191–200 of 515 posts
All due respect to Carmack but I think his take is probably influenced by his investment in his own AI company. There doesn’t seem to be many on this space who have any ethical or moral problems with profiting from the work of others and not contributing anything back to the commons. If we all intended our work in OSS the way he did maybe we’d all see it his way too. Copy left licenses are generally intended, afaict,…
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I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit. If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves. For GPL, it…
MIT license requires credit.
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
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"in accordance with its license" is the key part that's missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.
It seems to be a common view on HN that licenses and conditional access to websites should be ignored (i.e. WRT ad-blockers), but also that licenses on Open-Source Software repositories should be respected (i.e. WRT LLM training). I believe that holding these contradictory views is common, but the conflict would need to be resolved to come to a conclusion on how to proceed with LLM training.
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I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit. If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves. For GPL, it…
MIT license requires credit.
This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! Bu…
> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.
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yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine. but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason…
Who is stopping you from licensing your code that way then?
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
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This is an edge case in OSS. Even among software packages used by Netflix and Amazon, few of them were attributable to a single maintainer or small group of individuals. They've long since become community developed projects.
Netflix and Amazon use many packages of all sizes. And contributions to projects with many contributors helped people get jobs.
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Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open Source'?
The “cathedral” model refers to closed-source development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! Bu…
> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.
Edit, see:
Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.