projects/repos sitting on GitHub.
  - creata 2y ago
    That literally has no bearing on the issue.
    - bastardoperator 2y ago
      It literally does, even if you don't like it.
      - creata 2y ago
        You're free to explain how you think it's linked to the issue if you want to, but it just isn't. Yes, Microsoft contributes some open source software. That obviously does not preclude them from being exploitative toward other creators of open source software.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
whitehexagon 2y ago
I deleted my github 2 weeks ago, as much about AI, as about them forcing 2FA. Before AI it was SAAS taking more than they were giving. I miss the 'helping each other' feel of these code share sites. I wonder where are we heading with all this. All competition and no collaboration, no wonder the planet is burning.
pessimizer 2y ago
I don't understand the case being made here at all. AI is violating FOSS licenses, I totally agree. But you can write more FOSS using AI. It's totally unfair, because these companies are not sharing their source, and extracting all of the value from FOSS as they can. Fine. But when it comes to OSI Open Source, all they usually had to do was include a text file somewhere mentioning that they used it in order to do the same thing, and when it comes to Free Software, they could just lie about stealing it and/or fly under the radar. Free software needs more user-facing software, and it needs people other than coders to drive development (think UI people, subject matter specialists, etc.), and AI will help that. While I think what the AI companies are doing is tortious, and that they either should be stopped from doing it or the entire idea of software copyright should be re-examined, I also think that AI will be massively beneficial for Free Software. I also suspect that this could result in a grand bargain in some court (which favors the billionaires of course) where the AI companies have to pay into a fund of some sort that will be used to pay for FOSS to be created and maintained. Lastly, maybe Free Software developers should start zipping up all of the OSI licenses that only require that a license be included in the distribution and including that zipfile with their software written in collaboration with AI copilots. That and your latest GPL for the rest (and for your own code) puts you in as safe a place as you could possibly be legally. You'll still be hit by all of the "don't do evil"-style FOSS-esque licenses out there, but you'll at least be safer than all of the proprietary software being written with AI. I don't know what textbook directs you to eliminate all of your competition by lowering your competition's costs, narrowing your moat of expertise, and not even owning a piece of that. edit: that being said, I'm obviously talking about Free Software here, and not Open Source. Wasn't Open Source only protected by spirits anyway?
mnau 2y ago
It doesn't matter whether it is uploaded to GitHub or not. They would siphon it from GitLab, self hosting or source forge as well using crawlers.
seoulmetro 2y ago
It'll be okay. We "destroyed" photography by uploading to places like Instagram and Facebook but photography as a whole is still alive. It turns out even though there is lots of stealing, the world still spins and people still seek out original creators.

dartos 2y ago

> And people still support it by uploading to GitHub. It’s slowly, but noticeably moving from GitHub to other sites. The network effect is hard to work against.

fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
Migration is on my todo list, but it’s non trivial enough I’m not sure when I’ll ever have cycles to even figure out the best option. Gitlab? Self-hosted Git? Go back to SVN? A totally different platform? Truth be told, Git is a major pain in the ass anyway and I’m very open to something else.
- kubanczyk 2y ago
  A classic case of perfect being the enemy of the good. The answers are Gitlab and jj, cheers.
- mike_ivanov 2y ago
  Mercurial was better than git IMO, at least for smaller projects.

amelius 2y ago

> If you want to destroy open source completely The irony is of course that open source is what they used to train their models with.

guerrilla 2y ago
That was the point. They are laundering IP. It's the long way around the GPL, allowing then to steal.
- ianeigorndua 2y ago
  How many OSS repositories do I personally have to read through for my own code to be considered stolen property? That line of thought would get thrown out of court faster than an AI would generate it.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    I assume you're not an AI model, but a real human being (I hope). The analogy "AI == human" just... doesn't work, really.
    - ianeigorndua 2y ago
      That’s beside the point. Me teaching my brain someone’s way of syntactically expressing procedures is analogous to AI developers teaching their model that same mode of expression.
      - seoulmetro 2y ago
        No, a program that copies files is quite different to a human that writes those files data down and recalls them.
    - tensor 2y ago
      I think in this regard it works just fine. If the laws move to say that "learning from data" while not reproducing it is "stealing", then yes, you reading others code and learning from it is also stealing. If I can't feed a news article into a classifier to teach it to learn whether or not that I would like that article that's not a world I want to live in. And yes it's exactly the same thing as what you are accusing LLMs of. They should be subject to laws the same way humans are. If they substantially reproduce code they had access to then it's a copyright violation. Just like it would be for a human doing the same. But highly derived code is not "stolen" code, neither for AI nor for humans.

atomic128 2y ago

Yes. Thank you for saying it. We're watching Microsoft et al. defeat open source. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

bastardoperator 2y ago
Can you name a company with more OSS projects and contributors? Stop with the hyperbole...
- atomic128 2y ago
  Embrace, extend...
  - bastardoperator 2y ago
    Sure, Let me know when they extinguish kubernetes, helm, vscode, LSP, playwright, powershell, typescript, npm, or the other 6000 projects/repos sitting on GitHub.
- creata 2y ago
  That literally has no bearing on the issue.
  - bastardoperator 2y ago
    It literally does, even if you don't like it.
    - creata 2y ago
      You're free to explain how you think it's linked to the issue if you want to, but it just isn't. Yes, Microsoft contributes some open source software. That obviously does not preclude them from being exploitative toward other creators of open source software.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

whitehexagon 2y ago

I deleted my github 2 weeks ago, as much about AI, as about them forcing 2FA. Before AI it was SAAS taking more than they were giving. I miss the 'helping each other' feel of these code share sites. I wonder where are we heading with all this. All competition and no collaboration, no wonder the planet is burning.

pessimizer 2y ago

I don't understand the case being made here at all. AI is violating FOSS licenses, I totally agree. But you can write more FOSS using AI. It's totally unfair, because these companies are not sharing their source, and extracting all of the value from FOSS as they can. Fine. But when it comes to OSI Open Source, all they usually had to do was include a text file somewhere mentioning that they used it in order to do the same thing, and when it comes to Free Software, they could just lie about stealing it and/or fly under the radar. Free software needs more user-facing software, and it needs people other than coders to drive development (think UI people, subject matter specialists, etc.), and AI will help that. While I think what the AI companies are doing is tortious, and that they either should be stopped from doing it or the entire idea of software copyright should be re-examined, I also think that AI will be massively beneficial for Free Software. I also suspect that this could result in a grand bargain in some court (which favors the billionaires of course) where the AI companies have to pay into a fund of some sort that will be used to pay for FOSS to be created and maintained. Lastly, maybe Free Software developers should start zipping up all of the OSI licenses that only require that a license be included in the distribution and including that zipfile with their software written in collaboration with AI copilots. That and your latest GPL for the rest (and for your own code) puts you in as safe a place as you could possibly be legally. You'll still be hit by all of the "don't do evil"-style FOSS-esque licenses out there, but you'll at least be safer than all of the proprietary software being written with AI. I don't know what textbook directs you to eliminate all of your competition by lowering your competition's costs, narrowing your moat of expertise, and not even owning a piece of that. edit: that being said, I'm obviously talking about Free Software here, and not Open Source. Wasn't Open Source only protected by spirits anyway?

mnau 2y ago

It doesn't matter whether it is uploaded to GitHub or not. They would siphon it from GitLab, self hosting or source forge as well using crawlers.

seoulmetro 2y ago

It'll be okay. We "destroyed" photography by uploading to places like Instagram and Facebook but photography as a whole is still alive. It turns out even though there is lots of stealing, the world still spins and people still seek out original creators.