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> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the worl
by blibble 10mo ago
> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.
> To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault.
this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced
and I will produce no more
- machinationu 10mo ago[flagged]
- pdpi 10mo agoThat’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI
- blibble 10mo ago> That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. it's not the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on
- pdpi 10mo agoYes — That’s the bath water. The baby is the all the communal good that has come from FLOSS.
- afavour 10mo agoOP is asserting that the danger posed by AI is far bigger than the benefit of FLOSS. So to OP AI is the bath water.
- seanclayton 10mo agoYes, and they are okay with throwing the baby out with it, which is what the other commenter is commenting about. Throwing babies out of buckets full of bathwater is a bad thing, is what the idiom implies.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- dvfjsdhgfv 10mo agoIt is. If not you, other people will write their code, maybe of worse quality, and the parasites will train on this. And you cannot forbid other people to write open source software.
- blibble 10mo ago> If not you, other people will write their code, maybe of worse quality, and the parasites will train on this. this is precisely the idea add into that the rise of vibe-coding, and that should help accelerate model collapse everyone that cares about quality of software should immediately stop contributing to open source
- garciasn 10mo agoFree software has always been about standing on the shoulders of giants. I see this as doing so at scale and thus giving up on its inherent value is most definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- blibble 10mo agoI'd rather the internet ceased to exist entirely, than contributing in any way to generative "AI"
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoSuch a reactionary position is no better than nihilism.
- user____name 10mo agoIf God is Dead, do we have to rebuild It in the megacorps of the world whilst maximizing shareholder value?
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoI think you aren't recognizing the power that comes from organizing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of workers into vast industrial combines that produce the wealth of our society today. We must go through this, not against it. People will not know what could be, if they fail to see what is.
- keeganpoppen 10mo agothis just sounds like some memes smashed together in the LHC. what is this even supposed to mean? AI is a technology that will inevitably developed by humankind. all of this appeal to... populism? socialism?... is completely devoid of meaning in response to a discussion whose sine qua non is pragmatism at the very least.
- Marha01 10mo ago
- ekianjo 10mo agoIf we end up with only proprietary software we are the one who lose
- Juliate 10mo agoGenAI would be decades away (if not more) with only proprietary software (which would never have reached both the quality, coordination and volume open source enabled in such a relatively short time frame).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- xdavidliu 10mo agoopen source code is a miniscule fraction of the training data
- maplethorpe 10mo agoWhere did most of the code in their training data come from?
- fooqux 10mo agoI'd love to see a citation there. We already know from a few years ago that they were training AI based on projects on GitHub. Meanwhile, I highly doubt software firms were lining up to have their proprietary code bases ingested by AI for training purposes. Even with NDAs, we would have heard something about it.
- xdavidliu 10mo agoI should have clarified what I meant. The training data includes roughly speaking the entire internet. Open source code is probably a large fraction of the code in the data, but it is a tiny fraction of the total data, which is mostly non-code. My point was that the hypothetical of "not contributing to any open source code" to the extent that LLMs had no code to train on, would not have made as big of an impact as that person thought, since a very large majority of the internet is text, not code.
- maplethorpe 10mo agoI'm sorry but your point doesn't make sense to me. Training on all the world's text but omitting code means that your machine won't know how to write code. That's an enormous impact, not a small one. Unless you're in the camp that believes ChatGPT can extrapolate outside of its training data and do computer programming without having ever trained on any computer programming material?
- xdavidliu 10mo agofair point
- simonw 10mo agoYou refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world. It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0. I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.
- bgwalter 10mo agoGuilt-tripping people into providing more fodder for the machine. That is really something else. I'm not surprised that you don't understand ethics.
- simonw 10mo agoI'm trying to guilt-trip them into using their skills to improve the world through continuing to release open source software. I couldn't care less if their code was used to train AI - in fact I'd rather it wasn't since they don't want it to be used for that.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- hnisforjakases 10mo ago[dead]
- blibble 10mo agogiven the "AI" industry's long term goals, I see contributing in any way to generative "AI" to be deeply unethical, bordering on evil which is the exact opposite of improving the world you can extrapolate to what I think of YOUR actions
- bryan_w 10mo agoYour post, full of well formed, English sentences is also going to contribute to generative AI, so thanks for that.
- Kirth 10mo agosurely that cat's out of the bag by now; and it's too late to make an active difference by boycotting the production of more public(ly indexed) code?
- franktankbank 10mo agoKind of kind of not. Form a guild and distribute via SAAS or some other undistributable knowledge. Most code out there is terrible so relying on AI trained on it will lose out.
- lwhi 10mo agoThe promise and freedom of open source has been exploited by the least egalitarian and most capitalist forces on the planet. I would never have imagined things turning out this way, and yet, here we are.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pdpi 10mo agoFLOSS is a textbook example of economic activity that generates positive externalities. Yes, those externalities are of outsized value to corporate giants, but that’s not a bad thing unto itself. Rather, I think this is, again, a textbook example of what governments and taxation is for — tax the people taking advantage of the externalities, to pay the people producing them.
- lwhi 10mo agoYes, but unfortunately this never happens; and depressingly, I can't imagine it happening. The open source movement has been exploited.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoOpen Source (as opposed to Free Software) was intended to be friendly to business and early FOSS fans pushed for corporate adoption for all they were worth. It's a classic "leopards ate my face" moment that somehow took a couple of decades for the punchline to land: "'I never thought capitalists would exploit MY open source,' sobs developer who advocated for the Businesses Exploiting Open Source movement."
- lwhi 10mo agoI'm not sure I follow your line of reasoning. The exploited are in the wrong for not recognising they're going to be exploited? A pretty twisted point of view, in my opinion.
- 10mo ago
- ironman1478 10mo agoOpen source has been good, but I think the expanded use of highly permissive licences has completely left the door open for one sided transactions. All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?
- undeveloper 10mo agoEven the GPL allows companies to simply use code without contributing back, long as it's unmodified, or through a network boundary. the AGPL has the former issue.
- Avamander 10mo agoThis goes against what Stallman believes in, but there's a need for AGPL with a clause against closed-weight models.
- ironman1478 10mo agoAt least the contribution back can happen. You're right though, it's not perfect.
- mvdtnz 10mo agoHow dare you chastise someone for making the personal decision not to produce free work anymore? Who do you think you are?
- Trasmatta 10mo agoAnd then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI). "The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
- bilekas 10mo agoUnfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed. And the "training" companies are not being held liable. Are there any proposals to nail down an open source license which would explicitly exclude use with AI systems and companies?
- y-curious 10mo agoWhere is this spirit when AWS takes a FOSS project, puts it in the cloud and monetizes it?
- Snild 10mo agoIt exists, hence e.g. AGPL. But for most open source licenses, that example would be within bounds. The grandparent comment objected to not respecting the license.
- fweimer 10mo agoThe AGPL does not prevent offering the software as a service. It's got a reputation as the GPL variant for an open-core business model, but it really isn't that. Most companies trying to sell open-source software probably lose more business if the software ends up in the Debian/Ubuntu repository (and the packaging/system integration is not completely abysmal) than when some cloud provider starts offering it as a service.
- oblio 10mo agoFairly sure it's the same problem and the main reason stronger licenses are appearing or formerly OSS companies closing down their sources.
- mrwrong 10mo agoyou are saying X, but a completely different group of people didn't say Y that other time! I got you!!!!
- maplethorpe 10mo agoWhat people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?
- adhamsalama 10mo agoYes.
- rkomorn 10mo agoAbsolutely. Was this supposed to be some kind of gotcha?
- kenferry 10mo agoUh, yeah, he clearly would prefer it didn’t exist even if he was compensated.
- Xiol 10mo agoYes.
- MonkeyClub 10mo ago"Too expensive to do it legally" doesn't really stand up as an argument.
- nocman 10mo agoUm, please let your comment be sarcastic. It is ... right?
- alpha_squared 10mo agoUnequivocally, yes. There are plenty of "useful" things that can come out of doing unethical things, that doesn't make it okay. And, arguably, ChatGPT isn't nearly as useful as it is at convincing you it is.
- dmd 10mo agoEr... yes? Obviously? What are you even asking?
- terminalshort 10mo agoWhat a miserable attitude. When you put something out in the world it's out there for anyone to use and always has been before AI.
- blibble 10mo agoit is (... was) there to use for anyone, on the condition that the license is followed which they don't and no self-serving sophistry about "it's transformative fair use" counts as respecting the license
- rpdillon 10mo agoThe license only has force because of copyright. For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use. Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take. For a serious take, I recommend reading the copyright office's 100 plus page document that they released in May. It makes it clear that there are a bunch of cases that are non-transformative, particularly when they affect the market for the original work and compete with it. But there's also clearly cases that are transformative when no such competition exists, and the training material was obtained legally. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... I'm not particularly sympathetic to voices on HN that attempt to remove all nuance from this discussion. It's challenging enough topic as is.
- blibble 10mo ago> For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use. thankfully, I don't live under the US regime there is no concept of fair use in my country
- rpdillon 10mo agoOK, so what's the status in your country? What lawsuits have been filed, and what are the findings? There's a huge political aspect here: copyright hasn't worked for decades (I've written about this at length), and this is the latest iteration in that erosion. Countries that enforce IP as a natural right are going to have trouble navigating the change: they either need to avoid AI entirely (this will have higher costs than many anticipate), or they need revise how they think about copyright. Or they can just ignore it. There are no good options. My instinct is that countries that embrace change will do better.
- 2026iknewit 10mo agoI learned what i learned due to all the openess in software engineering and not because everyone put it behind a pay wall. Might be because most of us got/gets payed well enough that this philosophy works well or because our industry is so young or because people writing code share good values. It never worried me that a corp would make money out of some code i wrote and it still doesn't. AFter all, i'm able to write code because i get paid well writing code, which i do well because of open source. Companies always benefited from open source code attributed or not. Now i use it to write more code. I would argue though, I'm fine with that, to push for laws forcing models to be opened up after x years, but i would just prefer the open source / open community coming together and creating just better open models overall.
- Findecanor 10mo agoI've been feeling a lot the same way, but removing your source code from the world does not feel like a constructive solution either. Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied. I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code. If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there. Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?
- naasking 10mo agoWhy? The core vision of free software and many open source licenses was to empower users and developers to make things they need without being financially extorted, to avoid having users locked in to proprietary systems, to enable interoperability, and to share knowledge. GenAI permits all of this to a level beyond just providing source code. Most objections like yours are couched in language about principles, but ultimately seem to be about ego. That's not always bad, but I'm not sure why it should be compelling compared to the public good that these systems might ultimately enable.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago> and I will produce no more Nah, don't do that. Produce shitloads of it using the very same LLM tools that ripped you off, but license it under the GPL. If they're going to thief GPL software, least we can do is thief it back.
- gtirloni 10mo ago> and I will produce no more Thanks for your contributions so far but this won't change anything. If you'd want to have a positive on this matter, it's better to pressure the government(s) to prevent GenAI companies from using content they don't have a license for, so they behave like any other business that came before them.
- indigoabstract 10mo agoIt's kind of ironic since AI can only grow by feeding on data and open source with its good intentions of sharing knowledge is absolutely perfect for this. But AI is also the ultimate meat grinder, there's no yours or theirs in the final dish, it's just meat. And open source licenses are practically unenforceable for an AI system, unless you can maybe get it to cough up verbatim code from its training data. At the same time, we all know they're not going anywhere, they're here to stay. I'm personally not against them, they're very useful obviously, but I do have mixed or mostly negative feelings on how they got their training data.
- mrcwinn 10mo agoWas it ever open source if there was an implied refusal to create something you don't approve of? Was it only for certain kinds of software, certain kinds of creators? If there was some kind of implicit approval process or consent requirement, did you publish it? Where can that be reviewed?
- skybrian 10mo agoIf you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place. Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.
- conradfr 10mo agoIt's not really people, and they don't really use the software.
- skybrian 10mo agoPeople training LLM's on source code is sort of like using newspaper for wrapping fish. It's not the expected use, but people are still using it for something. As they say, "reduce, reuse, recycle." Your words are getting composted.
- Vegenoid 10mo agoNothing says reduce and reuse like building huge quantities of GPUs and massive data centers to run AI models. It’s like composting!
- Barrin92 10mo ago>Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values. Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery.
- whateverboat 10mo agoThat's a weird position to take. Open source software is actually what is mitigating this stupidity in my opinion. Having monopolistic players like Microsoft and Google is what brought us here in the first place.