131–140 of 351 posts
FOSS is dead - long live, FOSS. FOSS came up around the core idea of liberating software for hardware, and later on was sustained by the idea of a commodity of commons we can build on. But with LLMs we have alternative pathways/enablement for the freedoms: Freedom 0 (Run): LLMs troubleshoot environments and guide installations, making software executable for anyone. Freedom 1 (Study/Change): make modifications, inclu…
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
You can own the works, but not the vibes. If everyone owned the vibes we would all be infringing others. In my view abstractions should not be protected by copyright, only expression, currently the abstraction-filtration-comparison standard (AFC) protects abstractions too, non-literal infringement is a thing.
Trying to own the vibes is like trying to own the functionality itself, no matter the distinct implementation details, and this is closer to patents than copyrights. But patents get researched for prior art and have limited duration, copyright is automatic and almost infinite duration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Of course, it also seems clear in the present landscape that the law often depends more on the conv…
If there was going to be a case, it's derivative works. [1] What makes it all tricky for the courts is there's not a good way to really identify what part the generated code is a derivative of (except in maybe some extreme examples). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
However, that number would typically be very very very very small, making it hard to argue that the whole model is a derivative of that one individual document.
Nevertheless, a similar approach might work if you took a FOSS project as a whole, e.g. "the model knows a lot about the Linux kernel because it has been trained on its source code".
However, it is still not clear that this would be necessarily unlawful or make the LLM output a derivative work in all cases.
It seems to me that LLMs are trained on large FOSS projects as a way to teach them generalisable development skills, with the side effect of learning a lot about those particular projects.
So if I used a LLM to contribute to the kernel, clearly it would be drawing on information acquired during its training on the kernel's code source. Perhaps it could be argued that the output in that case would be a derivative?
But if I used a LLM to write a completely unrelated piece of software, the kernel training set would be contributing a lot less to the output.
I think Pete Hegseth would disagree with this statement.
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour.
My 2c:
- AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.
- It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. In a world of autonomous agents and open-weight models, control is decentralized.inference costs continue to drop, you dont need to be running on megacorp stacks. Millions (billions?) of agents finding and sharing among themselves. How will megacorps stop?
- I see the advent of LLMs like the spread of literacy. Scribes once held a monopoly on the written word, which felt like a "loss" to them when reading/writing became universal. But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour. My 2c: - AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all…
I’m not a professionally trained SWE (I’m a scientist who does engineering work). LLMs have really accelerated my ability to build, ideate, and understand systems in a way that I could only loosely gain from sometimes grumpy but mostly kind senior engineers in overcrowded chat rooms.
The legality of all of this is dubious, though, per the parent. I GPL licensed my FOSS scientific software because I wanted it to help advance biomedical research. Not because I wanted it to help a big corp get rich.
But then again, maybe code like mine is what is holding these models back lol.
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour. My 2c: - AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all…