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There’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open sou
by mangoman 8mo ago
There’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open source? It reads to me like “Hey, we thought the open source goose project was just okay, so we forked it to do it better. But we’re not going to contribute it back to and instead rename it.”
I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…
- firtoz 8mo agoIf they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- toyg 8mo agoLaw, spirit of the law, common decency. Rare currency these days, I know...
- jMyles 8mo ago> If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting What? Who cares about the license agreement? Lawyers and bureaucrats maybe. The real issue with _any_ software project is whether it is meant to be a step toward a more livable and peaceful world or not. Sure, some people make guided missile software to murder people for profit, but that's just obviously antisocial behavior, regardless of how well it complies with license agreements.
- Hasnep 8mo agoIf you put up a sign on your house saying "businesses, feel free to come use my driveway for whatever you want" and McDonald's sets up a restaurant there then you won't have much sympathy from me.
- jMyles 8mo agoWell sure, maybe in this case the driveway owner hasn't been slighted, as they consented to the use, but that doesn't mean that suddenly some other person critiquing Mickey D's for factory farming and using prison-slave labor to make uniforms is misguided. You can't just say, "Well, I'm struggling to see why it's off-putting for McDonald's to use that driveway for their slavery-poison-food operation".
- citizenkeen 8mo agoYou don’t have to agree that it’s off-putting, but if you’re “struggling to understand why” that demonstrates a serious lack of empathy and awareness of social dynamics.
- dkersten 8mo agoJust because it’s legal and allowed doesn’t mean it’s not off putting. Personally, I have no issue with them making their own internal fork, but then blogging about their thing without contributing it back leaves a little bad taste. If it’s so good, then contribute it back, since they benefited from the volunteers.
- dist-epoch 8mo agoYou can't have it both ways. As a library author choose MIT to encourage commercial usage because companies are afraid of GPL, but then complain that companies are actually using it in a MIT license way without contributing back.
- thn-gap 8mo agoLicense it GPL, and it will be fed to a model as training data to recreate it copyright free anyways.
- orangecoffee 8mo agoTraining falls outside of copyright concerns because of fair use, so proprietary or free is orthogonal. This is how the world is currently trending.
- dkersten 8mo agoI can find it off putting regardless. Especially since I’m not the person who released it under MIT license.
- unfunco 8mo ago…and you can get almost identical features by simply installing the GitHub app inside Slack, and then asking Copilot to work on something, this should take < 5m to set up for any organisation using Slack and GitHub.
- Hasnep 8mo agoWelcome to the free software movement!
- oytis 8mo agoCopyleft license would not help if they are only using it internally
- post-it 8mo agoAGPL would
- candiddevmike 8mo agoDo you have access to Stripes minion service so you can demand the source code? No copy left license requires contributing your changes.
- stavros 8mo agoNot unless they were exposing it over a network to non-Stripe people, AFAIK.
- nkohari 8mo agoI don't have specific information about Minions, but I do know about Stripe's architecture and internal tooling. The article isn't really talking about changes they made to goose, it's describing how they went about integrating goose with the rest of their developer infrastructure (ie. the AWS-based remote devbox system, Toolshed, etc).
- jcims 8mo agoI don’t know enough about either but if their approach was to make it substantially more opinionated, which is likely in the case of an org that’s subject to audits, it would make sense to keep it separate.
- _yclj 8mo ago[dead]
- hombre_fatal 8mo agoHow would they contribute back when their fork is a customization of how it works? > We’ve customized the orchestration flow in an opinionated way to interleave agent loops and deterministic code Is goose in such disrepair that you can just drop code changes into it and the smol developer auto-accepts it, happy that anyone is doing the work? Or is goose actually it's own project with 250 issues and 74 PRs and might have its own ideas about how it's built?
- surajrmal 8mo agoThey seem to have just optimized its integration with their existing tooling and workflows. That doesn't sound largely useful to the broader community. It's also probably different enough from goose at this point that rebranding it makes sense. I do think such integrations are hugely important for productivity and usefulness of this sort of tool. It seems like the post is advocating for doing deep 1p integration to further improve the utility of coding agents.
- davidw 8mo agoThe elephant in that room is that all these LLM's were trained on boatloads of open source software that they can remix enough to not violate any copyrights. As an open source contributor, in some ways this makes me much more frustrated than someone making a closed source fork of a BSD licensed project.
- api 8mo agoMy take for a very long time has been that any model trained in violation of copyright should not itself be copyrightable. It should be public domain. This would mean any model for which the trainer did not have permission to create a derivative work either implied by the work’s current license or obtained by them would have to release their model’s weights. You could argue that it’s fair use, but a fair use quotation of a work does not become the property of the one quoting it. If I quote a line from a song or a novel I do not now own rights to that line. So there’s precedent for this.
- techpression 8mo agoWhen everyone is using the same foundation (LLMs) this will become more and more common as a way to sell perceived benefits.