21 ms·

The contract behind open source was something like (GPL): "If you copy my work, you should share your work too." or at minimum (MIT): "If you copy my work, y

• Gormo 4mo ago
  > But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then. The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downstream of you use code is illegitimate, and that licenses like the GPL were meant to use copyright law to achieve something that resembles the state of affairs that might exist if copyright didn't exist in the first place. That's what the whole concept of "copyleft" always seemed to imply. Now we have a new class of technologies that is admittedly fraught with a wide range of risks and pitfalls, but also a lot of promise to enable people to actually put the "four freedoms" into practice in ways they couldn't before, and we're seeing people who have normative opinions about AI derived from other, unrelated principles trying to circle the wagons and exclude those use cases. That is what seems like a breach of the social contract as I've always understood it. > Did they mean literally CTRL+C, CTRL+V or something broader? Given that FOSS licenses were always constructed to function within applicable copyright law, I don't see how they could mean anything else. "Literal CTRL+C, CTRL+V" is the only thing copyright has ever applied to, and the whole point of "copyleft" was to lessen the restrictions on even that.
  • lelanthran 4mo ago
    > The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downstream of you use code is illegitimate, That's wrong. What on earth gave you that impression when the licenses specifically set constraints on what downstream can do (from "release derivatives as open" to "put me in the credits"). Which part of which open source licenses gave you the impression that there were no restrictions?
    • Gormo 4mo ago
      > That's wrong. What on earth gave you that impression when the licenses specifically set constraints on what downstream can do (from "release derivatives as open" to "put me in the credits"). These are restrictions on redistribution, not use. And they're there to make sure that derivative works can't themselves impose restrictions on use.
  • rspeele 4mo ago
    > Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then(...) Yes, I do think there has always been such a fissure. People publish OSS code for many reasons, often a blend of multiple reasons. There are selfish reasons such as the desire for one's work to be recognized, or even the hope of getting better employment through showing ones' skill or making something companies will pay for support on. There are social reasons like the desire to collaborate with others. There are altruistic benefit-of-all-mankind reasons like Richard Stallman said "...restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program." It sounds like your view of things is limited mostly to that last version of FOSS, the copyleft style. But even adherents of that style, I think, are not too happy with AI consumption of their code. For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared. And for two, if your idea of OSS is that we all put our contributions into the great shared river of human achievements to benefit the world, it is disappointing to see that river funneled into a giant waterwheel of profit for a half dozen trillion dollar companies charging rent for its bounty. > Given that FOSS licenses were always constructed to function within applicable copyright law, I don't see how they could mean anything else. I agree from a legal standpoint. I cannot enforce my personal definition of copying nor do I expect that to become possible. It was just conveniently aligned with the reality of how copying software worked in the past, and no longer is and never will be again. That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.
• locknitpicker 4mo ago
  > "If you copy my work, you should share your work too." Not exactly. The GPL way is that you should share my work under the same terms if you want to share it, even if modifying it. You are not required to share anything if you don't actually share anything, and just run it yourself. That's where all the criticism towards cloud providers who freely use FLOSS is directed. > But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. There is clearly a misalignment in expectations from some FLOSS enthusiasts. The main FLOSS licenses focus exclusively on distribution, but their expectations somehow extend well beyond distribution. We hear those FLOSS enthusiasts criticize and attack companies for using software exactly according to their terms, and somehow that is framed as abuse if said users happen to be bigger than some arbitrary boundary.