"I released source code under the MIT license and people are now using it to their financial benefit. Who could have possibly seen this coming?"
Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?
Bear is now source-available
131–140 of 509 posts
Re: Bear is now source-available
#132> We're entering a new age of AI powered coding, where creating a competing product only involves typing "Create a fork of this repo and change its name to something cool and deploy it on an EC2 instance". I've been curious about how LLMs would impact open source, I have some theories and this is not the only one.
I would love to hear your other theories!
I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the released source, once an LLM model is trained on it, then someone else could quickly and easily have the LLM generate a new program that implements the novel solutions. Whether this is a problem or not may depend on the motivations of the developer, but this potential for IP laundering may very well begin influencing the licenses and methods of distribution that people choose.
(Of course, I suppose at some point AI will be able to analyze and learn from binary executables or obfuscated source...)
Re: Bear is now source-available
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free Software and Open Source have definitions that are both on their face and in practical application by the bodies responsible for each almost entirely identical. Neither is a subset of the other. If you are concerned about mandating users provide modifications by a similar license to the one they received material under, what you want is copyleft .
“Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft. All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.
This statement is incorrect.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#134>It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it.
No, you don't believe in open source, hypocrite.
Open source means anyone can use it, even for commercial purposes, and you knew this from day zero.
Honestly, no sympathy for these people, as this happens over and over again, they actually exploit the very few good intended OSS people. They portray their project as open source initially, to gather sympathy and free work from others, then when they see the $$$ they flip the switch to non-OSS and rub their hands.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free Software and Open Source have definitions that are both on their face and in practical application by the bodies responsible for each almost entirely identical. Neither is a subset of the other. If you are concerned about mandating users provide modifications by a similar license to the one they received material under, what you want is copyleft .
“Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft. All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.
> “Free software” means copyleft.
No, it doesn't. The FSF uses “Free Software” to refer to a broad class that is essentially identical to the OSI use of “Open Source.”
The term the FSF uses for copyleft is “copyleft”, which is a subset of Free Software.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#136"I released source code under the MIT license and people are now using it to their financial benefit. Who could have possibly seen this coming?" Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?
Because between 15 and 20 years ago the BSD zealots won that culture war.
I would really love to see a simulation where GNU licenses won that culture war and which landscape we would have today.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#137As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is. I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-availa…
>What Herman is doing is a service to us all
I don't owe that guy s*it, what are you talking about.
He's actually doing a disservice to the OSS community, as there's now another story of OSS turning non-OSS out of greed, which damages (by a bit, but still) the whole aura that true OSS has built over the past 40 years.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem that these folks have is that AGPL still allows other people to host the software. They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider. GPL would have been a better initial license, and AGPL would have been the next logical step to ensure that changes that hosted services make can come back to the original version. I'm not entirely sure what they were hoping to get by making an extr…
> They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider. This is an overly negative take. At the end of the day, they are still providing software and the source code free to use for practically every purpose except directly competing with them. That's still altruistic while also being sensible in the real world rather than an ideal.
The license disallows use of the software for what it is intended: setting up a multi-user blogging system.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#139We are also entering the age of "hey AI, take this repo, reimplement the same functionality".
Now, no LLM is currently anywhere near doing that for ElasticSearch.
But for a project with 4845 lines of Python code? (as per tokei)
Definitely doable, with a bit of handholding and manual fixing.
Would that be a derivative work? Maybe, but that would be a hard legal battle.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#140As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is. I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-availa…
Perhaps a better term would be “limited use open source”
That's not open source then.