3 ms·
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else. Someone else
by hypfer 10mo ago
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
- wseqyrku 10mo agoWas looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoI keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can. They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!" One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
- aarondf 10mo agoHey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV
- socialcommenter 10mo agoHi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit? I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
- aarondf 10mo agoNo easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!" It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!
- socialcommenter 10mo agoNo easy answers, but a glimpse of hope anyway. Thank you for weighing in!
- aschmelyun 10mo ago> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create. Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself. Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in the community but maintain ownership and an audit trail over what you've created. People ripping off others works has always been a thing, of course it's much easier and pervasive now. It's still (IMO) beneficial to say "Look! I did this thing first!", with the added benefit of accruing the kind of "social capital" Aaron talked about.
- 10mo ago