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> "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away". perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some ver
by larodi 1y ago
> "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".
perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some very outspoken open-source proponents do not open-source their core business components. I can understand they do it in order to exist as a company, as busineses, but I don't understand why they have to endure being shamed for staying closed-source, while all their stack is open. many such companies exist.
and let's add to this all the fact that everything released in 2025 as open-source gets slurped by LLMs for training. so, essentially, you feed bro's models breakfast with your open-source, like it or not. in the very near future we'll be able to perhaps prompt a 'retell' of Redis which is both the same software, but written so that it is not.
in essence there seems to be now little reason to open-source anything at all, and particularly if this is a core-business logic. open-source if you can outpace everybody else (with tech), or else you shouldn't care about the revenue.
- palata 1y agoI agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem. I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Permissive don't protect the users in the first place, so...
- pbronez 1y agoSo who’s gonna sue an AI company asserting that all code they produce is GPL due to being trained on GPL code?
- palata 1y agoI feel like nobody cares. It sucks, I know. Like climate change, biodiversity loss, the energy crisis. Feels like we're pretty much screwed. Doesn't mean it's not a problem.
- growse 1y agoHow is training a model on GPL code and then having it write code any different to having a human read GPL code and then write code? Unless there's a specific copyright claim over a specific piece of code that was copied and published, it's hard to see how the GPL has any relevance.
- bccdee 1y agoBecause, unlike humans, LLMs reliably reproduce exact excerpts from their training data. It's very easy to get image generation models to spit out screenshots from movies.
- palata 1y agoI see that argument over and over, and I don't understand how people can consider it makes sense. "My clipboard learned the code, just like a human would. So it should be fine to copy-paste anything and call it my own". "How is killing a human any different to killing a computer?" "If humans can vote, why couldn't computers vote as well?" Can we start at "humans are not computers", maybe?
- growse 1y ago> Can we start at "humans are not computers", maybe? Sure. So it stands to reason that "computers" are not bound by human laws. So an LLM that finds a piece of copyright data out there on the internet, downloads it, and republishes it has not broken any law? It certainly can't be prosecuted. My original point was that copyright protections are about (amongst other things) protecting distribution and derivative works rights. I'm not seeing a coherent argument that feeding a copyrighted work (that you obtained legally) into a machine is breaching anyone's copyright.
- palata 1y ago
- motorest 1y ago> I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem. Why do you believe this is a problem? I mean, to believe that you first need to believe that having access to the source code is somehow a problem. > I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Nonsense. At most, the problem lies in people ignoring what rights a FLOSS license grants to end users, and then feigning surprise when end users use their software just as the FLOSS license intended. Also a telltale sign is the fact that these blind criticisms single out very precise corporations. Apparently they have absolutely no issue if any other cloud provider sells managed services. They single out AWS but completely ignore the fact that the organization behind ValKey includes the likes of Google, Ericsson, and even Oracle of all things. Somehow only AWS is the problem.
- palata 1y ago> I mean, to believe that you first need to believe that having access to the source code is somehow a problem. How in the world did you get there from what I said? Open source code has a licence that says what the copyright owner allows or not. LLMs are laundering machine in the sense that they allow anybody to just ignore licences and copyright in all code (even proprietary code: if you manage to train on the code of Windows without getting caught, you're good). > At most, the problem lies in people ignoring what rights a FLOSS license grants to end users Once it's been used to train an LLM, there is no right anymore. The licence, copyright, all that is worthless. > Also a telltale sign is the fact that these blind criticisms [...] No clue what you are talking about here.
- motorest 1y ago> LLMs are laundering machine in the sense that they allow anybody to just ignore licences and copyright in all code (...) No. Having access to the code does that. You only need a single determined engineer to do that. I mean, do you believe that until the inception of LLMs the world was completely unaware of the whole concept of reverse engineering stuff? > Once it's been used to train an LLM, there is no right anymore. Nonsense. You do not lose your rights to your work just because someone used a glorified template engine to write something similar. In fact, your whole blend of comment conveys a complete lack of experience using LLMs in coding applications, because all major assistant coding services do enforce copyright filters even when asking questions.
- necovek 1y agoAI companies have not shied away from slurping anything available with complete disregard for the licensing of the material. As such, code available is as much a boon to them as open source.
- palata 1y agoAnd leaked proprietary code.
- miki123211 1y agoA sufficiently capable LLM might be good enough to do cleanroom design on its own, with little to no human assistance. That would destroy the entire idea of copyright as it exists for software. You need one agent that can write a complete specification of any piece of software, either just by using it and inferring how it works, or by reverse engineering if not prohibited by the license. You then have a lawyer in the middle (human or LLM) review it, removing any bits that are copyrighted. You then need another agent that can re-implement that spec. You just made a perfectly legal clone. Cleanroom design is a well-established precedent in the US, and has been used before, just with teams of humans instead of LLMs. I think some companies will be completely unaffected by this, as either the behavior of their code can't easily be infered just from API calls, or because their value actually lies in users / data / business relationships, not the code directly. Stripe would be my go-to example, you can't just reverse-engineer all their optimizations and antifraud models just by getting a developer API key and calling their API endpoints. They also have a lot of relationships with banks and other institutions, which are arguably just as important to their business as their code. Instagram, Uber or Amazon also fall into this bucket somewhat.
- dcow 1y agoHumans can also do that, they’re just slower and presumably more expensive.
- eek2121 1y agoExcept that LLMs themselves are close to being killed off for the lack of clean room implementations themselves, at least here in the U.S.
- bloomburger 1y ago??????
- palata 1y agoOne can hope, but I don't think it will happen.