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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#381

Post by welshwelsh »

dahwolf wrote: post #212

I think AI is here to stay (obviously) but we do need a much better permission model regarding content, whether this is the writing on your blog, your digital art, your open source code, video, audio...all of it. The current model basically says that as soon as you publish something, others can pretty much do with it as they please under the disguise of "fair use", an aggressive ToS, the like. I stand by the author t…

In the age of reposts and generative AI, "attribution" is irrelevant. Nobody cares who originally made some content, and it truly doesn't matter.

>The more likely outcome is that content producers increasingly withdraw into closed paid platforms

Nah. You didn't get paid to write that post, did you? You did it for free. People nowadays are perfectly willing to create free content, and often high quality content, sometimes anonymously, even before generative AI.

There's no need for financial incentives anymore. As content creation becomes easier, people will start creating out of intrinsic motivation - to express themselves, to influence others and to inform. It's better that way.

Restricting content so that others can't benefit from it is not pro-human or pro-creator, it's selfish and wasteful. We should get rid of licenses altogether and feed everything humanity creates into a common AI model that is available for use by everyone.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#382

Post by mftrhu »

slg wrote: post #148
marcus_holmes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're suggesting that developers shut up and let the artists talk first? I'm not sure what the "you're suffering less than these other people" thing is actually intended to translate into? What do we do with that? All software licences are based on copyright, same as writing, art, music, etc. Some software licences are permissive. Some writing is permissive (e.g. Cory Doctorow). Some music is permissive (e.g. Ama…

> So you're suggesting that developers shut up and let the artists talk first? I'm not sure what the "you're suffering less than these other people" thing is actually intended to translate into? What do we do with that? The tech community has a tendency to not care about issues like this until it effects us. I’m not telling people to shut up about this. I’m saying don’t be a hypocrite. If this is the wrong approach f…

There is indeed a problem with the way all these models are trained, and too many people want to pretend that colour can be laundered out https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#383

Post by bombolo »

sokoloff wrote: post #366
bombolo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who train AI models claim that anything they can find on the internet is fair use. It's the whole point of the discussion… is it really? And if it's not fair use to train on windows source code because of copyright… doesn't that same copyright law cover everything else as well?

I think there's a reasonable distinction to make between "you can train AI models on any code that you are legally allowed to have and read" and "you can train AI models on any code that you are able to feed into it, regardless of whether you have permission to possess/read it".

You're not legally allowed to have and read it if you knowingly violate its license terms.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#384

Post by lelanthran »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #298
lelanthran wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. Is it? I can't think of a single professional dev making money right now that isn't making money because they did not have to reinvent the entire tech stack that they are skilled in. If there was no open s…

If there would be no open source, people would pay for libraries. Now we have open source, and a lot of devs are not compensated. End of story. No proper solution. That's all. Roughly the same applies to newspapers. Ohm please do not turn off advertisements so we could keep the lights going. Digital beggars everywhere.

> If there would be no open source, people would pay for libraries.

Nonsense. The cost of creating non-trivial software (say, 20+ dependencies, all needing payment) would put software out of the reach of ordinary people, meaning that there will only be a small niche of developer jobs.

Which means that most people making a non-zero income from writing software today would have been making a zero income from writing software in your hypothetical alternate universe.

There's a lot of butterfly-effect type results as well - due to how capitalism works, the majority of people who are capable of writing software would never be able to compete - whoever the bug players are, they could simply buy them out, shut them down or even product-dump.

FOSS levels the field somewhat: FOSS is a force multiplier, in that whatever FOSS creates can be used to create more software (even non-FOSS), reducing the dependency on one or two incumbents who were lucky enough to get there first and cornered the market.

Without FOSS, we'd all be running IE6 on Windows 98, because there'd be no competition.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#385

Post by bruce511 »

cmsj wrote: post #319
JaumeGreen wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors would end up providing the same end result since the original authors would be both allowed to and reasonably expected to distribute the derived work to their users as well. I might be in the wrong, but this is…

> What I get from the license is that you have to share the code with the users of your program, not anyone else. You're correct, but it's sort of a meaningless distinction because those users are entirely within their rights under the GPL to share that code on with anyone they want, which is why we don't really see the model of "secret GPL" you describe, in the wild.

I'd argue that this is exactly what you see in the wild. And it's why the AGPL license was created.

GPL code has to be shared with users who receive binaries. SAAS happily didn't shop binaries, so quite legally didn't ship source code.

AGPL redefines this in terms of "user" not "binary". That refinement completely exists to cater for unexpected use cases. No doubt new licenses (AIGPL?) will be needed to address this issue.

The whole need for Open Source protection played out with the (Apache licensed) Elastic Search. Switching to a ELv2 and SSPL license was controversial and in some ways "not open source", certainly not "free" because it limits what a user can do with the software.

So the distinction is far from meaningless and in some ways rendered GPL obsolete.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#386

Post by ethbr0 »

ratherbefuddled wrote: post #370
feanaro wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright infringement comes about later, when that mass of numbers is used to produce a topically related work. The same rules apply for humans -- see the concept of "clean room implementation".

It really doesn't. Prose isn't source code. Learning something, then later writing something else isn't copying.

My limited understanding of case law is that transformative use is still judged very human-centricly.

E.g. the courts take a dim view of any attempt to create a machine (in the abstract sense) that takes in copywritten works and churns out similar-but-uncopywritten works

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#387

Post by 8note »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #354
kuschku wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the state of a person's brain is outside of copyright It clearly isn’t. Which is why clean-room reverse engineering always requires at least two people. Or why a musician that accidentally recreates a chord progression they heard years ago but don't remember the source might still get sued.

No, you're missing the very distinction I'm trying to highlight. When I read and remember some text, possibly also learning from it, I'm not making a copy and I'm not creating a derivative work. The state of my brain is outside of copyright. Only at the point where I create a new representation based on what I have read I may be violating someone's copyrights. But is it the same for an AI? Is the act of reading, reme…

> The state of my brain is outside of copyright.

Is it actually? If we could fully pull out the state of your brain, and understand that you stored a copy of a copyrighted work, I think you could be on the hook for licensing it, paying fees every time you remember the work as a performance of it.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#388

Post by ye-olde-sysrq »

cxr wrote: post #350
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the GPLv4 will be coming out soon with an anti-AI-training clause (unless your output model and its outputs are also GPLv4, of course).

People keep bringing this up. It's not as straightforward as a clause that says "you can't use this to train AI" (which is what I suspect many people think). Licensing operates on a continuum of permissiveness. They can only relax the restrictions that you as a creator are given by default. You can't write a copyright license that adds them. You could write a legal instrument that compels and prohibits certain behavi…

I amend my wondering to the prepend the GPL thing with "I wonder how long it will take disney et al to make it illegal to train AI with their stuff" which then opens that door to the GPL

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#389

Post by EarlKing »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #377
EarlKing wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...except you don't need an infinite number of monkeys. It has been trained to produce protected expressions by virtue of being trained on protected expressions. The probability of it producing a protected expression at some point is 1.

The same truth holds for you or me writing up that code.

No it doesn't. My mind contains information derived from expressions I've read which I can rearrange into novel expressions. I don't regurgitate protected expressions verbatim. Co-Pilot does.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#390

Post by Aaron2222 »

avodonosov wrote: post #188
Aaron2222 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they claiming that it's fair use? IANAL, but wouldn't that make the licence irrelevant if training AI/ML models was found to be fair use? And if not, it's a licence violation anyway?

It will be difficult to claim fair use if training AI model is explicitly mentioned in the license, I think. Currently GPL says: > To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work. > A "covered work" means…

To me, that's like saying there would be little room for a fair use claim for news reporting/parody/[insert legitimate fair use here] if the licence expressly forbids it. IANAL though.
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