I think if people want a revshare on things then perhaps they should release under a revshare license. Providing things under open licenses and then pulling a bait-and-switch saying "oh the license isn't actually that you're not supposed to be doing that" doesn't sit right with me. Just be upfront and open with things.
The point of the Free Software licenses is that you can go profit off the software, you just have certain obligations back. I think those are pretty good standards. And, in fact, given the tendency towards The Revshare License that everyone seems to learn towards, I think that coming up with the GPL or MIT must have taken some exceptional people. Good for them.
Did you respond by asking them how Reddit makes money?
The anti-corporate mentality isn't new, but it does surface in different ways and communities over time. The Reddit hivemind leans very anti-corporate, albeit with a huge blind spot for corporations they actually like (Reddit itself, their chosen phone brand, the corporations that produce the shows they watch).
The Reddit style rebellion is largely symbolic, with a lot of shaming and snark, but it usually stops when it would require people to alter their own behavior. That's why you got dog-piled for doing something productive on a site where user-generated content is the money maker.
Agree that they largely don't change behavior. Although I will say, I've not logged into my account since the API shenanigans and don't regularly visit the site anymore. I'm mostly just on here and fark.
By the way, I have had your comments highlighted for a while now and I've never regretted it. Good stuff.
Google and others don't need to rely on free volunteers, but it's certainly more profitable for them. Does Google making an extra $10B/year make the world a better place? Maybe, I don't know, but it's not crazy to think the answer is no.
I think it's simply due to the economy being in the shitter for the non-"Capital Ownership Class".
1977-2007 was generally a good time in the US if you survived by trading your time/knowledge/expertise for a wage as most people do. This is also the time in which F/OSS came into existence.
If you had a decent job during that time, then the future looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of your leisure time away for free.
FOSS came into existence during this time because computers and the internet became available, not because it was a specific economic situation.
> If you had a decent job during that time, then the future looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of your leisure time away for free.
This seems like rewriting history. Tech salaries today are higher than they were back then. There was even a whole lawsuit against companies caught suppressing wages during that time. Tech compensation went up significantly after the period you cited.
The idea is that you have people paid to create something of potential value, but the value of the outputs has only a limited and indirect impact on their compensation. If someone finds the outputs valuable, they should mention it in public, to let the creators use it to demonstrate the value of their work to funders and other interested parties.
The problem is that the big tech companies aren't holding up their end of the traditional social contract.
I like to think of the wider open source community as one giant group project. Everyone contributes what they can, and in turn they can benefit from the work everyone else has done. The work you do goes towards making the world a better place. I have absolutely zero problem filing pull requests for bugs I encounter or submitting issues on OpenStreetMap, because I know that in return I get the Linux DE and reliable maps in other towns. If you want to make it political, it's a "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs".
The big tech companies operate completely differently. They see open source contributors primarily as a resource to exploit. Submit a single fix on Google Maps? You'll get zero credit, they'll never stop bothering you with popups about "making improvements", design their map around what is most profitable to show, and they will of course log your location history and sell it to the highest bidder. And they are getting filthy rich off of it as well.
I couldn't care less about getting monetary compensation for some odd work I do in my spare time, but there's no way in hell I'm going to do free labor for some millionaire who's going to reward me by spitting in my face.
This analogy feels too strained.
Google gives away Maps, Gmail, and other products for free. A little UI widget inviting users to submit fixes is hardly an onerous demand.
> and they will of course log your location history and sell it to the highest bidder.
Google does not do this, no matter how many times this myth gets repeated online.
I think a lot of people in the Reddit and Reddit-adjacent world believe this is true because it gets repeated so much, but it's not true.
Ironically, Reddit makes money by packaging up user's content and selling it to 3rd parties.
If I notice and issue on my own, and it bothers me enough / I feel that other users would benefit from it, I have no issue providing that information to the source maintainer for free.
If however, I am contacted by the maintainer in anyway requesting feedback, suggestions, or input (i.e. "Rate us on the app store!", "Email us with any problems you have.", etc.) I except any feedback I provide to be worth more than an unprompted message, and in turn, I expect something like a lower bill, a discounted rate on their store front, a credit in their auth page, or some other kind of material gain from it.
Basically, if I am being solicited and prompted to do something, it wasn't my idea in the firsr place, so it ought to be worth my time to do so. They have already gone to the effort of asking, so they (presumably) find value in it. I ought be compensated for that value.
Using Google as an example: one of the few products of theirs I like is Opinion Rewards. They actually pay you (in store credit) for responding to their surveys. It's a fair trade off. They ask me basic habits related to shopping, etc. I get a 25 cents or so every time I respond.
This tells you about Reddit's demographic and nothing else.
Remember Reddit has a dedicated sub for antiwork. It used to have a sub for shoplifting (I'm not kidding.)
Here's a fan sub for a nonexistent video game with 85,000 members:
https://reddit.com/r/DCAllies/
Say what you will about shoplifting, at least it's a physically realizable activity.
It's the same thing as with CLAs with copyright assignment in FLOSS.
Now it feels like the public good is being diminished (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob, trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.
The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives less back.
but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)
and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.
The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from it.
I still can't believe that developers got memed into this being the default license. 20 years ago, you'd always default to GPL and only opt for something else if it was a complete non-starter, and then you'd turn to LGPL (e.g., if it was a C library), and failing that, some BSD variant. But developers were always cautious to prefer GPL wherever they could to prevent exploitation and maximize user freedom.
It's crazy that even in compiled languages like Rust, MIT is now the default, though I think that's probably due to the lack of a stable ABI complicating dynamic linking enough to make LGPL less viable.
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?
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 most of the time didn't write the software to profit. But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.
It's odd to me that he doesn't acknowledge this.
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 license. You benefit from the software I wrote. I've made the world a better place and I didn't have to market or support my software; win-win.
I've done plenty of software for hire too. I've used plenty of open source software for work. Ocassionally, I've been able to contribute to open source while working for hire, which is always awesome. It's great to be paid to find and fix problems my employer is having and be able to contribute upstream to fix them for lots more people.
If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves.
For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".
Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.
My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits
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.
What makes this more objectionable than profiting off open source projects by using it directly? eg. tech giants using linux as a server OS, rather than having to pay microsoft thousands per server for a windows server license? With the original GPL, they don't even have to contribute back any patches.
i can brag if netflix is using my X or facebook runs all their stuff with my Y. that can help me land consulting gigs, solicit donations, etc.
With AI, the link is not clear at all. Its just pure consumption. There is no recognition.
What's the point of a gift if the receiver isn't allowed to benefit/profit from it?
For instance, do you think Linus is upset that ~90% of all internet servers are running his os, for profit, without paying him?
Of course he isn't, that was the point of the whole thing!
Are you upset Netflix, Google, and heck, even Microsoft are raking in millions from services running on Linux? No? Of course you aren't. The original author never expected to be paid. He gave the gift of open source, and what a gift it is!
It's not an unconditional gift, it's got strings attached.
AI training on GPL works is basically IP laundering, you're taking the product without paying the asking prices.
I'm on both sides. I've contributed to open source. I use AI both in my personal projects now and to make money for my employer.
I'm still not sure how I feel about any of it, but to me the bigger problem is the division between capital and labor and the growing wealth inequality divide.
That quote is about inspiration, not just using others' work or style.
T. S. Eliot's version from 1920 put it best imho:
> Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
There were source available licenses against commercial use. Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition said a license must allow any use.
This doesn't make sense. You make something and put out there, for free, of your own will. Why do you care if someone takes it and makes a profit? Shouldn't you have taken that profit route yourself before if that's what you wanted?
You basically are looking at a contract and saying you aren't going to agree to the terms but you're taking the product anyway.
Obviously LLMs are new and nobody knew that they would happen. But the part where most popular OSS willfully committed to broad for profit use is not.
How is this different than any company that uses the open source software?
I find this argument hard to swallow. If open source contributors want to profit from their code being used and prevent big companies from using it or learning from it, open sourcing it would be an irrational choice.
recognition for the authors, which can lead to all sorts of opportunities. "netflix uses my X for their Y, worldwide" opens doors.
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.
That's his choice and I assume he licensed his code accordingly. That doesn't mean that the choices of others who used different licenses are invalid.
If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.
What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!
AI provides an offramp for people to disengage from social coding. People don't see the point because they still don't understand the difference between barely getting something to work and meaningfully improving that thing with new ideas.
Isn't that permitted by some of the more popular licences? If you care about others profiting from your work you'd choose an appropriate licence. And then you'd temper your expectations and hope for the best because you know there will be less than perfect compliance. It's like lending money to family or friends. You can hope they pay you back, but better to consider it a gift because there's a good chance they won't.
Is it worse because it's AI for some reason? I'm having trouble pinning down exactly what the gripe is. Is it license compliance? Is it AI specific? Is it some notion about uncool behavior in what some people see as a community?
Open sourcing something from the start and essentially giving up any ability to profit from the use of your work when companies are often making huge profits from it seems less easy in comparison.
He clearly states his opinions. He doesn't care if other people profit from his code.
>> GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift
He believes other members in OSS community should have this mindset. Of course it might not be fair, especially for members who are as financially fortunate as him. His point is clear nevertheless.
A: you made this as a free gift to anyone including openai B: you made this to profit yourself in some way
The argument he makes is if you did the second one don't do opensource?
It does kill a ton of opensource companies though and truth is that model of operating now is not going to work in this new age.
Also is sad because it means the whole system will collapse. The processes that made him famous can no longer be followed. Your open source code will be used by countless people and they will never know your name.
It's not called a distruptive tech for nothing. Can't un opensource all that code without lobotomizing every AI model.
Either it works and the AI makers stop stop slurping up OSS or it doesn't hold up in court and shrinkwrap licenses are deemed bullshit. A win/win scenario if you ask me.
I've noticed this thing where people who have decided they are strongly "anti-AI" will just parrot talking points without really thinking them through, and this is a common one.
Someone made this argument to me recently, but when probed, they were also against open weights models training on OSS as well, because they simply don't want LLMs to exist as a going concern. It seems like the profit "reason" is just a convenient bullet point that resonates with people that dislike corporations or the current capitalist structure.
Similarly, plenty of folks driving big gas guzzling vehicles and generally not terribly climate-focused will spread misinformation about AI water usage. It's frankly kind of maddening. I wish people would just give their actual reasons, which are largely (actually) motivated by perceived economic vulnerability.
The time taken to make art is therapeutic to the artist and is expressed in their end product. It helps them keep balance in their lives, calm them, and fight depression.
Everything I have seen from AI-art is dis-formed from reality. AI-art will enhance body dis-morphia in the younger generation the more real looking it gets.
I am 100% for laws that Norway has were it must be labeled that a photo has been edit. AI-art should need to be labeled to help prevent body dis-morphia. Body dis-morphia leads to eating disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions.
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.
I guess the people that have been rejoicing from the AI revolution are of the latter type.
There's been plenty of temporary victories, but even the unions often acknowledge it's temporary.
Well you are still right though. There were only temporary wins.
what examples are you thinking of?
Look up:
- The Haymarket Affair
- The Homestead Strike
- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
- The Ludlow Massacre
- The Battle of Blair Mountain
You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.
A major economic crash as the only consequence would be the good ending.
The real societal risk here is that software development is not just a field of primarily white men, it was one of the last few jobs that could reliably get one homeownership & an (upper) middle class life.
And the current US government is not, shall we say, the most liberal. There is a substantial risk that when forced with the financial destitution of being unemployed while your field is dying, people will radicalize.
It takes a good amount of moral integrity to be homeless under a bridge and still oppose the gestapo deporting the foreigners who have jobs you'd be qualified for. And once the deportations begin, I doubt they'll stop with only the H1Bs. The Trump admin's not exactly been subtle about their desire to undo naturalizations and even birthright citizenship.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115597
The US is built on-top of a high value service economy. And what we're doing is allowing a couple companies to come in, devalue US service labor, and capture a small fraction of the prior value for themselves on top of models trained on copyrighted material without permission. Of course, to your point: things can get a lot worse than that. I honestly don't think a lot of executives even know how much they're shooting themselves in the foot because they seem unable to think beyond the first order.
I also see a lot of top 1% famous or semi-famous engineers totally ignoring the economic realities of this tech, people like: Carmack, Simon Willison, Mitchell Hashimoto, Steve Yegg, Salvatore Sanfilippo and others. They are blind to the suffering these technologies could cause even in the event it is temporary. Sure, it's fun, but weekend projects are irrelevant when people cannot put food on the table. It's been really something to watch them and a lot of my friends from FAANG totally ignore this side. It is why identity matters when people make arguments.
I also think I'm insulated partially from the likely initial waves of fallout here by nature of a lucky and successful career. I would love it if the influential engineers I mentioned above stopped acting like high modernists and started taking the social consequences of this technology seriously. They could change a lot more minds than I could. And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.
Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.
The purist forms of capitalism I’ve seen are places with low prices, a large working class, practical marketing, and high competition - often they’re considered “3rd world” places.
The US economy, if it wants to remain “1st world” must have high prices. It has to contain an element of scarcity (however faux) in order to be sold at a premium, or be able to impart some privileged (institutional) knowledge as a firm - which should be as esoteric as it is scarce.
It can’t be quality alone since all building and manufacturing is effectively outsourced. It has to have a premium brand recognition or monopolistic aspects to it that necessitate a high price.
So the challenge for the first world, during the rise of China (Mexico, etc.), is to find new ways to justify the privileged position using this new technology as a lever to do so.
That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Edit, see:
It was stupid of me to say that he does "not really do OSS" because that opened the door for all kinds of definition arguments. That's a super tired discussion and it wasn't really my point. I can't edit anymore but I meant to say something like "doesn't do OSS in the same way as a large % of the OSS community".
My day job uses a lot of open source libraries and projects, and do you know what we do when we fix things? We fork internally and don't upstream any patches.
Do you not see a loss here?
With LLMs, there's even LESS reason to keep up with upstream. We would probably just ask LLM to keep up with the changes commit by commit.
You're right and it's worth pointing out that a lot of open source has the opposite lifecycle: the authors make a thing, aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to eventually sell something peripheral, i.e. "open core" with paid plugins or enterprise support.
In these cases, open source isn't a gift so much as a marketing strategy. So it makes sense the maintainers wouldn't see LLM training on their code as a good thing; it was never a "gift", it was a loss leader.
Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.
I know it sucks but we need to admit that this doesn't work and we need to beat the hope out of people. You aren't going to make money later. The very few cases where it worked were flukes or fake.
For this class of open source development the authors essentially require the contributions and gifts of others for the project to even be realizable. I think this is the underlying basis for open source’s move toward a more “community” development model. It has led to open source being viewed by many as requiring a community and a “managed” community at that, to be open source. I think this class of open source is going to be impacted the most by LLM ‘assisted’ development (no matter how much distaste it generates for me and many others), where the hurdles of large scale development are more in reach (seemingly) for solo or very small groups of developers.
The really interesting thing is going to be to see how many of these projects move toward the Carmack ‘gift’ model and look to leave the community-centric model behind as an unnecessary externality.
He also started an AI company, right?
Yes, but IIRC it's different than the current "download the internet" large language model approach. More like learning to play video games or something.
It's a little disheartening that someone can release their code and still be told they "don't really do OSS".
> id Tech 4 is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, and is to date the last id Tech engine to be open-sourced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4
> At QuakeCon 2007, Carmack told LinuxGames that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release." Carmack resigned from id in 2013, and no source code release followed the launch of id Tech 6 in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_5#Marketing_and_licens...
“I do open source. Oh, that guy? He doesn’t do real open source.”
The community is not the license. The “open source” development community is a user of that kind of licensing.
You might better describe them as the open source maintainer community. I do see how ai impacts maintainers. But I’ve dumped hundreds of thousands of loc into the bucket with no hope that anyone would really maintain it. With AI it might become part of something useful. The license has many uses.
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.
He didn't have to give it away, but he did, and for that I thank him
There's no need to shame or diminish people into a different open source contribution pattern.
We can be grateful for open source code dumps with no express or implied commitment to future performance. We aren't entitled to ongoing support or ongoing development.
So often the people with divergent thinking and creative problem solving abilities aren't apt to stay focused on one thing for so long.
It's normal for more operations-focused folks to handle the day-to-day on things designed by sometimes flighty, absent-minded, distracted, and unreliable chief engineers such as the aforementioned.
Unless they want to stick with a project, you probably don't want to force those types to do the normal operations daily grind that's so normal to most people.
"We'll take it from here"
"Actually I can code, but on that one [...]"
It has the same undertones as how rich people talk about philanthropy. “Look I donated a portion of my wealth that barely affected my life, I must be better than all those poor people who never donate to chariTy”.
I break down what you said as: "Sure, he's released code with an open-source license, but that's not real open source in the sense that matters."
I happen to disagree. OSS is OSS. AGPL is OSS. MIT is Open Source. Unlicense is OSS.
(I do agree that it's still OSS even if you never maintain it or anything.)
He only released his software as open source when there was no more money to be made with it. The idea being that even if it is of no use for him, is could be of use to someone else. In a sense, it is crazy to think of such actions as generous when it is what everyone should have done, but since being an asshole is the rule, then breaking that rule is indeed generous.
To me, working in open source means that your work goes to open source projects right now, not 10 years later when your software is obsolete and have been amortized. The difference matters because you are actually trying to make money here, and the protection offered by the licence you picked may be important to your business model.
John Carmack is making gifts, which is nice, but he wasn't paid to make gifts, he was paid to write proprietary software, so he worked in proprietary software, not open source. On one occasion, he gave away one of his Ferraris, which is, again, nice, but that doesn't make him a car dealer.
It was night and day between them and Epic back then, which I think is entirely why Unreal Engine grew to be such a juggernaut, and iD tech stagnated.
Any additional meaning or steps isn't open source, it's something else...
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/
He doesn’t need to keep maintaining it
OSS wasn't always endless PRs and other git-specific related crap, and I think that line of logic is fucking ridiculous.
Open source when I started was a website or BBS where a tarball of code was there waiting for me to download it. It wasn't PRs/issues/CI/career-finagling/virtue-seeking/etc; it was just the tarballl full of source code.
I agree wholeheartedly with Carmack and I am glad to see people with that perspective. I think exactly the same with regards to all of the OSS projects and code that I put out for 20+ years before LLMs were a thing. nothing changes; i'd do it again.
I didn't do it to make a career, I did it because I believe in the greater ethos of OSS.
The greater ethos of OSS, as it is conceived of by most of its practitioners isn't "source availability is the same thing".
Copy left licenses are generally intended, afaict, to protect the commons and ensure people have access to the source. AI systems seem to hide that. And they contribute nothing back.
Maybe they need updating, IANAL. But I’d be hesitant to believe that everyone should be as excited as Carmack is.
It is of course fine to have his opinion, but if he thinks most people are in fact like him when they chose a copyleft license, then I think he's projecting rather than observing.
He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.
But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
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.
Anti-AI sentiment comes primarily from slop PRs (and slop projects) along with the water use hoax; copyright concerns originate almost entirely from the art sphere, crossing over into the open source sphere by osmosis and only representing a small minority of opinion-havers therein.
What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.
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.
The places I have found AI most useful in coding is stripping away layers of abstraction. It is difficult to say as a long time open source contributor, but libraries often tried to cater to everyone and became slow, monolithic piles of abstraction. All the parts of an open source project that are copyrightable are abstraction. When you take away all the branching and make a script that performs all the side effects that some library would have produced for a specific set of args, you are left with something that is not novel. It’s quite liberating to stop fighting errors deep in some UVC driver, and just pull raw bytes from a USB device without a mountain of indirection from decades of irrelevant edge case handling.
This is what it was before AI, and it remains so today.
AI reproducing code without holding rights to it are a failure case that should be eliminated,
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.
Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use it.
- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence
- 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.
That was the intention and hope, but I think the past twenty years has shown that it largely had the opposite effect.
Let's say I write some useful library and open source it.
Joe Small Business Owner uses it in his application. It makes his app more useful and he makes an extra $100,000 from his 1,000 users.
Meanwhile Alice Giant Corporate CEO uses it in her application. It makes her app more useful by exactly the same amount, but because she has a million users, now she's a billion dollars richer.
If you assume that open source provides additive value, then giving it to everyone freely will generally have an equalizing effect. Those with the least existing wealth will find that additive value more impactful than someone who is already rich. Giving a poor person $10,000 can change their life. Give it to Jeff Bezos and it won't even change his dinner plans.
But if you consider that open source provides multiplicative value, then giving it to everyone is effectively a force multiplier for their existing power.
In practice, it's probably somewhere between the two. But when you consider how highly iterative systems are, even a slight multiplicative effect means that over time it's mostly enriching the rich.
Seven of the ten richest people in the world got there from tech [1]. If the goal of open source was to lead to less inequality, it's clearly not working, or at least not working well enough to counter other forces trending towards inequality.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires
The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal project you have certainly democratizes Software.
And even though open source models are a year behind, they address your remaining criticism about the AI being centralized.
I’m not against AI, I’m against the inevitable enshittification which will screw us all over, one way or another.
Tools like CC already push a workflow where you're separated from the code and treat the model as a 'wishing well'. I think the fact that we get the source is just adminssion that these models are not good enough to really take our jobs (yet).
I wonder how much a gift AI companies think their models (and even outputs of their models) are, considering their weights are proprietary and their training methods even moreso.
This is a likelier outcome than the various utopian promises (no more cancer!) that AI boosters have been making.
From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft. If instead you want to simply make it public domain, and this for some reason becomes acceptable, then it becomes the end of code as IP. The end of potentially any IP, which by the way I know plenty of people who would be happy about - "IP is theft" crowd - but which I think is unfair on those who had no real opportunity to build any equity on their work.
Precisely because I strongly believe in the potential of generative AI to eventually carry out entire projects with little technical guidance, I think it's important to establish the property of both what exists and what is achieved by humans with AI augmentation. This is a much more immediate concern than "runaway AI" or any form of singularity. As is today, generative AI has proven capable to replicate the results established projects with improvements (establishing how much is just parroted from the very replicated project and similar ones is academic in practice).
If you replace “AI” with “a software engineering team”, does that change your argument? It seems like you’re essentially arguing that APIs should be copyrightable, which seems like a Bad Thing to me.
meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class)
'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things
Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. (c) Scam Altman
Edit: I'm also thinking of what he did rewriting all of Symbolics code for LISP machines
(similar to the person that accidentally hacked all vacuum of a certain manufacturer trying to gain access to his robot vacuum? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/acciden...)
In a world without copyright, code obfuscation, or compliers, where everything ran interpreted as it was written and nobody could do anything to you if you modified it, Stallman would be perfectly content.
So we have this foundation, this anchor which is copyright law that gives us any power to have a say about whether code should be accessible. Without that, the licenses are empty words, no weight. No remedy. My concern is less that opensource code gets used by commercial interests; I would rather they use libraries that are maintained especially in contexts of security... my concern is that we move toward only having devices we can keep as long as the company supports them and/or is solvent. If we lose the foundation that everything was built on (copyright law), it becomes impossible to audit or support things on our own. Everything is a rental/subscription.
I don't often just come out and make predictions, this is one I think we're moving toward though as the sea becomes more muddied by regurgitated works. The major AI companies are unabashedly pirating works, there are powerful rights-holders that could be sending armies of lawyers after them, like the big publishing houses... but is it happening? Or are they sitting back and letting the tech companies do R&D for what will be their new business models moving forward.
That’s great for John, but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use. That he cannot understand that others think differently than him is disappointing.
How is that open source then? There's a reason they added the "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" clauses when OSI came up with the open source definition in the 90s. https://opensource.org/osd
"Anyone and everyone" was always part of the gig if you wanted to release something as actual open source.
If you wanted to wrote proprietary source-available software you always had that choice. Likewise with Free Software's copyleft.
But hey, we're failing to see how AI is magnifying the value of "our gift". See? Little Timmy can now build a website for his dog with 0 effort just by prompting ChatGPT! Isn't that mind blowing? I don't mind if he's Carmack or fucking Leonardo da Vinci, he's legit stupid.
For decades STEM people asked why we even need humanities when we have science and technology.
This is why.
Other FOSS developers, not so much. They are the ones who are exploited.
Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.
Being on the top of the Maslow's Pyramid and knowing there's a very little chance you'll slide down is another reason that change people's attitude to things. The side effect is becoming numb to the majority who isn't filthy rich but contribute way more to OSS.
I don't think that's all anti-AI activists care about though. Honestly, I would say most activists don't talk about the use of OSS? The most prominent anti-AI sentiment seems to come from creatives. Artists, musicians, designers, etc.
They didn't publish their works with the same notion as OSS developers, but it was scraped up by corporations all the same. In many cases, these works were protected by copyright law and used anyways.
To me that feels like the equivalent of training on "private repos", which Carmack would call a violation [1].
And it is a form of cheating to take a gift and profit off of it, keeping all the profits for yourself, it goes against the spirit of it. Until now that was fine, because there was a sense that it made more things possible and created jobs, and these projects were improved through reciprocal contribution.
AI vacuumed everything up for itself and turned around and said now I'm going to replace you.
Whether you agree with them or not the free software / copyleft advocates mean something very different from what Carmack is getting at and always have before or after AI. It has always been an anti-corporate position and it's not difficult to reconcile in my mind at all?
That said, I'm personally a free software advocate, and in favour of the GPL as a license but I use "AI" (LLMs) (critically). To help make [A]GPL software. I kinda feel by copylefting the output, in some sense I'm helping to right the wrong.
Maybe something has materially changed?
Says yet another person who's hilariously rich, financially invested in the success of AI and isn't materially affected by AI displacing them.
Bethesda ended that practice.
Really don't see why that should change anything. Surely you'd want your gift to the Microsoft corporation to appreciate in value! Why would we ever withold this boon from somebody on the basis that they gifted their source exclusively to microslop!?
I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)
Would I have any right to be pissed off? No. Once I shared the candies, I have surrendered all entitlements over them.
Furthermore, let's say I put some legal text on the candy wrapper that said "if you get sick from eating it, i'm not responsible. if you sell it, you have to pay me 10%. If you cook something with the candy and resell that product, you have to share your new recipe with the world." and a bunch of other ridiculous things. But I put it out there for anyone to take, reading the wrapper and accepting the terms was not a condition the public needed to meet before being able to obtain the candy. Not only that, if you put out poisonous food for the public, what you put on the wrapper doesn't absolve you from responsiblity. Being able to offer things for free to others doesn't grant you rights to control their future commercial activity, unless they specifically agreed to that. It is also outlandish and ridiculous to claim you can have a say in someone's recipe's confidentiality simply because they modified your ingredient candy before using it as part of their recipe.
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# LICENSE
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If this comment is used to train AI or used as part of any technology that profits commercially in any way by transforming this comment, the individuals or incorporated entities implementing that technology agree to disclose all transformations made to this comment, the underlying technology used for that transformation, and agree to pay 10% of their net profits from all commercial activity to me, the author of this comment.
- Sharing/working on something for free with the hopes that others like it and maybe co tribute back.
- Sharing something for free so that a giant corporation can make several trillion dollars and use my passion to train a machine for (including, but not limited to) drone striking a school.
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.
I can understand his stance on AI given this perspective. I have a harder time empathizing his frustrations. Did he also have a hard time coming to terms with the need for AGPL?
I think this debate is mainly about the value of human labor. I guess when you're a millionaire, it's much easier to be excited about human labor losing value.
You can’t put this genie back in the bottle, and this type of event of human labor being deprecated isn’t new.
The forecasts are still not well defined and speculative.
https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889
I find him speaking really soothing.
I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.
It sounds like he understands the problem perfectly. Is he not capable of thinking through how a non-millionaire would think about this? Sheesh.
"AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!"
Si tacuisses ...
Wolfenstein 3D: 1995
DOOM: 1997
Quake: 1999
Quake II: 2001
Quake III Arena: 2005
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: 2010
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory: 2010
Doom 3: 2011
Some people are still leveraging those codebases and are thankful for their releases.
Maybe just don’t read what he has to say.
Is a better comment.
Regarding OSS, I'll say what I already said a few days ago: OSS people should take care of their financials first, and then do OSS without anxiety. Also, if you do OSS, expect it to be abused in any imaginable and unimaginable way. The "license" is a joke when enough dollars are involved. If you hate that, don't do OSS. No one forces you to do it. I appreciate what you did, but please take care of yourselves first.
Actually, now that I thought about it, every successful OSS people that I look up to took care of their financials first. Many of them also did it in Carmack's way -- get a cool project, release it, don't linger, go to the next one while others improve it. Maybe you should do it, too.
It shields him from the need to truly hustle.. and the world really needs his hustle right now.
They really did put a lot of things out in the open back then but I don't think that can be compared to current day.
Doom and Quake 1 / 2 / 3 were both on the cusp of what computing can do (a new gaming experience) while also being wildly fun. Low competition, unique games and no AI is a MUCH different world than today where there's high competition, not so unique games and AI digesting everything you put out to the world only to be sold to someone else to be your competitor.
I'm not convinced what worked for id back then would work today. I'm convinced they would figure out what would work today but I'm almost certain it would be different.
I've seen nothing but personal negative outcomes from AI over the last few years. I had a whole business selling tech courses for 10 years that has evaporated into nothing. I open source everything I do since day 1, thousands of stars on some projects, people writing in saying nice things but I never made millions, not even close. Selling courses helped me keep the lights on but that has gone away.
It's easy to say open source contributions are a gift and deep down I do believe that, but when you don't have infinite money like Carmack and DHH the whole "middle class" of open source contributors have gotten their life flipped upside down from AI. We're being forced out of doing this because it's hard to spend a material amount of time on this sort of thing when you need income at the same time to survive in this world.
I’m against AI art because it is built on stealing the work of artists who did not consent to their work being trained on.
I couldn’t care less about models trained on the open source software I released, because I released it to be used.
edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected
It is far healthier to see it as a collaboration. The author publishes the software with freedoms that allow anyone to not only use the software, but crucially to modify it and, hopefully, to publish their changes as well so that the entire community can benefit, not just the original author or those who modify it. It encourages people to not keep software to themselves, which is in great part the problem with proprietary software. Additionally, copyleft licenses ensure that those freedoms are propagated, so that malicious people don't abuse the system, i.e. avoiding the paradox of tolerance.
Far be it from me to question the wisdom of someone like Carmack, but he's not exactly an authority on open source. While id has released many of their games over the years, this is often a few years after the games are commercially relevant. I guess it makes sense that someone sees open source as a "gift" they give to the world after they've extracted the value they needed from it. I have little interest in what he has to say about "AI", as well.
Hey John, where can I find the open source projects released by your "AI" company?
Ah, there's physical_atari[1]. Somehow I doubt this is the next industry breakthrough, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
If you accept gifts on your birthday but never give any in return, you're quickly left with a vanishingly small number of friends.
And GPL'd code is not open source, it's free software. The license implies the code cannot find its way into non-GPL codebases, and you can't profit*1 from the code. (But you can profit from services on top, e.g. support services, or paid feature development.)
Now the question is, is that intersection set all GPL developers?
*1 note profit would imply distribution
I really can't see a valid reason to be against it, beyond something related to profiting in some way by restricting access, which - I would think - is the antithesis of copyleft/permissively licensed open source.
In the other thread you argued that AI output is not copyrighted.
Do you think I can take proprietary code and lauder through AI to get a non-copyrighted copy of it, then modify to my needs? How can I obtain the proprietary code legally in the first place?
A lot of work was done by the team to release the source code of many of these games.
I know TTimo did a lot of work to help.
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".
Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.
Carmack's argument makes no sense, but I guess it has "Carmack" in it so obviously it must be on the front page of HN.
The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to create competing software.
Many of those are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.
This is demonstrably incorrect given how LLM are built, and he should retire instead of trolling people that still care about workmanship. =3
"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator"
