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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

#41

Post by dysoco »

gensym wrote: post #14

I find it pretty simple: - OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence - AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

Depends on how you see it.

I know many people building oss, local alternatives to enterprise software for specific industries that cost thousands of dollars all thanks to AI.

If everyone can produce software now and at a much complex and bigger scale, it's much easier to create decentralized and free alternatives to long-standing closed projects.

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

#42

Post by throwaway2027 »

IshKebab wrote: post #19

TL;DR: I really wanted to use a more permissive license so I don't mind AI scraping my code. Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.

You hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary reason for his STB libraries.

https://github.com/nothings/stb

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

#45

Post by jhatemyjob »

> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift

I respect Carmack so much more now. I always scratched my head why he made Quake GPL. It was such a waste. Now it doesn't matter anymore. I so thankful copyleft is finally losing its teeth. It served its purpose 30 years ago, we don't need it anymore.

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

#46

Post by SirensOfTitan »

In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.

It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout.

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.

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

#47

Post by bombcar »

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 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.

He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away.

I think it's interesting that nobody would cry that Fabien should shovel cash from his book sales towards Carmack, nor should those who learned how to code by reading source owe something to the authors beyond gratitude and maybe a note here and there.

Even things like Apple's new implementation of SMB, which is "code clean" from GPLv3 Samba, but likely still leans on the years and years of experience and documentation about the SMB protocol.

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

#48

Post by jraph »

elteto wrote: post #37
moogly wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Attack the argument not the man. Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.

> presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit

That's not true. There are business models around open source, and many companies making money from open source work.

(I'm only reacting to this specific part of your comment)

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

#50

Post by liuliu »

moogly wrote: post #17

[flagged]

GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to have freedom with their hardware.

If you want to make money, use a proper license.

To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither. Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.

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