431–440 of 464 posts
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You can not accidentally sign your name saying “this code is GPL compliant” If you can’t be sure, don’t sign.
I’m not gonna. A lot of other people now will.
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What is it that worries you about the change that is happening?
In particular that the most used LLMs are proprietary. This is in great opposition to the best software out there so far: tcp/ip, linux, git, emacs, postgres, and a long etc. We depend enormously on this tools and that’s fine because they are open source. But we are starting to depend enormously on proprietary LLMs and that sucks. I know we have open source LLMs but 99% of us are not using them; that’s reality.
Sure, most people outsource control of the tools to do their job to third parties, and it will end badly for them. Not my problem.
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An open-source project receiving open-source contributions from (often anonymous) volunteers is not even close to analogous to a storefront selling products with a consumer guarantee they are backing on the basis of their supply chain.
Do you think that Goodwill should be able to offload all liability for everything they sell at their thrift shops to their often anonymous donors? Linus makes $1.5 million per year from the Linux foundation. And the foundation itself pulls in $300 million a year in revenue. They are directly benefiting from contributors and if they cause harm through their actions there’s a good chance they’ll be held liable.
I don't even think this is an appropriate analogy worth answering. Goodwill are selling products to consumers in a direct exchange of money-for-goods.
No one is buying Linux.
A phenomenon I can not explain is the fact that this simple clean statement of a fairly obvious approach to AI assistance somehow took this long and Linus to state so cleanly. Are there other popular repos with effectively this policy stated as neatly that I’ve missed?
The wording might be more or less lawyerly but the idea is fairly common, e.g. https://openinfra.org/legal/ai-policy (OpenStack).
A phenomenon I can not explain is the fact that this simple clean statement of a fairly obvious approach to AI assistance somehow took this long and Linus to state so cleanly. Are there other popular repos with effectively this policy stated as neatly that I’ve missed?
We've had this for a while now: https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/polici...
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Yes but if you do that manually you are in bad faith, if you ask an AI to do it you have no idea if you are going to be liable of something or not.
> you have no idea if you are going to be liable of something or not In life that is a very strong indicator you should not do
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I kinda like the analogy of travelling here. With normal artisanal coding you take your time getting from A to B and you might find out alternate routes while you slowly make your way to the destination. There's also a clear cost in backtracking and trying an alternate route - you already wrote the "wrong" code and now it's useless. But you also gained more knowledge and maybe in a future trip from A to C or C to D y…
That would be great if you were a research lab with unlimited funding. But most business needs to grapple with real user data. Data they've been hired to process or to provide an easier way to process. Trying stuff until something sticks is not a real solution. Having tests and specs is no guarantee that something will works. The only truth is the code. One analogy that I always take is the linear equation y = ax + b…
The optimal solution would be to encase the whole thing in blast-proof transparent polymer, but nobody has the money to do that :)
Trying stuff until something sticks was not a solution when a human had to do the trying and every line of code cost money.
Now you can launch 20 agents to do slightly different things to see if something sticks - and still do the manual work yourself for the 21st path. The cost for those extra 20 attempts is next to nothing compared to the price of an actual programmer.
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I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place. I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call the…
That's a dim view, people also contribute to make projects work for their own needs with hopes to share fixes with others. Like if I make a fix to vLLM to make a model load on particular hardware, I can verify functionality (LLM no longer strays off topic) and local plausibility (global scales are being applied to attention layers), but I can't pretend to understand full math of the overall process and will never hav…
> What's missed is that neither contributors nor maintainers are usually paid for their effort
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Unlike patents, independent creation is a valid defense to copyright infringement. Copyright is the literal expression of the idea. The identifier names, how the functions are broken up, which libraries are used etc… Given more than a dozen lines or so, 2 people aren’t going to write the exact same code to solve the same problem. It might be equivalent code, but it’s not going to be the exact same. def copyright_warn…
But isn't it literally impossible to determine whether I copied those 5 lines or wrote them myself? Especially in languages like Go where there's an Official Formatter that makes all code look identical as much as possible? There are a multitude of reasons why I'm not a lawyer and vague crap like this is a big part :D
Courts would look at the preponderance of the evidence in a civil trial.
Did you have access to my code? Is the copy long enough that it’s statistically very unlikely that could have came up with it exactly on your own?
They’ll look at things like did you copy misspellings in variable names. Did you copy the missing period at the end of the output string etc…
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Do you think that Goodwill should be able to offload all liability for everything they sell at their thrift shops to their often anonymous donors? Linus makes $1.5 million per year from the Linux foundation. And the foundation itself pulls in $300 million a year in revenue. They are directly benefiting from contributors and if they cause harm through their actions there’s a good chance they’ll be held liable.
> Do you think that Goodwill should be able to offload all liability for everything they sell at their thrift shops to their often anonymous donors? I don't even think this is an appropriate analogy worth answering. Goodwill are selling products to consumers in a direct exchange of money-for-goods. No one is buying Linux.
And any company selling a device or software the includes the Linux code should be liable then.
And they are according to the law btw. Along with anyone distributing the software which includes the owner of the Linux repositories.