4 ms·

I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strin

by toast0 8mo ago

I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strings isn't exactly a gift. If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me, there were no strings. Your users presumably benefit from the software I wrote, unless you're using it for evil, but I don't have enough clout to use an only IBM may use it for evil license. You benefit from the software I wrote. I've made the world a better place and I didn't have to market or support my software; win-win. I've done plenty of software for hire too. I've used plenty of open source software for work. Ocassionally, I've been able to contribute to open source while working for hire, which is always awesome. It's great to be paid to find and fix problems my employer is having and be able to contribute upstream to fix them for lots more people.

bombcar 8mo ago
It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.
- j-bos 8mo ago
  Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
  - tw04 8mo ago
    >it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
    - j-bos 8mo ago
      So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - NeutralCrane 8mo ago
      The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug. Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
- fwip 8mo ago
  Seems pretty understandable to me. In the former, you work on something hoping that real people will find it useful. In the latter, you're explicitly doing work for a paycheck.
radlad 8mo ago
Presumably you are licensing your code as MIT or a similar license. Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all stronger now. Don't fight AI, fight for open models.
  - GeoAtreides 8mo ago
    there are no open models. none. zero. there are binary files that some companies are allowing you to download, for now. it was called shareware in the old days. one day the tap will close and we'll see then what open models really means
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models https://allenai.org/open-models . For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent. At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
      - anonymousab 8mo ago
        > and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late. > Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests The companies training big models are actively respecting copyright from anyone big enough to actually fight back, and soaking everyone else. They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.
Jare 8mo ago
I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit. If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves. For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".
- pseudalopex 8mo ago
  MIT license requires credit.
  - Jare 8mo ago
    Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
    - pseudalopex 8mo ago
      The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong. > My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included". The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.
bluefirebrand 8mo ago
> If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits
- overfeed 8mo ago
  Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's milages vary. My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
  - jraph 8mo ago
    Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd like to use my work to deny end users the rights to control their computing. That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose. LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
  - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
    So, definitely not just for corporations to make insanely massive profits off?
- toast0 8mo ago
  How much do you think people would pay for this patch? https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320 https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320 If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything? And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.
emigre 8mo ago
Most open source licenses have strings attached, the terms of the licence say what those “strings” are. Like requiring attribution.
dminik 8mo ago
I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly. Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.
johnisgood 8mo ago
That sounds fun. I am trying to find potential employers who need me to write or fix code, and ideally contribute upstream along with it. Any ideas where to start? I am thinking something "chill". I am trying to avoid large corporations.
Lerc 8mo ago
One of the changes I have made in recent years is to move to the unlicence. I am ok with people using my code. I'm not ok with people saying that other people shouldn't be allowed to use my code.

by toast0 8mo ago

bombcar 8mo ago

It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.

j-bos 8mo ago
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
- tw04 8mo ago
  >it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
  - j-bos 8mo ago
    So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - NeutralCrane 8mo ago
    The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug. Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
fwip 8mo ago
Seems pretty understandable to me. In the former, you work on something hoping that real people will find it useful. In the latter, you're explicitly doing work for a paycheck.

radlad 8mo ago

Presumably you are licensing your code as MIT or a similar license. Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.

CamperBob2 8mo ago
No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all stronger now. Don't fight AI, fight for open models.
- GeoAtreides 8mo ago
  there are no open models. none. zero. there are binary files that some companies are allowing you to download, for now. it was called shareware in the old days. one day the tap will close and we'll see then what open models really means
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models https://allenai.org/open-models . For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent. At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
    - anonymousab 8mo ago
      > and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late. > Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests The companies training big models are actively respecting copyright from anyone big enough to actually fight back, and soaking everyone else. They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.

Jare 8mo ago

I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit. If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves. For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".

pseudalopex 8mo ago
MIT license requires credit.
- Jare 8mo ago
  Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
  - pseudalopex 8mo ago
    The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong. > My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included". The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.

bluefirebrand 8mo ago

> If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits

overfeed 8mo ago
Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's milages vary. My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
- jraph 8mo ago
  Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd like to use my work to deny end users the rights to control their computing. That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose. LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
- bluefirebrand 8mo ago
  So, definitely not just for corporations to make insanely massive profits off?
toast0 8mo ago
How much do you think people would pay for this patch? https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320 https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320 If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything? And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.

emigre 8mo ago

Most open source licenses have strings attached, the terms of the licence say what those “strings” are. Like requiring attribution.

dminik 8mo ago

I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly. Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.

johnisgood 8mo ago

That sounds fun. I am trying to find potential employers who need me to write or fix code, and ideally contribute upstream along with it. Any ideas where to start? I am thinking something "chill". I am trying to avoid large corporations.

Lerc 8mo ago

One of the changes I have made in recent years is to move to the unlicence. I am ok with people using my code. I'm not ok with people saying that other people shouldn't be allowed to use my code.