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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#3
post #2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766771 > privately on github So Microsoft and their AI will have access to your code but people won't.

Yeah, I'm aware, but didn't bother yet to go further... I have been thinking about hosting my own git server to work on.

I'm not a prolific open source contributor anyways, but i'm wondering if the tides are changing in regards to open source.

I can imaging that many people in the open source community - even if they're giving away their code for free under the most permissive licenses, still somewhere enjoy the fact that people know they're looking at their code on github or wherever it may be hosted. But now that slowly people shifting to only looking at code via LLM chat apps, then they might want to contirbute less to open source... just wondering... ?

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

#4
Aaahahah people tend to forget that GPL exists. If they use your software to build another, then you can sue and make all their software opensource. Also, you dont have to use github where your source is easily pray of LLM. You can host your own.

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

#5

Aaahahah people tend to forget that GPL exists. If they use your software to build another, then you can sue and make all their software opensource. Also, you dont have to use github where your source is easily pray of LLM. You can host your own.

And AGPL is even better.

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

#6

Aaahahah people tend to forget that GPL exists. If they use your software to build another, then you can sue and make all their software opensource. Also, you dont have to use github where your source is easily pray of LLM. You can host your own.

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 ?

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

#7
LLMs have not changed my opinion on contributing to open source. Slop PRs are quite easy to deal with, and I'm not too concerned about LLMs being trained on the fairly niche things I work on. If my projects were more popular I might have a different opinion.

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

#8
For me, I think the value of sharing with other people still outweighs the 'leeching' by proprietary for-profit vendors. Ideally, I'd like to be able to set an option on a repo: no LLM training, only training material for open weight models, and training material for all models. Though sadly, I do not think we could trust all vendors to respect such a flag, so now it is all or nothing.

Personally, I would select only training material for open models. Pandora's box is already open, but if we are going to have LLMs, I want them to be available to everyone and not gated by a small number of companies. Since open models generally have less of a benefit of scale in terms of GPUs, I want them to have the benefit of more available/higher quality training data.

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

#9
In the grand scheme of things, even GPLing your code doesn't matter as the AI is still trained on it. As AI increases in capabilities, it can just read and rewrite your code. And all code is useful in some way.

As mentioned in the comment, private on GH has no bearing, it is still in full sight of the AI.

From what I can tell, OSS submissions are on the rise as people embrace AI to work on things they could not previously.

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

#10
It hasn't changed anything for me. I don't really care if AI trains on my code or not. I write open source to share the code for other developers and give back as a way of pay it forward, to all the people's libraries I've relied on before.

Are people open sourcing their works in hopes to make money and that's their concern? I've never heard of that from people involved in open source.

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