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This piece was more interesting than I went in expecting it to be. But it hinges I think on a disputable claim, that the GPL's value is based on a network effec

by tptacek 8mo ago

This piece was more interesting than I went in expecting it to be. But it hinges I think on a disputable claim, that the GPL's value is based on a network effect, so that the GPL gets dramatically less useful (and thus attractive to newer projects) as the base of mainstream GPL software shrinks. I'm not sure I understand why that would be the case. The AI rewrite of the Linux kernel also seems farfetched. I don't think it really belongs in the title of this post.

ignoramous 8mo ago
chardet is a Python module ... with 170 million downloads ... licensed under the GPL. A different developer ... to include it in the Python standard distribution ... [reimplemented] it. With [Claude] ... in 5 days ... the reimplementation ... [has] better performance. May be LLMs learning from all of the FOSS code out there, and out-performing a team of domain experts, is helping us realise the promise of free as in beer.
- vips7L 8mo ago
  I guess the question is: was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room?
  - spwa4 8mo ago
    What do you mean? It's pretty damn clear how copyright and courts work, but let's review: 1) when a large copyright conglomerate sues a teenager: 30.000 USD per violation + enforcement of the license by an armed police officer coming to their house. 2) when a teenager has copyright violated by a large copyright conglomerate, or any large company: change the rules and force a compromise, resulting in $0 in damages. In fact it has just been made clear that copyright DOES NOT protect against AI training. That's "fair use". But let's pretend the courts are fair. Let's say I take all disney movies and tell AI to make a new one. Will courts suddenly decide Disney owns the copyright on both the model AND the movie? 100%.
  - ignoramous 8mo ago
    > was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room? Not a true clean room; the TFA notes: ... Every file is different. Automated plagiarism checks report only 1.3% in common code ... the reimplementation looks very clean. Different code, different algorithms, and better performance.
dTal 8mo ago
That's funny, because the "network effect" of the GPL was always extremely obvious to me as part of the point. The idea being that the more that GPL software forms a cohesive ecosystem, the less financially viable it becomes to operate outside of that ecosystem. It's viral, right? And software builds on software, we're about 15 layers deep at this point. The hope is that eventually, so much software is GPL that you effectively have two choices when writing something new: 1) join the GPL borg, or 2) boil the ocean reimplementing the entire stack from scratch. Unfortunately, free software was successful enough that the latest generation takes it for granted, and has forgotten why radical software politics is necessary. They do not understand, if they even think to ask, why so many nerds ran GNU/Linux even when it was objectively kind of terrible - why so many people were motivated to pour time into a half-broken thing. I hope by the time they do understand, it will not be too late. My controversial opinion: the problem with the GPL is that it isn't viral enough. It was written by nerds with a good understanding of computers, and poor understanding of people. As such, it focuses too much on technicalities like what it means "link" programs together, in an attempt to rigorously specify definitions that permit running proprietary programs on free operating systems, and vice versa. But it doesn't work. Every time your Android phone downloads a firmware update, by rights that should be a GPL violation, as it's a single giant executable that mixes together GPL and proprietary code, deliberately made in such a way that separating them out after the fact is impossible - in fact, the program is explicitly designed to fail to run if you so much as tamper with a single bit (signed images). It is hard to imagine something further from Stallman's vision - hard to imagine something less respectful of user freedom. And yet this is permitted on technicalities, because this functionally unmodifiable binary blob happens to be structured in a particular way that computer nerds recognize as a type of database called a "filesystem", and the GPL parts are neatly organized into database entries called "files". And they all agree that that's okay, whereas if you mix the code in a different type of database called a "link table", well that's bad and wrong.
- tptacek 8mo ago
  Why does the GPL network effect mean that I, as a library developer, am incentivized to choose GPL over MIT?

by tptacek 8mo ago

ignoramous 8mo ago

chardet is a Python module ... with 170 million downloads ... licensed under the GPL. A different developer ... to include it in the Python standard distribution ... [reimplemented] it. With [Claude] ... in 5 days ... the reimplementation ... [has] better performance. May be LLMs learning from all of the FOSS code out there, and out-performing a team of domain experts, is helping us realise the promise of free as in beer.

vips7L 8mo ago
I guess the question is: was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room?
- spwa4 8mo ago
  What do you mean? It's pretty damn clear how copyright and courts work, but let's review: 1) when a large copyright conglomerate sues a teenager: 30.000 USD per violation + enforcement of the license by an armed police officer coming to their house. 2) when a teenager has copyright violated by a large copyright conglomerate, or any large company: change the rules and force a compromise, resulting in $0 in damages. In fact it has just been made clear that copyright DOES NOT protect against AI training. That's "fair use". But let's pretend the courts are fair. Let's say I take all disney movies and tell AI to make a new one. Will courts suddenly decide Disney owns the copyright on both the model AND the movie? 100%.
- ignoramous 8mo ago
  > was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room? Not a true clean room; the TFA notes: ... Every file is different. Automated plagiarism checks report only 1.3% in common code ... the reimplementation looks very clean. Different code, different algorithms, and better performance.

dTal 8mo ago

That's funny, because the "network effect" of the GPL was always extremely obvious to me as part of the point. The idea being that the more that GPL software forms a cohesive ecosystem, the less financially viable it becomes to operate outside of that ecosystem. It's viral, right? And software builds on software, we're about 15 layers deep at this point. The hope is that eventually, so much software is GPL that you effectively have two choices when writing something new: 1) join the GPL borg, or 2) boil the ocean reimplementing the entire stack from scratch. Unfortunately, free software was successful enough that the latest generation takes it for granted, and has forgotten why radical software politics is necessary. They do not understand, if they even think to ask, why so many nerds ran GNU/Linux even when it was objectively kind of terrible - why so many people were motivated to pour time into a half-broken thing. I hope by the time they do understand, it will not be too late. My controversial opinion: the problem with the GPL is that it isn't viral enough. It was written by nerds with a good understanding of computers, and poor understanding of people. As such, it focuses too much on technicalities like what it means "link" programs together, in an attempt to rigorously specify definitions that permit running proprietary programs on free operating systems, and vice versa. But it doesn't work. Every time your Android phone downloads a firmware update, by rights that should be a GPL violation, as it's a single giant executable that mixes together GPL and proprietary code, deliberately made in such a way that separating them out after the fact is impossible - in fact, the program is explicitly designed to fail to run if you so much as tamper with a single bit (signed images). It is hard to imagine something further from Stallman's vision - hard to imagine something less respectful of user freedom. And yet this is permitted on technicalities, because this functionally unmodifiable binary blob happens to be structured in a particular way that computer nerds recognize as a type of database called a "filesystem", and the GPL parts are neatly organized into database entries called "files". And they all agree that that's okay, whereas if you mix the code in a different type of database called a "link table", well that's bad and wrong.

tptacek 8mo ago
Why does the GPL network effect mean that I, as a library developer, am incentivized to choose GPL over MIT?