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John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171 https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171
- nkassis 7mo agoI've been wondering, Stallman was driven to create free software after an incident trying to get the code for firmware on his office printer. I'm wondering if today, would he have just reverse engineered it with AI? Edit: I'm also thinking of what he did rewriting all of Symbolics code for LISP machines (similar to the person that accidentally hacked all vacuum of a certain manufacturer trying to gain access to his robot vacuum? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/accidental-hacker-how-one-man-gained-control-robots- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/acciden...)
- bombcar 7mo agoStallman rarely cared about the rights of the writer, even reading the GPL makes it clear that it's all about the rights of the user. In a world without copyright, code obfuscation, or compliers, where everything ran interpreted as it was written and nobody could do anything to you if you modified it, Stallman would be perfectly content.
- skilled 7mo agohttps://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171 https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171
- dang 7mo agoAdded above. Thanks!
- emiliobumachar 7mo agoAs I understand it, the anti-AI stance of open source software people in particular has nothing to do with AI learning from code bases, and everything to do with AI slop clogging all unrestricted community feedback channels.
- minimaxir 7mo agoIt's both, although the latter is more prominent.
- 3rodents 7mo agoYeah — isn’t he confusing the arguments against AI art? I’m against AI art because it is built on stealing the work of artists who did not consent to their work being trained on. I couldn’t care less about models trained on the open source software I released, because I released it to be used. edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected
- pseudalopex 7mo ago> edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.
- emiliobumachar 7mo ago"BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa 2026" is arguably attribution enough.
- pseudalopex 7mo agoThis would be useless. And false. It could not be argued in good faith. And open source licenses require the original copyright notice specifically.
- tadfisher 7mo agoOh, I thought it was about the wholesale theft (relicensing) of code by laundering through an LLM trained on the same code. ¿Porque no los dos?
- ahartmetz 7mo agoI don't have problem with AI learning from FOSS code bases. I have a big problem with FOSS code bases helping to create non-FOSS code which does not return the favor. AI-washed Windows code for Wine would be fantastic.
- OSaMaBiNLoGiN 7mo agoI think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it. In his follow-up post he talks about him open sourcing old games as a gift, and he doesn't much care how people receive that gift, just that they do. He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not. The original authors most of the time didn't write the software to profit. But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work. It's odd to me that he doesn't acknowledge this.
- sublinear 7mo agoIt's not even the profit, but that there is often no new code being contributed. AI provides an offramp for people to disengage from social coding. People don't see the point because they still don't understand the difference between barely getting something to work and meaningfully improving that thing with new ideas.
- evrimoztamur 7mo agoThere is a major difference between open-sourcing a completed product versus being an open source maintainer, and I'm disappointed that Carmack is drawing a false equivalence here.
- etchalon 7mo agoThis fellow Shawnee Mission East alum gets it.
- lavela 7mo agoThere is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar. I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.
- gensym 7mo agoI find it pretty simple: - OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence - AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
- dysoco 7mo ago> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it Depends on how you see it. I know many people building oss, local alternatives to enterprise software for specific industries that cost thousands of dollars all thanks to AI. If everyone can produce software now and at a much complex and bigger scale, it's much easier to create decentralized and free alternatives to long-standing closed projects.
- contagiousflow 7mo agoYou do understand that the above comment is talking about how the use and reliance on LLMs is what centralizes power right? It's great people can build these tools, but if the means to build these tools are controlled by three central companies where does that leave us?
- MrScruff 7mo agoThat would imply that there will never be an adequate open weights coding model. That might be true, but seems unlikely.
- truted2 7mo agoI agree with you. One counterargument is that producing software was never a path to adoption unless you had distribution and the big companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) have distribution on a scale that individuals will not.
- Sol- 7mo ago> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal project you have certainly democratizes Software. And even though open source models are a year behind, they address your remaining criticism about the AI being centralized.
- gaigalas 7mo agoModel distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.
- moogly 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- reactordev 7mo agoDoesn’t diminish the fact that he does so from a platform of privilege that his early success provided him. He can be both. It’s ok. He’s right about both points. It was a gift. A tremendous gift. He’s right about open source. Too many people see it as a reputation builder rather than a utility like it was intended to be.
- GaryBluto 7mo ago> But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been. What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.
- BoredPositron 7mo agoI mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest character traits.
- john_strinlai 7mo agoarguments are stronger without insults
- moogly 7mo agoAnyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing. I don't even think it's his fault per se. I'm fairly sure he would actually agree with the assessment. His raw intelligence is sky-high. And that is a big reason why he's making this post, is what I'm saying. It doesn't excuse him, but it's not surprising in the least.
- IshKebab 7mo agoTL;DR: I really wanted to use a more permissive license so I don't mind AI scraping my code. Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.
- throwaway2027 7mo agoYou hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary reason for his STB libraries. https://github.com/nothings/stb https://github.com/nothings/stb
- Findecanor 7mo agoIndeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past did so with the conviction that the license itself would in some measure protect the source code itself — as source code — from being exploited by commercially entities. The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to create competing software. Many of those are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.
- galaxyLogic 7mo agoI don't think we should protect "source-code", we should protect people. Source-code doesn't care, people do. Should we protect developers and their rights? Surely, and users' rights too definitely. But protecting source-code as such seems a bit abstract to me.
- yunnpp 7mo agoThis is exactly it. The people who release stuff under the GPL do so precisely because they want the software and derivatives to stay free. The software has strings attached; the AI removes them. What's so hard to understand here? Carmack's argument makes no sense, but I guess it has "Carmack" in it so obviously it must be on the front page of HN.
- throwaway2027 7mo agoPersonally for me I don't see it as gift, he licensed out the engine but didn't want to be in the engine business, after selling enough it feels he just put it out there so it's his stamp forever with the GPL infection. I think he already felt the diminishing returns at the time. He knew about the sharing of floppy discs and hacker scene and eventually someone would've done it and I think he felt cornered and said fuck it might as well put it out there to beat them to it.
- shdh 7mo agoThis is completely speculative and not factual. A lot of work was done by the team to release the source code of many of these games. I know TTimo did a lot of work to help.
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo agoThere's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software. https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889 https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889 I find him speaking really soothing.
- Joel_Mckay 7mo agoJohn Carmack seems to think isomorphic plagiarism and piracy bleed though is good for FOSS. This is demonstrably incorrect given how LLM are built, and he should retire instead of trolling people that still care about workmanship. =3 "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
- dminik 7mo agoSurely we can all agree that there is a difference between: - Sharing/working on something for free with the hopes that others like it and maybe co tribute back. - Sharing something for free so that a giant corporation can make several trillion dollars and use my passion to train a machine for (including, but not limited to) drone striking a school.
- charcircuit 7mo agoIf someone wants just the former they shouldn't make it open source.
- nitwit005 7mo agoHow will someone contribute back without the code?
- charcircuit 7mo agoCode can still be published and merge requests can still be handled even if the code isn't under an open source license. As a prime example check out Unreal Engine. One of the most popular game engines that powers many AAA games and cinema today. They are not open source, but they actively take outside contributions on GitHub. Though unlike what the parent comment is saying Epic can afford to pay people to work on the project instead of having all of the work done for free.
- nitwit005 7mo agoThey let people contribute by making the source open, which also lets the AI companies use it as training data. The question was how would you take contributions without letting the training happen. Edit: typo
- charcircuit 7mo agoEpic makes you agree to a legal agreement before getting access to the source so you could attempt to restrict the source via contract law. The issue is if it does escape to the public, contract law can't save you and copyright law allows for training on it.
- dwroberts 7mo agoI imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah
- fritzo 7mo ago[flagged]
- jhatemyjob 7mo ago> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift I respect Carmack so much more now. I always scratched my head why he made Quake GPL. It was such a waste. Now it doesn't matter anymore. I so thankful copyleft is finally losing its teeth. It served its purpose 30 years ago, we don't need it anymore.
- shdh 7mo agoCorporate lawyers for id wanted GPL iirc
- jhatemyjob 7mo agothat's more or less what carmack said in the tweet in the OP, no?
- SirensOfTitan 7mo agoIn my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own. It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout. Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.
- nomel 7mo ago> in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization what examples are you thinking of?
- _doctor_love 7mo agoMost of 19th and early-20th century history, which is very much recent history. Look up: - The Haymarket Affair - The Homestead Strike - The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - The Ludlow Massacre - The Battle of Blair Mountain You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.
- _doctor_love 7mo agolol this got downvoted - sorry that I studied history!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- CrossVR 7mo agoThere's one elephant in the room that's not being addressed: Training an AI on GPL code and then having it generate equivalent code that is released under a closed source license seems like a good way to destroy the copy-left FOSS ecosystem.
- indemnity 7mo agoThis is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!
- sidewndr46 7mo agoThis kind of reminds me how I saw some teams deal with a vulnerability scanner flagging an OSS dependency as having a reported vulnerability. The dependency was always OSS anyways. Copy & paste the entire thing into your project. Voila, dependency scanner doesn't find any problems any longer.
- ares623 7mo agoEven AI couldn't have come up with that!
- deckar01 7mo agoPeople were violating the terms of GPL without consequence long before AI. It is very difficult to determine if binaries were compiled from fragments of GPL code. The places I have found AI most useful in coding is stripping away layers of abstraction. It is difficult to say as a long time open source contributor, but libraries often tried to cater to everyone and became slow, monolithic piles of abstraction. All the parts of an open source project that are copyrightable are abstraction. When you take away all the branching and make a script that performs all the side effects that some library would have produced for a specific set of args, you are left with something that is not novel. It’s quite liberating to stop fighting errors deep in some UVC driver, and just pull raw bytes from a USB device without a mountain of indirection from decades of irrelevant edge case handling.
- waeaves 7mo ago[flagged]
- slantedview 7mo agoKeep in mind, Carmack heads an AI company now. His opinion should be viewed with that context.
- fresh_broccoli 7mo agoWell, if Carmack wants to give gifts to AI companies then he's free to do it, but it doesn't mean that other people want it too. I think this debate is mainly about the value of human labor. I guess when you're a millionaire, it's much easier to be excited about human labor losing value.
- shdh 7mo agoIf OpenAI, Anthropic, and all other US labs stopped developing LLM’s, the Chinese and Europeans would still continue. You can’t put this genie back in the bottle, and this type of event of human labor being deprecated isn’t new. The forecasts are still not well defined and speculative.
- jcmfernandes 7mo ago> and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift. I can understand his stance on AI given this perspective. I have a harder time empathizing his frustrations. Did he also have a hard time coming to terms with the need for AGPL?
- throwaway2027 7mo agoReplace GPL in his sentence with something anti-AI and think of back in time when Carmack did that, it's exactly the same situation now except he's in a much more favorable position to make that stance, it's ironic if he can't see that most of us are on the other side of that fence with AI right now.
- Isognoviastoma 7mo agoMost of FOSS is not a free gift, but asks for some form of repay. MIT asks for credit. GPL asks or credit and GPL'ing of things built atop. Unlicense is a free gift, but it is a minority. AI reproduces code while removing credit and copyleft from it and this is the problem.
- throwaway2027 7mo agoExactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and eat it too.
- zzo38computer 7mo agoI would want to use the license that does not ask for credit; the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to combine it with software having such licenses).
- godd2 7mo ago> and this is the problem Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use it.
- tombert 7mo agoIf I release something as MIT or Apache, all I want is some credit, either for my own self-satisfaction or for resume fuel. If a library I wrote was used by BigCo, then I could point to their license file and mention that in a job interview or something. If they have Claude generate something based on my code, they don't put it into their license, I don't get the resume fuel, and my work is unrewarded. I have gone back and forth about how I feel about AI training on code, and whether I think it's "theft", but my point is that the original code being available is kind of missing the point.
- Isognoviastoma 7mo ago
- imiric 7mo agoThinking of open source as a gift is such a strange take. It implies that the relationship is merely a transaction where the giftee is the beneficiary and the gifter is a philanthropist. It has subtle financial undertones, and a sense that gifters are somehow morally superior. It is far healthier to see it as a collaboration. The author publishes the software with freedoms that allow anyone to not only use the software, but crucially to modify it and, hopefully, to publish their changes as well so that the entire community can benefit, not just the original author or those who modify it. It encourages people to not keep software to themselves, which is in great part the problem with proprietary software. Additionally, copyleft licenses ensure that those freedoms are propagated, so that malicious people don't abuse the system, i.e. avoiding the paradox of tolerance. Far be it from me to question the wisdom of someone like Carmack, but he's not exactly an authority on open source. While id has released many of their games over the years, this is often a few years after the games are commercially relevant. I guess it makes sense that someone sees open source as a "gift" they give to the world after they've extracted the value they needed from it. I have little interest in what he has to say about "AI", as well. Hey John, where can I find the open source projects released by your "AI" company? Ah, there's physical_atari[1]. Somehow I doubt this is the next industry breakthrough, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. [1]: https://github.com/Keen-Technologies/physical_atari https://github.com/Keen-Technologies/physical_atari
- crote 7mo agoThe gift metaphor might work if you think of it like birthday gifts: yes, it's a gift, but everyone knows that you're supposed to give one in return on their birthday. If you accept gifts on your birthday but never give any in return, you're quickly left with a vanishingly small number of friends.
- shdh 7mo agoIt was certainly a gift to anyone who was able to fork those games and continue their maintenance
- Yanko_11 7mo ago[dead]
- skrebbel 7mo agoThis is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.
- beastman82 7mo agoThe assumption here is that the people who maintain something in a painstaking manner did not intend people to take it and do whatever they want with it in accordance with its license?
- sumeno 7mo ago"in accordance with its license" is the key part that's missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.
- dartharva 7mo ago> The licenses are completely ignored. Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.
- pseudalopex 7mo agoThe user would know how?
- sumeno 7mo agoAre you doing a full search of every GPL licensed repository every time you use an LLM to ensure that it isn't giving you GPL licensed code? That doesn't seem reasonable
- GeoAtreides 7mo agoeveryone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class) 'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things
- wiseowise 7mo agoYou sound like a commie, friend! Have you thought of poor millionaires and they right to finally scratch their OCD by adding another useless feature to slop nobody will ever use? Have you considered challenges they face at work, when their billionaire overlords don't make enough obscene money to match Lizard Ellison or Beff Jezos? Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. (c) Scam Altman
- skeledrew 7mo agoI said it just recently[0] and I'll say it again: those who're big on open source (or at least copyleft) should be jumping hard on the AI opportunity. The core purpose of copyleft is to ensure the freedom of users to do whatever they want with the covered works, chained ad infinitum. Letting AI at said works (and more) now means even more freedom, as now users can trivially (compared to previously) update that code to fit their use case more precisely, or port it to another language, or whatever. I really can't see a valid reason to be against it, beyond something related to profiting in some way by restricting access, which - I would think - is the antithesis of copyleft/permissively licensed open source. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259850
- Isognoviastoma 7mo agoCopyleft is copyright held in smart way. Nobody can take code under GPL and make its _copy_ proprietary because it would be violation of copyright. In the other thread you argued that AI output is not copyrighted. Do you think I can take proprietary code and lauder through AI to get a non-copyrighted copy of it, then modify to my needs? How can I obtain the proprietary code legally in the first place?
- leni536 7mo agoTry it with unreal engine first.
- skeledrew 7mo ago> you argued that AI output is not copyrighted I didn't argue it. The US courts made - and implicitly upheld - the ruling. https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-declines-to-consider-whether-ai-alone-can-create-copyrighted-works https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...
- arjie 7mo agoHas anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me. I think if people want a revshare on things then perhaps they should release under a revshare license. Providing things under open licenses and then pulling a bait-and-switch saying "oh the license isn't actually that you're not supposed to be doing that" doesn't sit right with me. Just be upfront and open with things. The point of the Free Software licenses is that you can go profit off the software, you just have certain obligations back. I think those are pretty good standards. And, in fact, given the tendency towards The Revshare License that everyone seems to learn towards, I think that coming up with the GPL or MIT must have taken some exceptional people. Good for them.
- em-bee 7mo agoyes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine. but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?) and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.
- karteum 7mo agoIMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft license.
- nonethewiser 7mo agoIm convinced a lot of open source proponents dont really like open source based on all the complaints about how the software is used.
- leni536 7mo agoProple choosing MIT-0, BSD0 or some equivalently permissive licence do gift their code to the world without expecting anything in return. Other FOSS developers, not so much. They are the ones who are exploited.
- galaxyLogic 7mo agoI think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".
- agentultra 7mo agoAll due respect to Carmack but I think his take is probably influenced by his investment in his own AI company. There doesn’t seem to be many on this space who have any ethical or moral problems with profiting from the work of others and not contributing anything back to the commons. If we all intended our work in OSS the way he did maybe we’d all see it his way too. Copy left licenses are generally intended, afaict, to protect the commons and ensure people have access to the source. AI systems seem to hide that. And they contribute nothing back. Maybe they need updating, IANAL. But I’d be hesitant to believe that everyone should be as excited as Carmack is.
- throwerofways67 7mo agoCarmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though
- cholantesh 7mo agoPractically every major company in the LLM space claims to have a core mission of pursuing AGI, just like Keen.
- losvedir 7mo agoI don't understand what point you're trying to make. Keen isn't in the LLM space.
- markus_zhang 7mo agoI think it’s more than that. He is always pro performance, pro technology, and maybe libertarian, too.
- cholantesh 7mo agoThere's no maybe about it, he has openly identified as such.
- dundarious 7mo ago
- rurp 7mo agoMany people who provided quality technical content on blogs, Stack Overflow, and other forums thought they were providing a public good and helping to create a lasting culture and community. Turns out they were making fuel pellets to power money machines for the richest tech oligarchs in the world. Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.
- teladnb 7mo agoHe threw Quake 3 over the wall after having made tons of money off it. He is now invested in AI and should just shut up. "AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!" Si tacuisses ...
- shdh 7mo agoid also released the source code to: Wolfenstein 3D: 1995 DOOM: 1997 Quake: 1999 Quake II: 2001 Quake III Arena: 2005 Return to Castle Wolfenstein: 2010 Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory: 2010 Doom 3: 2011 Some people are still leveraging those codebases and are thankful for their releases. Maybe just don’t read what he has to say.
- jjj123 7mo ago“My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world” That’s great for John, but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use. That he cannot understand that others think differently than him is disappointing.
- ohrus 7mo agoEven if not an explicit gift, isn't all OSS implicitly a gift? I'm having trouble understanding the practical difference.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mpyne 7mo ago> but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use How is that open source then? There's a reason they added the "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" clauses when OSI came up with the open source definition in the 90s. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd "Anyone and everyone" was always part of the gig if you wanted to release something as actual open source. If you wanted to wrote proprietary source-available software you always had that choice. Likewise with Free Software's copyleft.
- jjj123 7mo agoFair point! I was conflating source-available and open source. I guess you cannot limit based on user or use case, but you can set rules on attribution and copyleft in OSS, both of which aren’t respected by AI. Still seems different than a no strings attached gift.
- mpyne 7mo agoYes, I think there's a range between 'give it away I don't care what happens after' (public domain) to the "just cite me bro" (BSD/MIT style) and farther into the full copyleft where you have rights to see and modify the source but also obligations if you redistribute from there. AI can't follow all the rules across that range, but GPL-style licenses can also be hard to show infringement of even confined only to humans, which is one reason why you see things like encoding license onto module boundaries in projects like the Linux kernel. Even there, something like io_uring might be GPL but if I use the same techniques to build my library around a send/receive queue concept, as an AI might generate, is it still copyright infringement? I would argue it's never really been the open source model to prevent developers from reimplementing architectural styles or approaches (that's the logic of proprietary software authors), they've instead been after protecting their specific distributable libraries and applications. These are dicey questions even outside of AI, AI just brings them front and center because the linkage between training data and generated output seems more direct. But humans do also learn the same way, by studying source code when possible, even if they later write something from scratch you can't go and unlearn what you've learned.
- nickjj 7mo agoI really admire Carmack and followed everything id software since the beginning. They really did put a lot of things out in the open back then but I don't think that can be compared to current day. Doom and Quake 1 / 2 / 3 were both on the cusp of what computing can do (a new gaming experience) while also being wildly fun. Low competition, unique games and no AI is a MUCH different world than today where there's high competition, not so unique games and AI digesting everything you put out to the world only to be sold to someone else to be your competitor. I'm not convinced what worked for id back then would work today. I'm convinced they would figure out what would work today but I'm almost certain it would be different. I've seen nothing but personal negative outcomes from AI over the last few years. I had a whole business selling tech courses for 10 years that has evaporated into nothing. I open source everything I do since day 1, thousands of stars on some projects, people writing in saying nice things but I never made millions, not even close. Selling courses helped me keep the lights on but that has gone away. It's easy to say open source contributions are a gift and deep down I do believe that, but when you don't have infinite money like Carmack and DHH the whole "middle class" of open source contributors have gotten their life flipped upside down from AI. We're being forced out of doing this because it's hard to spend a material amount of time on this sort of thing when you need income at the same time to survive in this world.
- eqvinox 7mo agoI mean, yeah, sure, I can see that for open source. And GPL'd code is not open source, it's free software. The license implies the code cannot find its way into non-GPL codebases, and you can't profit*1 from the code. (But you can profit from services on top, e.g. support services, or paid feature development.) Now the question is, is that intersection set all GPL developers? *1 note profit would imply distribution
- torginus 7mo agoI have a secret fear about AI - that at one point when AI models get good enough, AI companies will no longer give you the source these tools generate - you'll get the artifacts (perhaps hosted on a subscription website), but you won't get the code. Tools like CC already push a workflow where you're separated from the code and treat the model as a 'wishing well'. I think the fact that we get the source is just adminssion that these models are not good enough to really take our jobs (yet). I wonder how much a gift AI companies think their models (and even outputs of their models) are, considering their weights are proprietary and their training methods even moreso.
- gensym 7mo ago> I have a secret fear about AI - that at one point when AI models get good enough, AI companies will no longer give you the source these tools generate - you'll get the artifacts (perhaps hosted on a subscription website), but you won't get the code. This is a likelier outcome than the various utopian promises (no more cancer!) that AI boosters have been making.
- ricardobeat 7mo agoThat highlights the importance of open models keeping up with the state of the art.
- themafia 7mo ago> and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors It sounds like he understands the problem perfectly. Is he not capable of thinking through how a non-millionaire would think about this? Sheesh.
- bronlund 7mo agoAll in all, I think copyright and patents should be abolished. They're just holding back the world for the sake of greed. There has to be another way.
- joecool1029 7mo agoThe foundation to which all of these licenses are tied to will likely be dissolved. Words/code had value in the old system. But now it's cheap to generate, way cheaper than hiring legions of writers/developers to write it. When it was a valuable asset lobbyists spent to protect it under law. I want you to think as you read this comment, do you think Disney would rather pay unionized workers or abolish copyright law and use other (trademark) mechanisms to protect their IP? A decade or so ago, this kind of thought would be crazy but things have changed. So we have this foundation, this anchor which is copyright law that gives us any power to have a say about whether code should be accessible. Without that, the licenses are empty words, no weight. No remedy. My concern is less that opensource code gets used by commercial interests; I would rather they use libraries that are maintained especially in contexts of security... my concern is that we move toward only having devices we can keep as long as the company supports them and/or is solvent. If we lose the foundation that everything was built on (copyright law), it becomes impossible to audit or support things on our own. Everything is a rental/subscription. I don't often just come out and make predictions, this is one I think we're moving toward though as the sea becomes more muddied by regurgitated works. The major AI companies are unabashedly pirating works, there are powerful rights-holders that could be sending armies of lawyers after them, like the big publishing houses... but is it happening? Or are they sitting back and letting the tech companies do R&D for what will be their new business models moving forward.
- markus_zhang 7mo agoJohn Carmack and all 10x programmers are going to benefit a lot from the advancement of AI, while we the ordinary programmers are going to suffer in the mid-long term. I mean he is one of the guys I look up to, but I don't want to lose my job. Regarding OSS, I'll say what I already said a few days ago: OSS people should take care of their financials first, and then do OSS without anxiety. Also, if you do OSS, expect it to be abused in any imaginable and unimaginable way. The "license" is a joke when enough dollars are involved. If you hate that, don't do OSS. No one forces you to do it. I appreciate what you did, but please take care of yourselves first. Actually, now that I thought about it, every successful OSS people that I look up to took care of their financials first. Many of them also did it in Carmack's way -- get a cool project, release it, don't linger, go to the next one while others improve it. Maybe you should do it, too.
- ClaudioAnthrop 7mo ago[dead]
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- maxothex 7mo ago[dead]
- CrzyLngPwd 7mo agoMillionaire tells millionaire wannabes what to do and not to do.
- olivierestsage 7mo agoHe's downplaying the "social change" aspect. For many, open source/free software has a political element, at least implicitly. That element is strongly opposed to aggressive centralization of capital and surveillance power. You can point out how different licenses were always written in a way that permitted monetization/for-profit use, but that's beside the point -- the people who chose those licenses never imagined that their code would be used at this scale for this kind of purpose.
- nunez 7mo ago> My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world. Says yet another person who's hilariously rich, financially invested in the success of AI and isn't materially affected by AI displacing them.
- shdh 7mo agoid Software released the source code to Wolfenstein in 1995, he was only rich at that point on merit and the success of their games. Bethesda ended that practice.
- wiseowise 7mo agoWhat's your point though? That just because he's extremely smart, got lucky and got rich in the process he's somehow immune to critique? No one can argue that John is an exceptional programmer and human being, but millions of developers aren't Carmacks – they're shmucks trying to survive under increasing pressure of corporate boot squeezing ever more. They're the ones being threatened by AI, not wealthy John for whom it's all games now.
- shdh 7mo agoBeing displaced due to improved technology isn't anything new. Wagons pulled by horses used to be driven by people as well.
- wiseowise 7mo ago> Being displaced due to improved technology isn't anything new. Wagons pulled by horses used to be driven by people as well. And in this situation Carmack is essentially a wealthy, rich ranch owner who says to peasant that it's not a big deal at all. Again: what's your point?
- shdh 7mo agoThis is not a new pattern in society, it has happened historically and its going to happen again.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoNot everybody means the same thing by open source, it's always been a rather bad umbrella phrase for a lot of different things (and I'm old enough to remember when it first became current). Whether you agree with them or not the free software / copyleft advocates mean something very different from what Carmack is getting at and always have before or after AI. It has always been an anti-corporate position and it's not difficult to reconcile in my mind at all? That said, I'm personally a free software advocate, and in favour of the GPL as a license but I use "AI" (LLMs) (critically). To help make [A]GPL software. I kinda feel by copylefting the output, in some sense I'm helping to right the wrong.
- mwkaufma 7mo agoPulling out the ol' "activist" dog whistle. Cope.
- nabbed 7mo ago>Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors,... I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)
- snickerbockers 7mo ago>If github trained models on the contents of your private repos, that would be a violation. Really don't see why that should change anything. Surely you'd want your gift to the Microsoft corporation to appreciate in value! Why would we ever withold this boon from somebody on the basis that they gifted their source exclusively to microslop!?
- steele 7mo agoCarmack can afford to gift his labor
- Mon0t0n 7mo agothe grift that keeps on grifting
- rDr4g0n 7mo agoWho contributed their work to open source (as a gift) with the expectation that their contribution would eventually be ground into a paste, fully stripped of attribution, and sold as a service? Maybe something has materially changed?
- mempko 7mo agoJohn Carmack already had his bag and reputation when he did the code dumps.
- muyuu 7mo agoI don't consider myself anti AI at all, but I find relicensing concrete solutions by supposed AI rewrites to be completely callous and an attack on human work. I don't think this can be just dismissed as being against using a particular technology. From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft. If instead you want to simply make it public domain, and this for some reason becomes acceptable, then it becomes the end of code as IP. The end of potentially any IP, which by the way I know plenty of people who would be happy about - "IP is theft" crowd - but which I think is unfair on those who had no real opportunity to build any equity on their work. Precisely because I strongly believe in the potential of generative AI to eventually carry out entire projects with little technical guidance, I think it's important to establish the property of both what exists and what is achieved by humans with AI augmentation. This is a much more immediate concern than "runaway AI" or any form of singularity. As is today, generative AI has proven capable to replicate the results established projects with improvements (establishing how much is just parroted from the very replicated project and similar ones is academic in practice).
- FreakyT 7mo ago> From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft. If you replace “AI” with “a software engineering team”, does that change your argument? It seems like you’re essentially arguing that APIs should be copyrightable, which seems like a Bad Thing to me.
- qaadika 7mo ago> an attack on human work A "software engineering team" is human, so that does change the argument. It becomes a human-human problem, not a human-machine problem. Or in OSHA terms, a problem to be solved with administrative controls rather than engineering controls.
- Plywood1 7mo agoHello
- wiseowise 7mo agohttps://x.com/Rahll/status/2032473978179039260 https://x.com/Rahll/status/2032473978179039260 Is a better comment.
- Plywood1 7mo agoSo, big tech takes the "gift" of passionate developers and: 1. Use them to threaten their jobs (and so many other jobs like lawyers, artists, tech writers...). 2. Hoard hardware, causing prices to raise to absurd levels and effectively making it harder for passionate developers to tinker at home. 3. Set up circular deals between themselves to raise stock prices, creating a bubble that will make 2008 seem like a joke. 4. Close the models and refuse to give credit to anyone or be transparent about training data. 5. Hire cheap labor to label training data in third world countries. 6. Use their models to gather data about the users and profile them, essentially paving the way for mass AI surveillance. 7. Fearmonger about how their models have the potential to wipe the human race. 8. And many other wonderful things. But hey, we're failing to see how AI is magnifying the value of "our gift". See? Little Timmy can now build a website for his dog with 0 effort just by prompting ChatGPT! Isn't that mind blowing? I don't mind if he's Carmack or fucking Leonardo da Vinci, he's legit stupid.
- revanx_ 7mo agoHe's anything but stupid, he is also human, makes mistakes (like you) and the last time I checked he was working on AI for years now so, yeah, he's probably going to gravitate towards "AI good" instead of "AI took my job".
- wiseowise 7mo agoNot stupid, just doesn't give a shit. He's 50+, has $100+ mil net worth and can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants. He's a cunt, but not a stupid cunt.
- wolvesechoes 7mo agoHe is not stupid. He is just like most tech people - ignorant of history, sociology and matters of policy. For decades STEM people asked why we even need humanities when we have science and technology. This is why.
- poolnoodle 7mo agoIn a way, doesn't AI violate non-commercial open source licenses because it takes the code and then profits from it but in a way that is so opaque that nobody can prove it?
- pepperoni_pizza 7mo agoIn the "When you're a star^H^H^H^H big tech, they let you do it. You can do anything." kind of way.
- cadamsdotcom 7mo agoIt’s a shame John Carmack made enough money to get rich. It shields him from the need to truly hustle.. and the world really needs his hustle right now.
- albatross79 7mo agoCarmack can be enthusiastic about AI because it's no threat to him, he's already set. He's not going to be laid off, and if he is, he can just do coding as a hobby for the rest of his life. He doesn't need to worry about what blue collar job to retrain for in middle age to be able to pay his mortgage and clothe his kids. And it is a form of cheating to take a gift and profit off of it, keeping all the profits for yourself, it goes against the spirit of it. Until now that was fine, because there was a sense that it made more things possible and created jobs, and these projects were improved through reciprocal contribution. AI vacuumed everything up for itself and turned around and said now I'm going to replace you.
- 0dayz 7mo agoIt's a bit of a complicated topic in general. Personally I think ai code should always be open source to at least make it the most "ethical", others can see and edit it as they see fit. Generally though I've noticed that the spirit of open source (community owned code) has slowly been morphing into a few pointers that in some way undermine open source, whenever that be the fact that folks get more entitled towards open source projects or that they see certain open source licenses (specifically GPL) as a tool to build an anti-capitalist moat. Despite the fact that almost every open source or accepted open source license by OSI or FSF explicitly states no warranty and commercialization of said project is allowed, just that most people don't contribute money let alone code (just look at the xz debacle even now the dev is not given sufficient attention in terms of commercial and social support to maintain it). To be fair to Carmack, his vision of open source is one shared by a lot of the "free means anarcho-free" developer camp and as such if said code is used in ai or to bomb children then so be it. I guess this is one of the major tension of open source is exactly what open source ought to be: A drive towards ethical code or a drive towards anarcho-free, because stating "free as in freedom" is too vague; freedom has the connotation of both the idea of freedom TO DO something and the freedom to be EXEMPT from something. In the end I believe that freedom to be exempt is more important than the freedom to do. Due to the fact that the bad actors usually benefit more to exploit freedom-to than freedom-from, hence why beyond community building the (A|L)GPL helps out in ensuring both as a user but also as a developer that the code written is protecting us both. Whenever or not AI is part of that is well going back to my point that ai code should most likely almost always be open-sourced if one wants to "lift the burden".
- crakhamster01 7mo agoI can maybe see this argument being valid for OSS - as Carmack says, by nature it should be "no strings attached". I don't think that's all anti-AI activists care about though. Honestly, I would say most activists don't talk about the use of OSS? The most prominent anti-AI sentiment seems to come from creatives. Artists, musicians, designers, etc. They didn't publish their works with the same notion as OSS developers, but it was scraped up by corporations all the same. In many cases, these works were protected by copyright law and used anyways. To me that feels like the equivalent of training on "private repos", which Carmack would call a violation [1]. [1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2031769354401091988 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2031769354401091988
- YeGoblynQueenne 7mo agoI have to ask, are there really "anti-AI activists"? Like, are there people marching against AI, attacking data center, spray-painting "AI OUT" on computers, and so on? Or is it just an exaggeration by Carmak?
- emigre 7mo agoI imagine that he is not that committed to open source, when he chooses to post on X.
- notepad0x90 7mo agoLet's say I put out a bag of candies for halloween or something for anyone to come and take without restrictions. A few of them take most of the candies, then go around the corner and sell it for a significant profit, so much that they are billionaires now, but I've only grown poorer. Would I have any right to be pissed off? No. Once I shared the candies, I have surrendered all entitlements over them. Furthermore, let's say I put some legal text on the candy wrapper that said "if you get sick from eating it, i'm not responsible. if you sell it, you have to pay me 10%. If you cook something with the candy and resell that product, you have to share your new recipe with the world." and a bunch of other ridiculous things. But I put it out there for anyone to take, reading the wrapper and accepting the terms was not a condition the public needed to meet before being able to obtain the candy. Not only that, if you put out poisonous food for the public, what you put on the wrapper doesn't absolve you from responsiblity. Being able to offer things for free to others doesn't grant you rights to control their future commercial activity, unless they specifically agreed to that. It is also outlandish and ridiculous to claim you can have a say in someone's recipe's confidentiality simply because they modified your ingredient candy before using it as part of their recipe. --- # LICENSE I am not responsible for how you interpret this comment. By reading this, you accept fully that I am not responsible for any libel, economic or otherwise any harm caused to you, or any entity you represent. If this comment is used to train AI or used as part of any technology that profits commercially in any way by transforming this comment, the individuals or incorporated entities implementing that technology agree to disclose all transformations made to this comment, the underlying technology used for that transformation, and agree to pay 10% of their net profits from all commercial activity to me, the author of this comment.
- oxag3n 7mo agoOpen sourcing old games is OSS corner case. Being on the top of the Maslow's Pyramid and knowing there's a very little chance you'll slide down is another reason that change people's attitude to things. The side effect is becoming numb to the majority who isn't filthy rich but contribute way more to OSS.