3 ms·

Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them. It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liber

by utopiah 8mo ago

Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them. It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify. "Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often? Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!

karel-3d 8mo ago
It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.
- fladrif 8mo ago
  Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
  - darkwater 8mo ago
    If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
    - lupire 8mo ago
      PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.
      - dymk 8mo ago
        That wasn’t people weaponizing satire, that was people just making weapons
    - fladrif 8mo ago
      Unfortunately it's not too bad for them, it's too bad for everyone they're around. They aren't the ones that lose out when we start dismantling open source communities.
  - svnt 8mo ago
    There is an overlay of smeared poop on one of the license files… is that something you are seeing on typical tech company landing pages? The company is literally named “bad/evil.”
  - mcherm 8mo ago
    No one who understands the first thing about this topic could possibly have read that web page and not realized that it was satire. "Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?" "Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers." "For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers." "Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"
    - pixelatedindex 8mo ago
      Maybe I’m missing something but big corps do this, right? I legitimately expect folks like Musk and Zuckerberg to say these things. I get why that’s exactly the reason it’s satire but it’s a little too close to the truth for me to chuckle about it.
    - fladrif 8mo ago
      This is because you're already in that mindset. Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!
zozbot234 8mo ago
This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save you either.
- eru 8mo ago
  No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)
  - Ethee 8mo ago
    The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.
    - dymk 8mo ago
      The courts? Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?
      - Ethee 8mo ago
        Your point is circular, let me bring it all around. If I make a 'clean-room' implementation using an LLM of a software that has a GPL license. How does the court enforce that my black box didn't use the original software in any way if there's no way to know? Does having that software as part of it's training corpus automatically enroll all output as GPL enforceable? This is essentially the question some courts are attempting to answer right now.

by utopiah 8mo ago

karel-3d 8mo ago

It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.

fladrif 8mo ago
Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
- darkwater 8mo ago
  If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
  - lupire 8mo ago
    PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.
    - dymk 8mo ago
      That wasn’t people weaponizing satire, that was people just making weapons
  - fladrif 8mo ago
    Unfortunately it's not too bad for them, it's too bad for everyone they're around. They aren't the ones that lose out when we start dismantling open source communities.
- svnt 8mo ago
  There is an overlay of smeared poop on one of the license files… is that something you are seeing on typical tech company landing pages? The company is literally named “bad/evil.”
- mcherm 8mo ago
  No one who understands the first thing about this topic could possibly have read that web page and not realized that it was satire. "Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?" "Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers." "For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers." "Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"
  - pixelatedindex 8mo ago
    Maybe I’m missing something but big corps do this, right? I legitimately expect folks like Musk and Zuckerberg to say these things. I get why that’s exactly the reason it’s satire but it’s a little too close to the truth for me to chuckle about it.
  - fladrif 8mo ago
    This is because you're already in that mindset. Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!

zozbot234 8mo ago

This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save you either.

eru 8mo ago
No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)
- Ethee 8mo ago
  The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.
  - dymk 8mo ago
    The courts? Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?
    - Ethee 8mo ago
      Your point is circular, let me bring it all around. If I make a 'clean-room' implementation using an LLM of a software that has a GPL license. How does the court enforce that my black box didn't use the original software in any way if there's no way to know? Does having that software as part of it's training corpus automatically enroll all output as GPL enforceable? This is essentially the question some courts are attempting to answer right now.