John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

Another possible consensus would be that copyright don't exist, and anyone can copy proprietary or copyleft work and improve it. Nobody would be harmed in such situation, original author still have its copy. I would have no problem with such state - but it must be same for everyone, not just FOSS.

After it became obvious that 1) these LLMs were trained heavily on OSS, and 2) that they (arguably) wantonly violated the licenses of the OSS they were trained on (as even the most permissive of which mandated attribution), 3) that LLMs could be used to rewrite code licensed with terms (e.g., copyleft) deemed unsuitable for certain commercial purposes to nullify those terms, and 4) that these LLMs would ultimately be used to reduce the demand for developers and suppress developer wages (even as cost of living keeps rising, and now even cost of compute, once deflationary, rises quickly as well, ironically thanks to LLMs), the culture of unbounded enthusiasm for open source amongst devs ought to have quickly been supplanted by one of peer pressure-bordering-on-public-shaming against open source participation.

Yet people still go out of their way to open source projects, or work, uncompensated, on open source beyond the "good citizen" stuff of reporting bugs (possibly with fixes) in things you use.

It really boggles the mind. Even if you can't starve the beast, why willingly feed it, and for free?

Personally I think ai code should always be open source to at least make it the most "ethical", others can see and edit it as they see fit.

Generally though I've noticed that the spirit of open source (community owned code) has slowly been morphing into a few pointers that in some way undermine open source, whenever that be the fact that folks get more entitled towards open source projects or that they see certain open source licenses (specifically GPL) as a tool to build an anti-capitalist moat.

Despite the fact that almost every open source or accepted open source license by OSI or FSF explicitly states no warranty and commercialization of said project is allowed, just that most people don't contribute money let alone code (just look at the xz debacle even now the dev is not given sufficient attention in terms of commercial and social support to maintain it).

To be fair to Carmack, his vision of open source is one shared by a lot of the "free means anarcho-free" developer camp and as such if said code is used in ai or to bomb children then so be it.

I guess this is one of the major tension of open source is exactly what open source ought to be:

A drive towards ethical code or a drive towards anarcho-free, because stating "free as in freedom" is too vague; freedom has the connotation of both the idea of freedom TO DO something and the freedom to be EXEMPT from something.

In the end I believe that freedom to be exempt is more important than the freedom to do.

Due to the fact that the bad actors usually benefit more to exploit freedom-to than freedom-from, hence why beyond community building the (A|L)GPL helps out in ensuring both as a user but also as a developer that the code written is protecting us both.

Whenever or not AI is part of that is well going back to my point that ai code should most likely almost always be open-sourced if one wants to "lift the burden".

That would be all of them. They are all dirty.

The idea of 'voting with your dollar' is ridiculous - they are all terrible, so there's nothing to vote for. But yes, modern life requires that we engage with their nonsense, no need to think of the interaction as anything more that begrudging extraction.