> To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault.
this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced
and I will produce no more
I fixed it... Sorry, I had to, the quote template was simply too good.
Yes.
I don't see how "We couldn't do this cool thing if we didn't throw away ethics!" is a reasonable argument. That is a hell of a thing to write out.
The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI
it's not
the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on
All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?
I would never have imagined things turning out this way, and yet, here we are.
Are there any proposals to nail down an open source license which would explicitly exclude use with AI systems and companies?
Even if you could construct such a license, it wouldn't be OSI open source because it would discriminate based on field of endeavor.
And it would inevitably catch benevolent behavior that is AI-related in its net. That's because these terms are ill-defined and people use them very sloppily. There is no agreed-upon definition for something like gen AI or even AI.
Because it is "transformative" and therefore "fair" use.
Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.
no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values.
Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery.
which they don't
and no self-serving sophistry about "it's transformative fair use" counts as respecting the license
"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
But AI is also the ultimate meat grinder, there's no yours or theirs in the final dish, it's just meat.
And open source licenses are practically unenforceable for an AI system, unless you can maybe get it to cough up verbatim code from its training data.
At the same time, we all know they're not going anywhere, they're here to stay.
I'm personally not against them, they're very useful obviously, but I do have mixed or mostly negative feelings on how they got their training data.
Might be because most of us got/gets payed well enough that this philosophy works well or because our industry is so young or because people writing code share good values.
It never worried me that a corp would make money out of some code i wrote and it still doesn't. AFter all, i'm able to write code because i get paid well writing code, which i do well because of open source. Companies always benefited from open source code attributed or not.
Now i use it to write more code.
I would argue though, I'm fine with that, to push for laws forcing models to be opened up after x years, but i would just prefer the open source / open community coming together and creating just better open models overall.
Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied.
I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code. If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there. Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?
Most objections like yours are couched in language about principles, but ultimately seem to be about ego. That's not always bad, but I'm not sure why it should be compelling compared to the public good that these systems might ultimately enable.
Nah, don't do that. Produce shitloads of it using the very same LLM tools that ripped you off, but license it under the GPL.
If they're going to thief GPL software, least we can do is thief it back.
Thanks for your contributions so far but this won't change anything.
If you'd want to have a positive on this matter, it's better to pressure the government(s) to prevent GenAI companies from using content they don't have a license for, so they behave like any other business that came before them.
