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Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?

#61
Imposed scarcity in most forms are what I see as the problem. It's a problem if copyleft source is used without respecting licensing terms. Unless I was doing something in a larger scale business capacity, I don't have a problem with bits and pieces of what I publish to be used. It's not like I've published any major database or hosted application platform. They tend to be smaller things that solve specific technical problems, like a DB query/ORM library. In most cases I think more individuals would be learning/using small parts of it rather than the whole thing as-is.

The only thing that's really a problem I see is if you're trying to build a business around developing opensource. Even then, it's better to publish non-core pieces of it so that many eyes can use and hopefully improve the security or fix bugs/holes in it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?

#62

Yes. I always licensed my projects under GPL variants. That contract was broken by LLM vendors. So now I'm taking my toys and going home. All my new projects are hosted on Sourcehut. I trust Drew when he says they are not letting LLM bots have at it. Its not just the dev either. I'm no longer posting any content on blogs. Almost all of my other online interactions have moved to private channels and closed forums. I'm…

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Re: Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?

#63
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think GPL licenses really stop companies from scraping the code and using it to train their LLM's. Also, how would you prove they actually used your code ?

I strongly agree. LLM’s have eviscerated the core idea and motivation behind using the GPL, in a way I didn’t at all see coming. We’ve published a lot of very unique GPL code (eg in sagemath), which anybody can now easily “regenerate” as part of some other closed (or open) software using an LLM. They wouldn’t even know they are creating a derived work of our GPL code. I have had to come to terms with this...

> which anybody can now easily “regenerate”

I don't think this is as clear as you say it is. If a person "regenerates" GPL code from memory, it will still be a copyright violation. LLMs can't own copyright on their own, so a person must be responsible for the result. So it should be a violation. GPL should help (if you actually sue).

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