9 ms·

I agree that communities should try to protect themselves from malicious actors. But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's

I agree that communities should try to protect themselves from malicious actors. But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical: IMO FOSS is a gift to humanity and as such: "A gift should be given freely, without obligation or expectation, as a true expression of love and kindness"

poszlem 9mo ago
I think this mixes up the 'how' with the 'why.' FOSS isn't the end in itself, I think that for most people it's just the tool that lets us work together, share what we've built, and get something back from the community. If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.
- breezykoi 9mo ago
  For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.
  - juliangmp 9mo ago
    Emphasis on the freedom, especially the freedom to use by anyone for any purpose. If it took some people in the FOSS space this long that it also includes people, companies or purposes they disagree with, then I don't know what to tell them.
    - duskdozer 9mo ago
      That's just one interpretation of freedom.
      - breezykoi 9mo ago
        You are correct but in the context of free software, the FSF has been explicit about this ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"). Publishing software under a FOSS license imply that you agree with this definition of freedom.
      - pixl97 9mo ago
        I mean, not really... That's like saying "I have the freedom to kill you". Saying that you can create something, then you reserve the 'freedom' to limit what everyone else does for it really doesn't fall under the word freedom at all.
        oblio 9mo ago
        The interpretation is simple and the complete opposite of "I have the freedom to kill you". The software creator (human or AI) must give the user of its software the same freedoms it has received. If it has received the freedom to view the original, readable, source code, then users should have the freedom to view the original, readable, source code. If it has received the freedom to modify the source code, then users should have the freedom to modify the source code. Etc. It's not hard to follow for people who want to do the moral thing. It's VERY hard to follow for people who want to make money (and ideally lots of it, very quickly).
      - juliangmp 9mo ago
        Have you actually read one a Free/Open-Source license? Like for example the MIT[1] license: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software [...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...] Or the FSF's definition[2] of Free Software The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). Or the OSI's definition[3] of open source. 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor It's almost as if this concept is at the very core of FOSS. [1]: https://mit-license.org/ https://mit-license.org/ [2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms [3]: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
        duskdozer 9mo ago
        Yes. Much as there's "MIT free", there's also "AGPL free", and many "MIT free" people consider the AGPL "non-" or less free due to restrictions, while "AGPL free" people consider it more free by demanding its derivatives also be free. While "use for any purpose" has been included, I think considering purpose is a natural extension of this concept. Suppose there were some software project that aimed to practically eliminate the ability for users to share and use free or open software as it is today. Is it more free to allow such a project to be unrestricted from using other software, even if that project would lead to the destruction of free software otherwise?
- Applejinx 9mo ago
  If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do. If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded. And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior. These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
- dannersy 9mo ago
  I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc. It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith. My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.
  - breezykoi 9mo ago
    You're conflating freedom of use with moral endorsement. FOSS grants freedom, not ethical approval of every use.
    - dannersy 9mo ago
      No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.
croisillon 9mo ago
[flagged]
- wazoox 9mo ago
  "Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté" Saint-Just
- throwfaraway135 9mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGBT people -> a lot of LGBT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?
  - ignoramous 9mo ago
    > I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGPT people -> a lot of LGPT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Nice bait with broad sweeping generalizations there. One of critiques of "Paradox of Tolerance" is its proponents (probably not Karl Popper himself) take the argument to its extremes (similar to the generalization you posit), while the reality is more of a spectrum.
    - throwfaraway135 9mo ago
      I didn't intend it to be bait. It is a generalization, but if you read carefully, there is "a lot" at each point. And pretending that there aren't large swaths of people who have different ideas and you can group them into "tolerant" and "none tolerant" is also a generalization.
    - neutronicus 9mo ago
      Yes, I think of “paradox of tolerance” as a sort of glib rebuttal people give when enjoined to tolerate someone. “Fuck you, that person is intolerant, I get to do whatever I want to them. And man, how uncultured are you that you would even suggest otherwise. You must never have heard of this philosopher!”
Palmik 9mo ago
Nothing wrong with a GPL-like viral license for the AI era. Training on my code / media / other data? No worries, just make sure the weights and other derived artifacts are released under similarly permissive license.
- breezykoi 9mo ago
  Wouldn't you want the code generated by those models be released under those permissive licenses as well? Is that what you mean by other derived artifacts?
  - s1mplicissimus 9mo ago
    That's how I interpreted it at least
- teekert 9mo ago
  It really should be like that indeed. Where is RMS? Is he working on GPLv4?
  - twoodfin 9mo ago
    If model training is determined to be fair use under US copyright law—either legislated by Congress or interpreted by Federal courts—then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way.
    - RobotToaster 9mo ago
      > then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way. At least in the US. Quite what happens if another country ordered, say chatGPT, to be released under the AGPL since it was trained on AGPL code, who knows.
  - oblio 9mo ago
    RMS is probably greatly behind the technical news at this point. I mean, he's surfing the web via a email summary of some websites. Even if he doesn't condone of how the internet is evolving, he can't really keep up with technology if he doesn't "mingle". He's also 72, we can't expect him to save everyone. We need new generations of FOSS tech leaders.
gentooflux 9mo ago
AI is not humanity. Also many open source licenses have attribution clauses, which AI does not honor when it regurgitates.
- pipo234 9mo ago
  I think the attribution is a very good point! Essentially LLMs are recontextualizing their training data. So on one hand, one might argue that training is like a human reading books and then inference is like writing something novel, (partially) based on the reading experience. But the contract between humans considers it plagiarism when we recite some studied text and then claim it as your own. So for example, books attribute citations with footnotes. With source code we used to either re-used a library as-is, in which case the license terms would apply OR write our own implementation from scratch. While this LLM recontextualization purports to be like the latter, it is sometimes evident that the original license or at least some attribution, comment or footnote should apply. If only to help with future legibility maintenance.
fweirdo 9mo ago
> But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical I agree with you. Imagine a parallel Earth where there was a free OS that the majority in the world used called GNU/Felix. Felix (it/its), who wrote GNU/Felix and who was the project’s strong but kind leader, one day had a head injury that somehow decreased its empathy but raised its IQ. Subordinates of Felix on the council of leadership noticed that it was adding features that would track all user data to use in some nefarious plan. In this case, most would agree that for both the freedom and good of all, Felix should no longer lead this effort. However, they would want to be sure that even the Will Bates’ great company Bikerosoft didn’t lead the project either, because despite its wonderful and ubiquitous Bikerosoft Office apps and Ezure cloud tools and infrastructure, it was a profit-based company.

poszlem 9mo ago

I think this mixes up the 'how' with the 'why.' FOSS isn't the end in itself, I think that for most people it's just the tool that lets us work together, share what we've built, and get something back from the community. If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.

breezykoi 9mo ago
For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.
- juliangmp 9mo ago
  Emphasis on the freedom, especially the freedom to use by anyone for any purpose. If it took some people in the FOSS space this long that it also includes people, companies or purposes they disagree with, then I don't know what to tell them.
  - duskdozer 9mo ago
    That's just one interpretation of freedom.
    - breezykoi 9mo ago
      You are correct but in the context of free software, the FSF has been explicit about this ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"). Publishing software under a FOSS license imply that you agree with this definition of freedom.
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      I mean, not really... That's like saying "I have the freedom to kill you". Saying that you can create something, then you reserve the 'freedom' to limit what everyone else does for it really doesn't fall under the word freedom at all.
      - oblio 9mo ago
        The interpretation is simple and the complete opposite of "I have the freedom to kill you". The software creator (human or AI) must give the user of its software the same freedoms it has received. If it has received the freedom to view the original, readable, source code, then users should have the freedom to view the original, readable, source code. If it has received the freedom to modify the source code, then users should have the freedom to modify the source code. Etc. It's not hard to follow for people who want to do the moral thing. It's VERY hard to follow for people who want to make money (and ideally lots of it, very quickly).
    - juliangmp 9mo ago
      Have you actually read one a Free/Open-Source license? Like for example the MIT[1] license: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software [...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...] Or the FSF's definition[2] of Free Software The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). Or the OSI's definition[3] of open source. 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor It's almost as if this concept is at the very core of FOSS. [1]: https://mit-license.org/ https://mit-license.org/ [2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms [3]: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
      - duskdozer 9mo ago
        Yes. Much as there's "MIT free", there's also "AGPL free", and many "MIT free" people consider the AGPL "non-" or less free due to restrictions, while "AGPL free" people consider it more free by demanding its derivatives also be free. While "use for any purpose" has been included, I think considering purpose is a natural extension of this concept. Suppose there were some software project that aimed to practically eliminate the ability for users to share and use free or open software as it is today. Is it more free to allow such a project to be unrestricted from using other software, even if that project would lead to the destruction of free software otherwise?
Applejinx 9mo ago
If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do. If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded. And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior. These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
dannersy 9mo ago
I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc. It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith. My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.
- breezykoi 9mo ago
  You're conflating freedom of use with moral endorsement. FOSS grants freedom, not ethical approval of every use.
  - dannersy 9mo ago
    No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.

croisillon 9mo ago

[flagged]

wazoox 9mo ago
"Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté" Saint-Just
throwfaraway135 9mo ago
I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGBT people -> a lot of LGBT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?
- ignoramous 9mo ago
  > I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGPT people -> a lot of LGPT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Nice bait with broad sweeping generalizations there. One of critiques of "Paradox of Tolerance" is its proponents (probably not Karl Popper himself) take the argument to its extremes (similar to the generalization you posit), while the reality is more of a spectrum.
  - throwfaraway135 9mo ago
    I didn't intend it to be bait. It is a generalization, but if you read carefully, there is "a lot" at each point. And pretending that there aren't large swaths of people who have different ideas and you can group them into "tolerant" and "none tolerant" is also a generalization.
  - neutronicus 9mo ago
    Yes, I think of “paradox of tolerance” as a sort of glib rebuttal people give when enjoined to tolerate someone. “Fuck you, that person is intolerant, I get to do whatever I want to them. And man, how uncultured are you that you would even suggest otherwise. You must never have heard of this philosopher!”

Palmik 9mo ago

Nothing wrong with a GPL-like viral license for the AI era. Training on my code / media / other data? No worries, just make sure the weights and other derived artifacts are released under similarly permissive license.

breezykoi 9mo ago
Wouldn't you want the code generated by those models be released under those permissive licenses as well? Is that what you mean by other derived artifacts?
- s1mplicissimus 9mo ago
  That's how I interpreted it at least
teekert 9mo ago
It really should be like that indeed. Where is RMS? Is he working on GPLv4?
- twoodfin 9mo ago
  If model training is determined to be fair use under US copyright law—either legislated by Congress or interpreted by Federal courts—then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way.
  - RobotToaster 9mo ago
    > then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way. At least in the US. Quite what happens if another country ordered, say chatGPT, to be released under the AGPL since it was trained on AGPL code, who knows.
- oblio 9mo ago
  RMS is probably greatly behind the technical news at this point. I mean, he's surfing the web via a email summary of some websites. Even if he doesn't condone of how the internet is evolving, he can't really keep up with technology if he doesn't "mingle". He's also 72, we can't expect him to save everyone. We need new generations of FOSS tech leaders.

gentooflux 9mo ago

AI is not humanity. Also many open source licenses have attribution clauses, which AI does not honor when it regurgitates.

pipo234 9mo ago
I think the attribution is a very good point! Essentially LLMs are recontextualizing their training data. So on one hand, one might argue that training is like a human reading books and then inference is like writing something novel, (partially) based on the reading experience. But the contract between humans considers it plagiarism when we recite some studied text and then claim it as your own. So for example, books attribute citations with footnotes. With source code we used to either re-used a library as-is, in which case the license terms would apply OR write our own implementation from scratch. While this LLM recontextualization purports to be like the latter, it is sometimes evident that the original license or at least some attribution, comment or footnote should apply. If only to help with future legibility maintenance.

fweirdo 9mo ago

> But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical I agree with you. Imagine a parallel Earth where there was a free OS that the majority in the world used called GNU/Felix. Felix (it/its), who wrote GNU/Felix and who was the project’s strong but kind leader, one day had a head injury that somehow decreased its empathy but raised its IQ. Subordinates of Felix on the council of leadership noticed that it was adding features that would track all user data to use in some nefarious plan. In this case, most would agree that for both the freedom and good of all, Felix should no longer lead this effort. However, they would want to be sure that even the Will Bates’ great company Bikerosoft didn’t lead the project either, because despite its wonderful and ubiquitous Bikerosoft Office apps and Ezure cloud tools and infrastructure, it was a profit-based company.