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Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

kefir.protopopov.lv

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Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#81
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all .

People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.

> People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing.

Those people who do that are too few and far between to make a difference. The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license. That license is how they specify what they want in return.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#82
post #76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contract behind open source was something like (GPL): "If you copy my work, you should share your work too." or at minimum (MIT): "If you copy my work, you should credit me." I think it is no longer under dispute that the legal contract is satisfied by LLMs. The AI companies won and will continue to win. But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what lea…

> But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then. The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downs…

> Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then(...)

Yes, I do think there has always been such a fissure. People publish OSS code for many reasons, often a blend of multiple reasons. There are selfish reasons such as the desire for one's work to be recognized, or even the hope of getting better employment through showing ones' skill or making something companies will pay for support on. There are social reasons like the desire to collaborate with others. There are altruistic benefit-of-all-mankind reasons like Richard Stallman said "...restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program."

It sounds like your view of things is limited mostly to that last version of FOSS, the copyleft style. But even adherents of that style, I think, are not too happy with AI consumption of their code. For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared. And for two, if your idea of OSS is that we all put our contributions into the great shared river of human achievements to benefit the world, it is disappointing to see that river funneled into a giant waterwheel of profit for a half dozen trillion dollar companies charging rent for its bounty.

> Given that FOSS licenses were always constructed to function within applicable copyright law, I don't see how they could mean anything else.

I agree from a legal standpoint. I cannot enforce my personal definition of copying nor do I expect that to become possible. It was just conveniently aligned with the reality of how copying software worked in the past, and no longer is and never will be again. That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#83
post #40
post #13

People taking your work and not giving anything back was ALWAYS the risk you took when writing free software. LLM training doesn't change that much. That the us military no doubt is using gcc to compile embedded software for their icbm:s no doubt irks the gnu people. But you can't have it any other way. "You can only use my software for good things" just is not consistent with "free software".

Yeah, I really can't comprehend these sentiments as anything other than an "I don't like AI" argument. FOSS has always been about just writing code and putting it out into the world where others can do as they please with it. I see a lot of risks involved in people surrendering their own decision-making to LLMs, but that's a question of how they're used, not how they're trained. The idea that using FOSS software to t…

> FOSS has always been about just writing code and putting it out into the world where others can do as they please with it.

That is wrong. How can you write that with a straight face? There are projects that are put into the public domain (one major one comes to mind), but the clear majority of FOSS projects have strings attached which make the intention of the authors absolutely clear.

IOW, if you're not happy with what the cost of the product is, then just don't use it.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.

> People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. Those people who do that are too few and far between to make a difference. The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license. That license is how they specify what they want in return.

> The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license.

100% of open source devs aren’t giving away the source without a license, since a licence—the grant of permissions for what is otherwise exclusive to author under the law—is what makes something open source.

> That license is how they specify what they want in return.

No, the license is how they legally give away permission to use material that is legally subjejct to their exclusive rights by virtue of creation. The license may be a contract license that, as you suggest, involves mutual exchange of value, but for many (especially permissive) open source licenses it is a gratuitous bounded grant of permission which has limits but does not involve giving something of value back to the creator.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#85
post #76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contract behind open source was something like (GPL): "If you copy my work, you should share your work too." or at minimum (MIT): "If you copy my work, you should credit me." I think it is no longer under dispute that the legal contract is satisfied by LLMs. The AI companies won and will continue to win. But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what lea…

> But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. Perhaps this illustrates a fissure that was always lurking under the surface, then. The social contract that I've personally always attributed to FOSS communities was that attempting to restrict how people downs…

One correction: the point of copyleft was to explot the restrictions in order to ensure that it would be possible for everyone to copy the software.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#86
I'm finding it hard to be motivated to continue on language dev work. I feel it may also have to do with AI. Not so much the predatory aspect of it, like this author, but something else: shall we say, certain revelations about the nature of the target audience.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#87
I have many GPL projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron) and spend a significant amount of time in them. GPL has always explicitly permitted commercial use; that's a feature, not a bug, dating back to Stallman's original vision. Any person or company can use my code (or Kefir code) under the terms of the GPL, as I use code given away by companies under GPL or even more liberal licences for free. That's the deal. GPL is a license explicitly designed to maximize use, so it doesn't make sense to object to a specific form of use. The claim that AI companies are somehow violating GPL by training on GPL code is legally baseless (I studied law here in Switzerland and had lectures about international IP law); also the FSF itself has not claimed otherwise; even if it were prohibited, it would be a copyright enforcement problem, and not a reason to stop publishing. I don't know Kefir, but it looks like a great (even optimizing) compiler. So it's really a pitty that its development is no longer open source.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#88
post #57
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who break the social contract are the ones responsible for breaking the social contract, not the ones who take steps in response to social contract being broken.

So the questions here are (a) is any generally accepted social contract actually being broken, and (b) if so, who are the ones who are breaking it?

Yes, and obviously: bots crushing servers in strict contravention of the robots.txt rules.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#89
post #17
post #9

Seems to me LLMs have changed some things. I'm not sure how it's best put, but it used to be: - Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had gone into it. The writer paid effort so the reader didn't have to. - There'd be some level of attachment to what you've put effort into. With LLMs, that's undermined: it's easy to produce thoughtless imitations. Code or comments where though…

But LLMs don’t seem particularly good at inventing new ways to code (or write, or…). It’s literally all derivative. So what happens in 10 years? Are we headed for a great stagnation?

Let LLMs ingest its own output, everything past 2022 will be increasingly hallucinatory self-regurgitation.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#90
post #87

I have many GPL projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon , https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon , https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron ) and spend a significant amount of time in them. GPL has always explicitly permitted commercial use; that's a feature, not a bug, dating back to Stallman's original vision. Any person or company can use my code (or Kefir code) under the terms of the GPL, as I use co…

The GPL, unlike the BSD and such, intends to prevent the closing of distributed derivative works. LLMs trained on GPL code can produce derivative works without any enforcement mechanism.

You may be fine with that, but the GPL is not a public domain license, and LLM training treats all things as if they were public domain.

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