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Coding agents could make free software matter again

gjlondon.com

141–150 of 351 posts

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's at the VC funded discount rate I would presume, not even true cost of those tokens without any profit.

Yeah that's the thing making my head spin, tack a 30% profit margin on that and it's 550usd per day? Probably going to be more than that for rocketship growth and investor expectations. Is that the game? Lock in companies to this "new reality" with cheap tokens then once they fire all their devs, bait and switch to 2X the cost.

Of course that’s the play. It’s always the play and it’s so sad to see everyone on this forum falling for it.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#142
post #64

If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are: 1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos 2. the best models are proprietary 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going…

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Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#143
post #64

If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are: 1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos 2. the best models are proprietary 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going…

> 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). Meanwhile as people sleep on LLMs to help them audit their code for security holes, or even any security code auditing tools. Script kiddies don't care that you think AI isn't ready, they'll use AI models to scrape your website for security gaps. They'll use LLMs to figure out how to hack your employees and steal your data. We a…

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Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#145
post #30

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…

> 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. Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid…

Broadly speaking, GPL is a license that has specific provisions about creating derivative software from the licensed work, and just saying "fair use" doesn't exempt you from those provisions. More specifically, an advertised use case (in fact, arguably the main one at this stage) of the most popular closed models as they're currently being used is to produce code, some of which is going to be GPL licensed. As such, the code used is part of the functionality of the program. The fact that this program was produced from the source code used by a machine learning algorithm rather than some other method doesn't change this fundamental fact.

The current supreme court may think that machine learning is some sort of magic exception, but they also seem to believe whatever oligarchs will bribe them to believe. Again, I doubt the law will be enforced as written, but that has more to do with corruption than any meaningful legal theory. Arguments against this claim seem to ignore that courts have already ruled these systems to not have intellectual property rights of their own, and the argument for fair use seems to rely pretty heavily on some handwavey anthropomorphization of the models.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get a new hire who already knows the common SaaS products but has to re learn your vibe coded version no one else uses where no information exists online. There is a reason why large proprietary products remain prevalent even when cheaper better alternatives exist. Being "industry standard" matters more than being the best.

The new hire will just vibe code a new solution that translates your solution into something he prefers. Every new hire will have his own.

This will all end well I'm sure

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#148
post #64

If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are: 1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos 2. the best models are proprietary 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going…

> 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). Meanwhile as people sleep on LLMs to help them audit their code for security holes, or even any security code auditing tools. Script kiddies don't care that you think AI isn't ready, they'll use AI models to scrape your website for security gaps. They'll use LLMs to figure out how to hack your employees and steal your data. We a…

This reads like a "You wouldn't download a car!" ad but it's trying to scare you into using AI instead.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#149
post #123

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. Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid…

> So what is it about GPL licensed software that you feel would make AI training on it not subject to the same copyright and fair use considerations that apply to books? The poster doesn't like it, so it's different. Most of the "legal analysis" and "foregone conclusions" in these types of discussions are vibes dressed up as objective declarations.

You seem like the type of person that will believe anything as long as someone cites a case without looking into it. Bartz v Anthropic only looked at books, and there was still a 1.5 billion settlement that Anthropic paid out because it got those books from LibGen / Anna's Archive, and the ruling also said that the data has to be acquired "legitimately".

Whether data acquired from a licence that specifically forbids building a derivative work without also releasing that derivative under the same licence counts as a legitimate data gathering operation is anyone's guess, as those specific circumstances are about as far from that prior case as they can be.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#150
post #30

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…

> 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. Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid…

Bartz v Anthropic explicitly held ruling on fair use. It is not precedent, here.
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