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> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is ma

by dom96 9mo ago

> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? We've already seen some pretty strong evidence of this with Tailwind.

poszlem 9mo ago
You are not wrong to feel this, because you cannot control what you feel. But it might be worth investigating why you feel this, and why were you writing open source in the first place.
- abc123abc123 9mo ago
  It is actually very simple to control what you feel, and very much possible. This deterministic idea about our feelings must die quick. Pro-tip, call the psychology department at your local university and they will happily teach you how to control your feelings.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  Job insecurity while a bunch of companies claim LLM coding agents are letting them decimate their workforces is a pretty solid reason to feel like your code is being stolen. Many, if not most tech workers have been very sheltered from the harsher economic realities most people face, and many are realizing that labor demand, rather than being special, is why. A core goal of AI products is increasing the supply of what developer labor produces, which reduces demand for that labor. So yeah— feeling robbed when your donated code is used to train models is pretty rational.
- supriyo-biswas 9mo ago
  Ultimately most things in life and society where one freely gives (and open source could be said to be one such activity) is also balanced by advising everyone participating in the "system" to also reciprocate the same, without which it becomes an exploitative relationship. Examples of such sayings can be found in most major world religions, but a non-religious explanation of the dynamics at hand follows below. If running an open source model means that I have only given out without receiving anything, there remains the possibility of being exploited. This dynamic has always existed, such as companies using a project and sending in vulnerability reports and the like but not offering to help, and instead demanding, often quite rudely. In the past working with such extractive contributors may have been balanced with other benefits such as growing exposure leading to professional opportunities, or being able to sell hosted versions, consulting services and paid features, which would have helped the maintainer of the open source project pay off their bills and get ahead in life. However with the rise of LLMs, it both facilitates usage of the open source tools without getting a chance to direct their attention towards these paid services, nor allows the maintainer to have direct exposure to their contributors. It also indirectly violates the spirit of said open source licenses, as LLMs can spit out the knowledge contained in these codebases at a scale that humans cannot, thus allowing people to bypass the license and create their own versions of the tools, which are themselves not open source despite deriving their knowledge from such data. Ultimately we don't need to debate about this; if open source remains a viable model in the age of LLMs, people will continue to do it regardless of whether we agree or disagree regarding topics such as this; on the other hand, if people are not rewarded in any way we will only be left with LLM generated codebases that anyone could have produced, leaving all the interesting software development to happen behind closed doors in companies.
Freak_NL 9mo ago
I don't worry about that too much. I still contribute to FOSS projects, and I use FOSS projects. Whenever I contribute, I usually fix something that affects me (or maybe just something I encountered), and fixing it has a positive effect on the users of that software, including me.
rolisz 9mo ago
With Tailwind, wasn't the problem that much fewer people visited the documentation, which showed ads? The LLMs still used Tailwind
chrishare 9mo ago
I think the Tailwind case is more complicated than this, but yes - I think it's reasonable to want to contribute something to the common good but fear that the value will disproportionally go to AI companies and shareholders.
bromuro 9mo ago
I do open source exactly because i’m fine my work can be “stolen”.
- m4rtink 9mo ago
  Stolen means no attribution and not following the rules of the GPL, instead producing un-attributed AI-washed closed source code owned by companies.
- arter45 9mo ago
  GPL requires attribution. Some people are fine with their code being used by others for free while still expecting their work to be acknowledged. Code posted on Stackoverflow is apparently CC-BY-SA licensed, which means attribution is still required.
RadiozRadioz 9mo ago
I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for. I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the license.
- luke5441 9mo ago
  GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option is not to publish. There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options, but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help much.
  - ThunderSizzle 9mo ago
    > Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court. Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.
    - zarzavat 9mo ago
      Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important. Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.
      - luke5441 9mo ago
        Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If there were problems in the US, they'd just move training there.
prodigycorp 9mo ago
I dont understand the invocation of tailwind here. It doesn't make sense. Tailwind's LLM struggles had nothing to do with open source, it had to do with the fact that they had the same business model as publisher, with ads pointing to their only product.
- aspaviento 9mo ago
  Exactly, their issue was about a drop in visits to their documentation site where they promote their paid products. If they were making money from usage, their business could really thrive with LLMs recommending Tailwind by default
  - dom96 9mo ago
    AFAIK their issue is that LLMs have been trained on their paid product (Tailwind UI, etc.) and so can reproduce them very easily for free. Which means devs no longer pay for the product. In other words, the open source model of "open core with paid additional features" may be dead thanks to LLMs. Perhaps less so for some types of applications, but for frameworks like Tailwind very much so.
    - prodigycorp 9mo ago
      That's not what Adam said. He said it was a traffic issue.
burnermore 9mo ago
This is an absolute valid concern. We either need strong governmental interventions to these models who don't comply with OSS. Or accept that there definitely wont be open model businesses. Make them proprietary and accept the fact that even permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD Clause 2/3 wont't be followed by anyone while writing OSS. And as for Tailwind, I donno if it is cos of AI.
tmplostpwd 9mo ago
If you don't want people "stealing" your code, you don't want open source. You want source available.
- pferde 9mo ago
  You're confusing open source with public domain.
noosphr 9mo ago
Use a license that doesn't allow it then. Not everything needs to be mit or gnu.
- bakugo 9mo ago
  LLMs don't care about licenses. And even if they did, the people who use them to generate code don't care about licenses.
  - noosphr 9mo ago
    Thieves don't care about locks, so doors are pointless.
    - bakugo 9mo ago
      Thieves very much do care about doors and locks, because they are a physical barrier that must be bypassed, and doing so is illegal. Software licenses aren't, AI companies can just take your GPL code and spit it back out into non-GPL codebases and there's no way for you to even find out it happened, much less do anything about it, and the law won't help you either.
serf 9mo ago
I don't understand the mindset because I began my foray into open source exactly because I wanted to distribute and share my code. in other words, i've never been in the position that I felt my charitable givings anywhere were ever stolen. Some people write code and put it out there without caveats. Some people jump into open source to be license warriors. Not me. I just write code and share it. If youre a person, great. if you're a machine then I suppose that's okay too -- I don't want to play musical chairs with licenses all day just to throw some code out there, and I don't particularly care if someone more clever than myself uses it to generate a profit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  Me too. I’ve never been a fan of coercive licensing. I don’t consider that “open.” It’s “strings-attached.” I make mine MIT-licensed. If someone takes my stuff, and gets rich (highly unlikely), then that’s fine. I just don’t want some asshole suing me, because they used it inappropriately, or a bug caused them problems. I don’t even care about attribution. I mainly do it, because it forces me to take better care, when I code.
  - immibis 9mo ago
    You wouldn't even be the 100th developer to eventually regret that.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
      > eventually regret that I'm not exactly sure what you mean. I've been doing it for a couple of decades, so far, and haven't regretted it. Am I holding it wrong? I'd be grateful for some elucidation. Thanks!
  - msla 9mo ago
    There's no such thing as coercive licensing, and thinking there is is buying into the myths proprietary vendors perpetuate because they're tired of not being able to farm labor from Open Source developers. It's very interesting that the "viral" nonsense came from Microsoft, isn't it?
oncallthrow 9mo ago
I want to write less, because quite frankly I get zero satisfaction from having an LLM churn out code for me, in the same way that Vincent van Gogh would likely derive no joy from using Nano Banana to create a painting. And sure, I could stubbornly refuse to use an LLM and write the code myself. But after getting used to LLM-assisted coding, particularly recent models, writing code by hand feels extremely tedious now.
ValveFan6969 9mo ago
[flagged]
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? I don't think it's wrong, but misdirected maybe. What do you that someone can "steal" your open source contributions? I've always released most of my code as "open source", and not once has someone "stolen" it, it still sits on the same webpage where I initially published it, decades ago. Sure, it's guaranteed ingested into LLMs since long time ago, but that's hardly "stealing" when the thing is still there + given away for free. I'm not sure how anyone can feel like their open source code was "stolen", wasn't the intention in the first place that anyone can use it for any purpose? That's at least why I release code as open source.
- krior 9mo ago
  "Open Source" does not equal "No terms on how to share and use the code". Granted, there are such licenses but afaik the majority requires attribution at the minimum.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    Then I'd say they're "breaking the license", not "stolen your project", but maybe I'm too anal about the meaning of words.
    - dom96 9mo ago
      Yeah, fair, I could have been clearer. But yes, that is what I meant: breaking the license.
      - otterley 9mo ago
        I’m unaware of any mainstream Open Source licenses that forbid training an AI model on the work. Are you using one?
        9mo ago
babarock 9mo ago
I don't know if you're "wrong", but I do feel differently about this. I've written a ton of open source code and I never cared what people do with it, both "good" or "bad". I only want my code to be "useful". Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer. Of course, I'd rather people use my code to feed the poor than build weapons, but it's just a preference. My conviction is that my code is _freed_ from me and my individual preferences and shared for everyone to use. I don't think my code is "stolen", if someone uses it to make themselves rich.
- martin-t 9mo ago
  > Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer. Why not say "... but to the people I disagree with"? Would you be OK knowing your code is used to cause more harm than good? Would you still continue working on a hypothetical OSS which had no users, other than, say, a totalitarian government in the middle east which executes homosexuals? Would you be OK with your software being a critical directly involved piece of code for example tracking, de-anonymizing and profiling them? Where is the line for you?
  - layer8 9mo ago
    I agree with the GP. While I wouldn’t be happy about such uses, I see the use as detached from the software as-is, given (assuming) that it isn’t purpose-built for the bad uses. If the software is only being used for nefarious purposes, then clearly you have built the wrong thing, not applied the wrong license. The totalitarian government wouldn’t care about your license anyway. The one thing I do care about is attribution — though maybe actually not in the nefarious cases.
    - martin-t 9mo ago
      > The totalitarian government wouldn’t care about your license anyway. I see this a lot and while being technically correct, I think it ignores the costs for them. In practice such a government doesn't need to have laws and courts either but usually does because the appearance of justice. Breaking international laws such as copyright also has costs for them. Nobody will probably care about one small project but large scale violations could (or at least should) lead to sanctions. Similarly, if they want to offer their product in other countries, now they run the risk of having to pay fines. Finally, see my sibling comment but a lot of people act like Open Source is an absolute good just because it's Open Source. By being explicit about our views about right and wrong, we draw attention to this delusion.
risyachka 9mo ago
Also open source without support has zero value. And you can support only 1-2 projects. Meaning 99% of everything oss released now is de-facto abandonware.
samwillis 9mo ago
I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be open source (or at the very least source available). In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple. The future is highly customisable software, and that is best built on open source. How this looks from a business perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to be fun!
- jennyholzer4 9mo ago
  [dead]
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  Why do you think customization can only viably done via changing the code of the application itself. I think there is room for closed source platforms that are built on top of using LLMs via some sort of API that it exposes. For example, iOS can be closed source and LLMs can develop apps for it to expand the capabilities of one's phone. Allowing total customization by a business can allow them to mess up the app itself or make other mistakes. I don't think it's the best interface for allowing others to extend the app.
- dom96 9mo ago
  I'm convinced of the opposite. I think a lot more software will be closed source so that an LLM cannot reproduce it from its training data for free.
- MaxBarraclough 9mo ago
  > In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple. This seems unlikely. It's not the norm today for closed-source software. Why would it be different tomorrow?
  - simonw 9mo ago
    Because we now have LLMs that can read the code for us. I'm feeling this already. Just the other day I was messing around with Fly's new Sprites.dev system and I found myself confused as to how one of the "sprite" CLI features worked. So I went to clone the git repo and have Claude Code figure out the answer... and was surprised to find that the "sprite" CLI tool itself (unlike Fly's flycli tool, which I answer questions about like this pretty often) wasn't open source! That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented me from answering my question. It reminded me that the most frustrating thing about using macOS these days is that so much of it is closed source. I'd love to have Claude write me proper documentation for the sandbox-exec command for example, but that thing is pretty much a black hole.
andrewstuart 9mo ago
I’ve written plenty of open source and I’m glad it’s going into the great training models that help everyone out. I love AI and pay for four services and will never program without AI again. It pleases me that my projects might be helping out.
zsoltkacsandi 9mo ago
> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I believe open source will become a bit less relevant in it’s current form, as solution/project tailored libraries/frameworks can be generated in a few hours with LLMs.
uyzstvqs 9mo ago
Then why open source something in the first place? The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her, and often to publicly collaborate on a project together. If I made something open source, you can train your LLM on it as much as you want. I'm glad my open source work is useful to you.
- tw04 9mo ago
  > The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her The entire point isn’t to allow a large corporation to make private projects out of your open source project for many open source licenses. It’s to ensure the works that leverage your code are open source as well. Something AI is completely ignoring using various excuses as to why their specific type of theft is ok.
  - FergusArgyll 9mo ago
    There is an open source world that believes in the MIT license which has no obligation to keep the derivative FOSS
    - dom96 9mo ago
      Even the MIT license requires attribution, all of that gets lost when training an LLM.
      - otterley 9mo ago
        Read all the text of the license carefully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208
- jeroenhd 9mo ago
  Plenty of people will gladly give you their hard work for free if you promise you'll return the favor. Or if you promise not to take your work and make others pay for it when they could just get it for free. Basically, help the people that want to embrace the freedoms of open source, but not the ones that are just in it for the free labour. Or at the very, very least, include a little "thank you" note. AI doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, so if you're in that mindset you now have to decide between going full hands-off like you or not doing any open source work at all.
martin-t 9mo ago
No, you're absolutely right. LLMs are labor theft on an industrial scale. I spent 10 years writing open source, I haven't touched it in the last 2. I wrote for multiple reasons none of which any longer apply: - I believe every software project should have an open source alternative. But writing open source now means useful patterns can be extracted and incorporated into closed source versions _mechanically_ and with plausible deniability. It's ironically worse if you write useful comments. - I enjoyed the community aspect of building something bigger than one person can accomplish. But LLMs are trained on the whole history and potentially forum posts / chat logs / emails which went into designing the SW too. With sufficiently advanced models, they effectively use my work to create a simulation of myself and other devs. - I believe people (not just devs) should own the product they build (an even stronger protection of workers against exploitation than copyright). Now our past work is being used to replace us in the future without any compensation. - I did it to get credit. Even though it was a small motivation compared to the rest, I enjoyed everyone knowing what I accomplished and I used it during job interviews. If somebody used my work, my name was attached to it. With LLMs, anyone can launder it and nobody knows how useful my work was. - (not solely LLM related) I believed better technology improves the world and quality of life around me. Now I see it as a tool - neutral - to be used by anyone for both good and bad purposes. Here's[0] a comment where I described why it's theft based on how LLMs work. I call it higher order plagiarism. I haven't seen this argument made by other people, it might be useful for arguing about those who want to legalize this. In fact, I wonder if this argument has been made in court and whether the lawyers understand LLMs enough to make it. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330
zahlman 9mo ago
> But, in general, it is now clear that for most projects, writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have fun. I want to write code to defy this logic and express my humanity. "To have fun", yes. But also to showcase what it means when a human engages in the act of programming. Writing code may increasingly not be "needed", but it increasingly is art.
andrewstuart 9mo ago
If you give, and expect something in return, then you are not giving, that is a transaction.
ben_w 9mo ago
> Am I wrong to feel this? There's no such thing as a wrong feeling. And I say this as one of those with the view that AI training is "learning" rather than "stealing", or at least that this is the goal because AI is the dumbest, the most error prone, and also the most expensive way, to try to make a copy of something. My fears about setting things loose for public consumption are more about how I will be judged for them than about being ripped off, which is kinda why that book I started writing a decade ago and have not meaningfully touched in the last 12 months is neither published properly nor sent to some online archive. When it comes to licensing source code, I mostly choose MIT, because I don't care what anyone does with the code once it's out there. But there's no such thing as a wrong feeling, anyone who dismisses your response is blinding themselves to a common human response that also led to various previous violent uprisings against the owners of expensive tools of automation that destroyed the careers of respectable workers.
63stack 9mo ago
Also why would I use your open source project, when I can just prompt the AI to generate one for me, gracefully stripping the license as a bonus?
qsera 9mo ago
Unless I am missing something, it seems that you only need to use something like the following that was (obtained using quick search, haven't tried) https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-github-using-git-remote-gcrypt-9fc289092b25 https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-githu... My opinion on the matter is that AI models stealing the open source code would be ok IF the models are also open and remain so, and the services like chatgpt will remain free of cost (at least a free tier), and remain free of ads. But we all know how it is going to go.
CraftingLinks 9mo ago
Not wrong. But i don't share your concerns at all. I like sharing code and if people, and who knows, machines, can make use of it and provide some value however minute, that makes me content.
jillesvangurp 9mo ago
A common intention with opensource is to allow people, and AI tools they use, to reuse, recombine, etc. OSS code in any way they see fit. If that's not what you want, don't open source your work. It's not stealing if you gave it away and effectively told people "do whatever you want". Which is one way licenses such as the MIT license are often characterized. It's very hard to prevent specific types of usage (like feeding code to an LLM) without throwing out the baby with the bathwater and also preventing all sorts of other valid usages. AGPLv3, which is what antirez and Redis use goes to far IMHO and still doesn't quite get the job done. It doesn't forbid people (or tools) to "look" at the code which is what AI training might be characterized as. That license creates lots of headaches for corporate legal departments. I switched to Valkey for that reason. I actually prefer using MIT style licenses for my own contributions precisely because I don't want to constrain people or AI usage. Go for it. More power to you if you find my work useful. That's why I provide it for free. I think this is consistent with the original goals of open source developers. They wanted others to be able to use their stuff without having to worry about lawyers. Anyway, AI progress won't stop because of any of this. As antirez says, that stuff is now part of our lives and it is a huge enabler if you are still interested in solving interesting problems. Which apparently he is. I can echo much of what he says. I've been able to solve larger and larger problems with AI tools. The last year has seen quite a bit of evolution in what is possible. > Am I wrong to feel this? I think your feelings are yours. But you might at least examine your own reasoning a bit more critically. Words like theft and stealing are big words. And I think your case for that is just very weak. And when you are coding yourself are you not standing on the shoulders of giants? Is that not theft?
williamcotton 9mo ago
I've been writing a bunch of DSLs lately and I would love to have LLMs train on this data.
fabianholzer 9mo ago
> Am I wrong to feel this? Why would a feeling be invalid? You have one life, you are under no obligation to produce clean training material, much less feel bad about this.
tiborsaas 9mo ago
Yes. If you didn't care before when contributing to open source who uses your code then it shouldn't matter now that a company picks up your code. You are also contributing this way too. Tailwind is a business and they picked a business model that wasn't resilient enough.
oxag3n 9mo ago
This is a dilemma for me that gets more and more critical as I finalize my thesis. My default mental model was to open source for the sake of contributing back to the community, enhance my ideas and discuss them with whoever finds it interesting. To my surprise, my doctoral advisor told me to keep the code closed. She told me not only LLMs will steal it and benefit from it, but there's a risk of my code becoming a target after it's stolen by companies with fat attorney budgets and there's no way I could defend and prove anything.
JacobAsmuth 9mo ago
This is why I never got into open source in the first place. I was worried that new programmers might read my code, learn how to program, and then start independently contributing the the projects I know and love - significantly devaluing my contributions.

by dom96 9mo ago

poszlem 9mo ago

You are not wrong to feel this, because you cannot control what you feel. But it might be worth investigating why you feel this, and why were you writing open source in the first place.

abc123abc123 9mo ago
It is actually very simple to control what you feel, and very much possible. This deterministic idea about our feelings must die quick. Pro-tip, call the psychology department at your local university and they will happily teach you how to control your feelings.
DrewADesign 9mo ago
Job insecurity while a bunch of companies claim LLM coding agents are letting them decimate their workforces is a pretty solid reason to feel like your code is being stolen. Many, if not most tech workers have been very sheltered from the harsher economic realities most people face, and many are realizing that labor demand, rather than being special, is why. A core goal of AI products is increasing the supply of what developer labor produces, which reduces demand for that labor. So yeah— feeling robbed when your donated code is used to train models is pretty rational.
supriyo-biswas 9mo ago
Ultimately most things in life and society where one freely gives (and open source could be said to be one such activity) is also balanced by advising everyone participating in the "system" to also reciprocate the same, without which it becomes an exploitative relationship. Examples of such sayings can be found in most major world religions, but a non-religious explanation of the dynamics at hand follows below. If running an open source model means that I have only given out without receiving anything, there remains the possibility of being exploited. This dynamic has always existed, such as companies using a project and sending in vulnerability reports and the like but not offering to help, and instead demanding, often quite rudely. In the past working with such extractive contributors may have been balanced with other benefits such as growing exposure leading to professional opportunities, or being able to sell hosted versions, consulting services and paid features, which would have helped the maintainer of the open source project pay off their bills and get ahead in life. However with the rise of LLMs, it both facilitates usage of the open source tools without getting a chance to direct their attention towards these paid services, nor allows the maintainer to have direct exposure to their contributors. It also indirectly violates the spirit of said open source licenses, as LLMs can spit out the knowledge contained in these codebases at a scale that humans cannot, thus allowing people to bypass the license and create their own versions of the tools, which are themselves not open source despite deriving their knowledge from such data. Ultimately we don't need to debate about this; if open source remains a viable model in the age of LLMs, people will continue to do it regardless of whether we agree or disagree regarding topics such as this; on the other hand, if people are not rewarded in any way we will only be left with LLM generated codebases that anyone could have produced, leaving all the interesting software development to happen behind closed doors in companies.

Freak_NL 9mo ago

I don't worry about that too much. I still contribute to FOSS projects, and I use FOSS projects. Whenever I contribute, I usually fix something that affects me (or maybe just something I encountered), and fixing it has a positive effect on the users of that software, including me.

rolisz 9mo ago

With Tailwind, wasn't the problem that much fewer people visited the documentation, which showed ads? The LLMs still used Tailwind

chrishare 9mo ago

I think the Tailwind case is more complicated than this, but yes - I think it's reasonable to want to contribute something to the common good but fear that the value will disproportionally go to AI companies and shareholders.

bromuro 9mo ago

I do open source exactly because i’m fine my work can be “stolen”.

m4rtink 9mo ago
Stolen means no attribution and not following the rules of the GPL, instead producing un-attributed AI-washed closed source code owned by companies.
arter45 9mo ago
GPL requires attribution. Some people are fine with their code being used by others for free while still expecting their work to be acknowledged. Code posted on Stackoverflow is apparently CC-BY-SA licensed, which means attribution is still required.

RadiozRadioz 9mo ago

I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for. I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the license.

luke5441 9mo ago
GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option is not to publish. There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options, but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help much.
- ThunderSizzle 9mo ago
  > Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court. Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.
  - zarzavat 9mo ago
    Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important. Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.
    - luke5441 9mo ago
      Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If there were problems in the US, they'd just move training there.

prodigycorp 9mo ago

I dont understand the invocation of tailwind here. It doesn't make sense. Tailwind's LLM struggles had nothing to do with open source, it had to do with the fact that they had the same business model as publisher, with ads pointing to their only product.

aspaviento 9mo ago
Exactly, their issue was about a drop in visits to their documentation site where they promote their paid products. If they were making money from usage, their business could really thrive with LLMs recommending Tailwind by default
- dom96 9mo ago
  AFAIK their issue is that LLMs have been trained on their paid product (Tailwind UI, etc.) and so can reproduce them very easily for free. Which means devs no longer pay for the product. In other words, the open source model of "open core with paid additional features" may be dead thanks to LLMs. Perhaps less so for some types of applications, but for frameworks like Tailwind very much so.
  - prodigycorp 9mo ago
    That's not what Adam said. He said it was a traffic issue.

burnermore 9mo ago

This is an absolute valid concern. We either need strong governmental interventions to these models who don't comply with OSS. Or accept that there definitely wont be open model businesses. Make them proprietary and accept the fact that even permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD Clause 2/3 wont't be followed by anyone while writing OSS. And as for Tailwind, I donno if it is cos of AI.

tmplostpwd 9mo ago

If you don't want people "stealing" your code, you don't want open source. You want source available.

pferde 9mo ago
You're confusing open source with public domain.

noosphr 9mo ago

Use a license that doesn't allow it then. Not everything needs to be mit or gnu.

bakugo 9mo ago
LLMs don't care about licenses. And even if they did, the people who use them to generate code don't care about licenses.
- noosphr 9mo ago
  Thieves don't care about locks, so doors are pointless.
  - bakugo 9mo ago
    Thieves very much do care about doors and locks, because they are a physical barrier that must be bypassed, and doing so is illegal. Software licenses aren't, AI companies can just take your GPL code and spit it back out into non-GPL codebases and there's no way for you to even find out it happened, much less do anything about it, and the law won't help you either.

serf 9mo ago

I don't understand the mindset because I began my foray into open source exactly because I wanted to distribute and share my code. in other words, i've never been in the position that I felt my charitable givings anywhere were ever stolen. Some people write code and put it out there without caveats. Some people jump into open source to be license warriors. Not me. I just write code and share it. If youre a person, great. if you're a machine then I suppose that's okay too -- I don't want to play musical chairs with licenses all day just to throw some code out there, and I don't particularly care if someone more clever than myself uses it to generate a profit.

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
Me too. I’ve never been a fan of coercive licensing. I don’t consider that “open.” It’s “strings-attached.” I make mine MIT-licensed. If someone takes my stuff, and gets rich (highly unlikely), then that’s fine. I just don’t want some asshole suing me, because they used it inappropriately, or a bug caused them problems. I don’t even care about attribution. I mainly do it, because it forces me to take better care, when I code.
- immibis 9mo ago
  You wouldn't even be the 100th developer to eventually regret that.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
    > eventually regret that I'm not exactly sure what you mean. I've been doing it for a couple of decades, so far, and haven't regretted it. Am I holding it wrong? I'd be grateful for some elucidation. Thanks!
- msla 9mo ago
  There's no such thing as coercive licensing, and thinking there is is buying into the myths proprietary vendors perpetuate because they're tired of not being able to farm labor from Open Source developers. It's very interesting that the "viral" nonsense came from Microsoft, isn't it?

oncallthrow 9mo ago

I want to write less, because quite frankly I get zero satisfaction from having an LLM churn out code for me, in the same way that Vincent van Gogh would likely derive no joy from using Nano Banana to create a painting. And sure, I could stubbornly refuse to use an LLM and write the code myself. But after getting used to LLM-assisted coding, particularly recent models, writing code by hand feels extremely tedious now.

ValveFan6969 9mo ago

[flagged]

embedding-shape 9mo ago

> I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? I don't think it's wrong, but misdirected maybe. What do you that someone can "steal" your open source contributions? I've always released most of my code as "open source", and not once has someone "stolen" it, it still sits on the same webpage where I initially published it, decades ago. Sure, it's guaranteed ingested into LLMs since long time ago, but that's hardly "stealing" when the thing is still there + given away for free. I'm not sure how anyone can feel like their open source code was "stolen", wasn't the intention in the first place that anyone can use it for any purpose? That's at least why I release code as open source.

krior 9mo ago
"Open Source" does not equal "No terms on how to share and use the code". Granted, there are such licenses but afaik the majority requires attribution at the minimum.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Then I'd say they're "breaking the license", not "stolen your project", but maybe I'm too anal about the meaning of words.
  - dom96 9mo ago
    Yeah, fair, I could have been clearer. But yes, that is what I meant: breaking the license.
    - otterley 9mo ago
      I’m unaware of any mainstream Open Source licenses that forbid training an AI model on the work. Are you using one?
      - 9mo ago

babarock 9mo ago

I don't know if you're "wrong", but I do feel differently about this. I've written a ton of open source code and I never cared what people do with it, both "good" or "bad". I only want my code to be "useful". Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer. Of course, I'd rather people use my code to feed the poor than build weapons, but it's just a preference. My conviction is that my code is _freed_ from me and my individual preferences and shared for everyone to use. I don't think my code is "stolen", if someone uses it to make themselves rich.

martin-t 9mo ago
> Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer. Why not say "... but to the people I disagree with"? Would you be OK knowing your code is used to cause more harm than good? Would you still continue working on a hypothetical OSS which had no users, other than, say, a totalitarian government in the middle east which executes homosexuals? Would you be OK with your software being a critical directly involved piece of code for example tracking, de-anonymizing and profiling them? Where is the line for you?
- layer8 9mo ago
  I agree with the GP. While I wouldn’t be happy about such uses, I see the use as detached from the software as-is, given (assuming) that it isn’t purpose-built for the bad uses. If the software is only being used for nefarious purposes, then clearly you have built the wrong thing, not applied the wrong license. The totalitarian government wouldn’t care about your license anyway. The one thing I do care about is attribution — though maybe actually not in the nefarious cases.
  - martin-t 9mo ago
    > The totalitarian government wouldn’t care about your license anyway. I see this a lot and while being technically correct, I think it ignores the costs for them. In practice such a government doesn't need to have laws and courts either but usually does because the appearance of justice. Breaking international laws such as copyright also has costs for them. Nobody will probably care about one small project but large scale violations could (or at least should) lead to sanctions. Similarly, if they want to offer their product in other countries, now they run the risk of having to pay fines. Finally, see my sibling comment but a lot of people act like Open Source is an absolute good just because it's Open Source. By being explicit about our views about right and wrong, we draw attention to this delusion.

risyachka 9mo ago

Also open source without support has zero value. And you can support only 1-2 projects. Meaning 99% of everything oss released now is de-facto abandonware.

samwillis 9mo ago

I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be open source (or at the very least source available). In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple. The future is highly customisable software, and that is best built on open source. How this looks from a business perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to be fun!

jennyholzer4 9mo ago
[dead]
charcircuit 9mo ago
Why do you think customization can only viably done via changing the code of the application itself. I think there is room for closed source platforms that are built on top of using LLMs via some sort of API that it exposes. For example, iOS can be closed source and LLMs can develop apps for it to expand the capabilities of one's phone. Allowing total customization by a business can allow them to mess up the app itself or make other mistakes. I don't think it's the best interface for allowing others to extend the app.
dom96 9mo ago
I'm convinced of the opposite. I think a lot more software will be closed source so that an LLM cannot reproduce it from its training data for free.
MaxBarraclough 9mo ago
> In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple. This seems unlikely. It's not the norm today for closed-source software. Why would it be different tomorrow?
- simonw 9mo ago
  Because we now have LLMs that can read the code for us. I'm feeling this already. Just the other day I was messing around with Fly's new Sprites.dev system and I found myself confused as to how one of the "sprite" CLI features worked. So I went to clone the git repo and have Claude Code figure out the answer... and was surprised to find that the "sprite" CLI tool itself (unlike Fly's flycli tool, which I answer questions about like this pretty often) wasn't open source! That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented me from answering my question. It reminded me that the most frustrating thing about using macOS these days is that so much of it is closed source. I'd love to have Claude write me proper documentation for the sandbox-exec command for example, but that thing is pretty much a black hole.

andrewstuart 9mo ago

I’ve written plenty of open source and I’m glad it’s going into the great training models that help everyone out. I love AI and pay for four services and will never program without AI again. It pleases me that my projects might be helping out.

zsoltkacsandi 9mo ago

> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I believe open source will become a bit less relevant in it’s current form, as solution/project tailored libraries/frameworks can be generated in a few hours with LLMs.

uyzstvqs 9mo ago

Then why open source something in the first place? The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her, and often to publicly collaborate on a project together. If I made something open source, you can train your LLM on it as much as you want. I'm glad my open source work is useful to you.

tw04 9mo ago
> The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her The entire point isn’t to allow a large corporation to make private projects out of your open source project for many open source licenses. It’s to ensure the works that leverage your code are open source as well. Something AI is completely ignoring using various excuses as to why their specific type of theft is ok.
- FergusArgyll 9mo ago
  There is an open source world that believes in the MIT license which has no obligation to keep the derivative FOSS
  - dom96 9mo ago
    Even the MIT license requires attribution, all of that gets lost when training an LLM.
    - otterley 9mo ago
      Read all the text of the license carefully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208
jeroenhd 9mo ago
Plenty of people will gladly give you their hard work for free if you promise you'll return the favor. Or if you promise not to take your work and make others pay for it when they could just get it for free. Basically, help the people that want to embrace the freedoms of open source, but not the ones that are just in it for the free labour. Or at the very, very least, include a little "thank you" note. AI doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, so if you're in that mindset you now have to decide between going full hands-off like you or not doing any open source work at all.

martin-t 9mo ago

No, you're absolutely right. LLMs are labor theft on an industrial scale. I spent 10 years writing open source, I haven't touched it in the last 2. I wrote for multiple reasons none of which any longer apply: - I believe every software project should have an open source alternative. But writing open source now means useful patterns can be extracted and incorporated into closed source versions _mechanically_ and with plausible deniability. It's ironically worse if you write useful comments. - I enjoyed the community aspect of building something bigger than one person can accomplish. But LLMs are trained on the whole history and potentially forum posts / chat logs / emails which went into designing the SW too. With sufficiently advanced models, they effectively use my work to create a simulation of myself and other devs. - I believe people (not just devs) should own the product they build (an even stronger protection of workers against exploitation than copyright). Now our past work is being used to replace us in the future without any compensation. - I did it to get credit. Even though it was a small motivation compared to the rest, I enjoyed everyone knowing what I accomplished and I used it during job interviews. If somebody used my work, my name was attached to it. With LLMs, anyone can launder it and nobody knows how useful my work was. - (not solely LLM related) I believed better technology improves the world and quality of life around me. Now I see it as a tool - neutral - to be used by anyone for both good and bad purposes. Here's[0] a comment where I described why it's theft based on how LLMs work. I call it higher order plagiarism. I haven't seen this argument made by other people, it might be useful for arguing about those who want to legalize this. In fact, I wonder if this argument has been made in court and whether the lawyers understand LLMs enough to make it. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330

zahlman 9mo ago

> But, in general, it is now clear that for most projects, writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have fun. I want to write code to defy this logic and express my humanity. "To have fun", yes. But also to showcase what it means when a human engages in the act of programming. Writing code may increasingly not be "needed", but it increasingly is art.

andrewstuart 9mo ago

If you give, and expect something in return, then you are not giving, that is a transaction.

ben_w 9mo ago

> Am I wrong to feel this? There's no such thing as a wrong feeling. And I say this as one of those with the view that AI training is "learning" rather than "stealing", or at least that this is the goal because AI is the dumbest, the most error prone, and also the most expensive way, to try to make a copy of something. My fears about setting things loose for public consumption are more about how I will be judged for them than about being ripped off, which is kinda why that book I started writing a decade ago and have not meaningfully touched in the last 12 months is neither published properly nor sent to some online archive. When it comes to licensing source code, I mostly choose MIT, because I don't care what anyone does with the code once it's out there. But there's no such thing as a wrong feeling, anyone who dismisses your response is blinding themselves to a common human response that also led to various previous violent uprisings against the owners of expensive tools of automation that destroyed the careers of respectable workers.

63stack 9mo ago

Also why would I use your open source project, when I can just prompt the AI to generate one for me, gracefully stripping the license as a bonus?

qsera 9mo ago

Unless I am missing something, it seems that you only need to use something like the following that was (obtained using quick search, haven't tried) https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-github-using-git-remote-gcrypt-9fc289092b25 https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-githu... My opinion on the matter is that AI models stealing the open source code would be ok IF the models are also open and remain so, and the services like chatgpt will remain free of cost (at least a free tier), and remain free of ads. But we all know how it is going to go.

CraftingLinks 9mo ago

Not wrong. But i don't share your concerns at all. I like sharing code and if people, and who knows, machines, can make use of it and provide some value however minute, that makes me content.

jillesvangurp 9mo ago

A common intention with opensource is to allow people, and AI tools they use, to reuse, recombine, etc. OSS code in any way they see fit. If that's not what you want, don't open source your work. It's not stealing if you gave it away and effectively told people "do whatever you want". Which is one way licenses such as the MIT license are often characterized. It's very hard to prevent specific types of usage (like feeding code to an LLM) without throwing out the baby with the bathwater and also preventing all sorts of other valid usages. AGPLv3, which is what antirez and Redis use goes to far IMHO and still doesn't quite get the job done. It doesn't forbid people (or tools) to "look" at the code which is what AI training might be characterized as. That license creates lots of headaches for corporate legal departments. I switched to Valkey for that reason. I actually prefer using MIT style licenses for my own contributions precisely because I don't want to constrain people or AI usage. Go for it. More power to you if you find my work useful. That's why I provide it for free. I think this is consistent with the original goals of open source developers. They wanted others to be able to use their stuff without having to worry about lawyers. Anyway, AI progress won't stop because of any of this. As antirez says, that stuff is now part of our lives and it is a huge enabler if you are still interested in solving interesting problems. Which apparently he is. I can echo much of what he says. I've been able to solve larger and larger problems with AI tools. The last year has seen quite a bit of evolution in what is possible. > Am I wrong to feel this? I think your feelings are yours. But you might at least examine your own reasoning a bit more critically. Words like theft and stealing are big words. And I think your case for that is just very weak. And when you are coding yourself are you not standing on the shoulders of giants? Is that not theft?

williamcotton 9mo ago

I've been writing a bunch of DSLs lately and I would love to have LLMs train on this data.

fabianholzer 9mo ago

> Am I wrong to feel this? Why would a feeling be invalid? You have one life, you are under no obligation to produce clean training material, much less feel bad about this.

tiborsaas 9mo ago

Yes. If you didn't care before when contributing to open source who uses your code then it shouldn't matter now that a company picks up your code. You are also contributing this way too. Tailwind is a business and they picked a business model that wasn't resilient enough.

oxag3n 9mo ago

This is a dilemma for me that gets more and more critical as I finalize my thesis. My default mental model was to open source for the sake of contributing back to the community, enhance my ideas and discuss them with whoever finds it interesting. To my surprise, my doctoral advisor told me to keep the code closed. She told me not only LLMs will steal it and benefit from it, but there's a risk of my code becoming a target after it's stolen by companies with fat attorney budgets and there's no way I could defend and prove anything.

JacobAsmuth 9mo ago

This is why I never got into open source in the first place. I was worried that new programmers might read my code, learn how to program, and then start independently contributing the the projects I know and love - significantly devaluing my contributions.