4 ms·

You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out

by neilv 1y ago

You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly. So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you. Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to launder it. Google had too much class (and comfortable market position) to launch the sleazy "AI" gold rush. But plenty of upstarts currently see an irresistible opportunity to get rich, by leveraging automated mass copyright violation, while handwaving "AI".

tkzed49 1y ago
I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".
- neilv 1y ago
  I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc. A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working. There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow. Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI". We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution. In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important. I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
  - tkzed49 1y ago
    Thanks, it's an interesting perspective. I may have underappreciated the code volume/time requirements to execute especially in a startup setting. I think I see where you're coming from. I'd imagine in some applications, there is very niche/specific implementation on Github that is both expensive to reimplement and not permissively licensed. I can see the "AI laundering" angle there.
  - dabockster 1y ago
    > accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.
    - Joel_Mckay 1y ago
      In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based. It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses. Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.) The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3 Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume: "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla) https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/ https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
      - dabockster 1y ago
        That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.
catigula 1y ago
Yep. ChatGPT was hugely irresponsible in many ways and rests solely on the shoulders of Sam Altman, someone allegedly implicated in various schemes.
cobertos 1y ago
If that is the case, isn't the future more private code? The producers realize that public release is no longer in their favor and will keep it in their groups (until they leak or whatever)?
AstroBen 1y ago
Google had too much class? They've been scraping sites content for years before all this LLM stuff - using it to answer questions directly in search results and sending no clicks No, I think Google was just slow this time
- neilv 1y ago
  I think Google has ethics in their self-image. Albeit more flexibility in practice. But decisions might've come down to what keeps the ad revenue machine fed. Or it might not have made it to decisions. If they were slow, wasn't it only in being prepared for when the boat got rocked? Until the boat got rocked, they had a monopoly, so why rock it themselves? I wouldn't write in my promotion packet, "Disrupted our golden cash cow, and put our dominance and entire company at risk, before someone else did, because it would happen eventually, you'll thank me later, pls promo kthx."
gruez 1y ago
>You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs That's not what people who are using AI for though? The typical use case is "write a program that does [insert business problem]". I highly doubt there's a codebase that solves that exact business problem.
dabockster 1y ago
> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way? Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But honestly, our field would be so much healthier overall in the long term.
- billy99k 1y ago
  I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software. The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.
  - lvturner 1y ago
    >> The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you. But isn't that exactly what we have now with the existing patents and copyrights implementation? Maybe some people are getting some money, but I know if Amazon (random example company name) violate copyright or a patent of mine, I don't have the resources to take them to court over it much less win.
    - dragandj 1y ago
      Sure, but if you have a strong copyright infringement case, couldn't you team up with a litigating company and take on Amazon? I am not sure that in any industry any tiny mom and pup shop can take on the largest corporate player without any cooperation from complementary interests...
userbinator 1y ago
Ironically, I've heard a few people saying they wish the big companies would just copy their publicly available code on GitHub even without attribution instead of coming up with their own overengineered and inefficient solutions which take a lot more time and effort, and which are then forced upon those former people as users.

by neilv 1y ago

tkzed49 1y ago

I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".

neilv 1y ago
I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc. A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working. There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow. Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI". We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution. In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important. I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
- tkzed49 1y ago
  Thanks, it's an interesting perspective. I may have underappreciated the code volume/time requirements to execute especially in a startup setting. I think I see where you're coming from. I'd imagine in some applications, there is very niche/specific implementation on Github that is both expensive to reimplement and not permissively licensed. I can see the "AI laundering" angle there.
- dabockster 1y ago
  > accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.
  - Joel_Mckay 1y ago
    In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based. It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses. Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.) The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3 Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume: "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla) https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/ https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
    - dabockster 1y ago
      That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.

catigula 1y ago

Yep. ChatGPT was hugely irresponsible in many ways and rests solely on the shoulders of Sam Altman, someone allegedly implicated in various schemes.

cobertos 1y ago

If that is the case, isn't the future more private code? The producers realize that public release is no longer in their favor and will keep it in their groups (until they leak or whatever)?

AstroBen 1y ago

Google had too much class? They've been scraping sites content for years before all this LLM stuff - using it to answer questions directly in search results and sending no clicks No, I think Google was just slow this time

neilv 1y ago
I think Google has ethics in their self-image. Albeit more flexibility in practice. But decisions might've come down to what keeps the ad revenue machine fed. Or it might not have made it to decisions. If they were slow, wasn't it only in being prepared for when the boat got rocked? Until the boat got rocked, they had a monopoly, so why rock it themselves? I wouldn't write in my promotion packet, "Disrupted our golden cash cow, and put our dominance and entire company at risk, before someone else did, because it would happen eventually, you'll thank me later, pls promo kthx."

gruez 1y ago

>You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs That's not what people who are using AI for though? The typical use case is "write a program that does [insert business problem]". I highly doubt there's a codebase that solves that exact business problem.

dabockster 1y ago

> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way? Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But honestly, our field would be so much healthier overall in the long term.

billy99k 1y ago
I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software. The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.
- lvturner 1y ago
  >> The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you. But isn't that exactly what we have now with the existing patents and copyrights implementation? Maybe some people are getting some money, but I know if Amazon (random example company name) violate copyright or a patent of mine, I don't have the resources to take them to court over it much less win.
  - dragandj 1y ago
    Sure, but if you have a strong copyright infringement case, couldn't you team up with a litigating company and take on Amazon? I am not sure that in any industry any tiny mom and pup shop can take on the largest corporate player without any cooperation from complementary interests...

userbinator 1y ago

Ironically, I've heard a few people saying they wish the big companies would just copy their publicly available code on GitHub even without attribution instead of coming up with their own overengineered and inefficient solutions which take a lot more time and effort, and which are then forced upon those former people as users.