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John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

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Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#321

Post by Quekid5 »

nayuki wrote: post #292
skrebbel wrote: post #91

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…

Then by your definition, SQLite isn't open-source because it's a code dump with a license, but outsiders are not allowed to participate in shaping (the official copy of) the code.

SQLite is public domain while the code released by id/Carmack is GPL.

The latter technically doesn't prevent anyone making money off it, but in practice it does (other than nominal fees).

That alone is a massive difference.

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#322

Post by skeeter2020 »

nayuki wrote: post #292
skrebbel wrote: post #91

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…

Then by your definition, SQLite isn't open-source because it's a code dump with a license, but outsiders are not allowed to participate in shaping (the official copy of) the code.

Not sure if this was your intent, but what WOULD the result be of an AI reimplemented SQLite? They've got some of the best technical documentation in the game; there are lots of directions this could go...

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#323

Post by pseudalopex »

Jare wrote: post #192
pseudalopex wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT license requires credit.

Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says: > 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 "w…

The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong.

> 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".

The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#324

Post by layer8 »

dismalaf wrote: post #305
layer8 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just incorrect. “Open source” can mean the licensing as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been associated with the development model since The Cathedral and the Bazaar [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

The "development model" of open source is that one person code dumps, another takes, changes it then dumps it, another picks up the copy with the changes, changes it again, and so on. Sometimes it finds it's way back. A bazaar is a chaotic market with a million vendors, not anything remotely cooperative. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is meant to convey the idea that OSS code develops without central organization, thro…

Have you read the essay? http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

In it, the bazaar is a metaphor for how Linux was being developed.

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#325

Post by sidewndr46 »

indemnity wrote: post #227
CrossVR wrote: post #49

There's one elephant in the room that's not being addressed: Training an AI on GPL code and then having it generate equivalent code that is released under a closed source license seems like a good way to destroy the copy-left FOSS ecosystem.

This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!

This kind of reminds me how I saw some teams deal with a vulnerability scanner flagging an OSS dependency as having a reported vulnerability. The dependency was always OSS anyways. Copy & paste the entire thing into your project. Voila, dependency scanner doesn't find any problems any longer.

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#327

Post by kashyapc »

skrebbel wrote: post #91

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…

Well said. Some people are misparsing your core point here.

Skrebbel is largely referring to the OSS projects that need people to do consitent grunt work like shipping predictable releases, stable branch maintenance, backporting security fixes, etc. This is the kind of work maintains that the internet's infrastructure.

A bit like the Nebraska guy from the famous XKCD, dependecy: https://xkcd.com/2347/

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#328

Post by godd2 »

Isognoviastoma wrote: post #77

Most of FOSS is not a free gift, but asks for some form of repay. MIT asks for credit. GPL asks or credit and GPL'ing of things built atop. Unlicense is a free gift, but it is a minority. AI reproduces code while removing credit and copyleft from it and this is the problem.

> and this is the problem

Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use it.

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#329

Post by dminik »

toast0 wrote: post #24
OSaMaBiNLoGiN wrote: post #4

I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it. In his follow-up post he talks about him open sourcing old games as a gift, and he doesn't much care how people receive that gift, just that they do. He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not. The original authors…

I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strings isn't exactly a gift. If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me, there were no strings. Your users presumably benefit from the software I wrote, unless you're using it for evil, but I don't have enough clout to use an only IBM may use it for evil l…

I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly.

Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.

Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

#330

Post by [deleted] »

skrebbel wrote: post #91

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…

[deleted]
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