> A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.

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.

I've never publicly scolded someone for doing free work for tech monopolies but I do understand the impulse. The problem is that it's a completely one-sided relationship, and there are perfectly legitimate concerns about how the biggest tech companies are using their wealth and power. At this point I doubt much of anyone would expect a large tech company to go out of its way to lose money in order to support human communities. They take what they can, and ruthlessly kill products and services the minute they think it helps their bottom line.

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.

> Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output?

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.

MIT and BSD licenses are kind of obvious. They are academic licenses, named after universities.

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.

> I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

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 cultural shift exists and it will intensify as long as consumer prices and cost of living continue to rise at the same time corporate profit margins do. This is a simple, easy link to make, pretty much everyone's now aware and has stopped buying the excuses. Consolidation and an increase in straight up, unpunished criminal monopoly and cartel activity within corporate America have given rise to this new culture. Luigi Mangione will not be the last of his kind.

Because the ratio of developers who do it for money to developers who do it for love of developing has dramatically increased, as computer science became a subject people studied for economic reasons, not just for fun.

I would like to offer a similar, but somewhat different opinion on one aspect of what you talked about regarding "revshare":

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.

Really weird how you compare contribution to a commercial market leading company with open source licensing. How does that even make sense? If you give your knowledge or workforce away for free, do it. Google will not notice you in any case.

> someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

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.)

I think we've all been burned by 20+ years of exploitation in the guise of "free product." Google more or less spearheaded that movement. I agree we should all be community-minded and have nice things, but when you look at how the rewards (social and monetary) are shared it's overwhelmingly disproportionate.

This has nothing to do with monetization of output and everything to do with power balance. Google can take your contributions and do whatever they want with it, including banning you from using the data you contributed ever again. This doesn't happen with OpenStreetMap for example, which can be and is being monetized just fine as well, because all contributors have equal rights to the data.

It's the same thing as with CLAs with copyright assignment in FLOSS.

Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception that, while these companies have always profited off of our inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public good, they provided the platform, and profited off that platform.

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.

yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine.

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.

It has always been like that, except we used to call it demos, sharewhare, beerware, postware,...

The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from it.

The MIT license didn’t require a lot of thought.

> submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

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?

I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strings isn't exactly a gift.

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.

>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.

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.

There is a major difference between open-sourcing a completed product versus being an open source maintainer, and I'm disappointed that Carmack is drawing a false equivalence here.

Isn't that the case, and even the point, of all open source, even before AI?

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!

This is just the divide between capital and labor though, isn't it? See also: everything is a remix; great artists steal.

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.

Are you suggesting that authors didn't know or understand that commercial exploitation of their OSS contributions was possible? If so, that is a complete misrepresentation of history. There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. Authors have chosen not to use them, and instead chose licenses, such as MIT/GPL, that allowed commercial use. And there has always been commercial use of OSS. Big companies, small companies, tech companies, oil and gas companies, weapons manufacturers, banks, hardware companies, etc. They all use OSS and they all make a profit from it, without giving anything back to the people who originally wrote it. That's not an edge case or an unexpected consequence, it a fundamental tenet of free (as in freedom) software: You do not get to choose who uses it, or how they use it.

> But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work

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?

What seems stranger to me is not acknowledging, that most popular OSS explicitly permitted for profit use. It's essentially what made them popular.

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.

> He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are 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.

> 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.

Its a lot less odd when you remember that he's running an AI company himself.

It's also odd to release software under a license allowing commercial use if the authors didn't want that.

It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.

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!

> profiting for having done it.

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?

It's not even the profit, but that there is often no new code being contributed.

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.

Yeah the main difference seems to be that he open sourced the games after he got very wealthy from them not before. So of course at that point you can easily feel magnanimous about bestowing gifts.

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.

A lot of the use of open source code has directly breached the terms under which that code is shared and they are now monetising the sale of this code.

> But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.

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.

I haven't given a cent to openai or anthropic but they have given me many thousands of tokens for free.

That's the point? I agree and roughly it's one of two.

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.

If folks don't want LLMs scanning their codebases we should just make some new OSS licenses. Basically, "GPL/BSD/MIT + You pinky promise not to scan this for machine learning".

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.

why is someone making money out of it a bad thing, if they're not preventing other people from using the code?

>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.

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.

so what?

Carmack is the same person comfortable with delaying talks of ethical treatment of a digital being, or what even constitutes one until in his eyes "they demonstrate the capabilities of a two year old" by which point, with the scale we distribute these models at, and the dependence we're pushing the world to adopt on them, we'll be well into the "implicit atrocity zone", and so far down the sunk cost trail, everyone will just decide to skip the ethics talk altogether if we wait that long. This is in spite of being a family man, which raises serious questions to me about how he must treat them. It does not surprise me at all the man has blindspots I could fit a semi-truck in.

Software engineers have been automating away workers' jobs from the beginning. "Computer" was once a job title. There were armies of switchboard operators at the phone company. Companies had typing pools, mail clerks, and file clerks. We write shell scripts and development tools to automate our own jobs.

I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is finally going to bite us in the ass.

I'm not aware of any labor efforts that have successfully fought automation long term.

There's been plenty of temporary victories, but even the unions often acknowledge it's temporary.

> in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization

what examples are you thinking of?

> Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered.

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.

> the US is built on a high value service economy

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.

> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift").

That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.

I have the same attitude as Carmack. I have several libraries and sites I maintain as well as contributing to several popular open source projects. I still have his attitude about this. Both my open source and my ongoing maintenance are gifts. I'm also free to stop giving when I don't feel like it.

> It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away.

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.

He also (presumably) doesn't have to worry as much about money as many OSS folks might, so dual licensing (as a means to keep working on the OSS version while also making ends meet) is likely not something he would consider.

He also started an AI company, right?

The assumption here is that the people who maintain something in a painstaking manner did not intend people to take it and do whatever they want with it in accordance with its license?

> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS

It's a little disheartening that someone can release their code and still be told they "don't really do OSS".

That is, in fact, 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.

Then by your definition, SQLite isn't open-source because it's a code dump with a license, but outsiders are not allowed to participate in shaping (the official copy of) the code.

> It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away.

He didn't have to give it away, but he did, and for that I thank him

Though I agree that a healthy, vibrant, open source software project requires community and merge maintainer(s), open source "code dumps" (contributions of one's work for others to share) are open source.

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.

This the “no true scott”! fallacy. I sure he writes code and makes it open with an open source license, but he not really doing open source.

OSS is a big umbrella. At the end of the day, if you are not hurting for money, you might be okay donating your work for AI training. Meanwhile if you’re working hard on projects while sacrificing a lot (including money) you are very much allowed to not want AI use it for training if it means financial gain for a select few at the top.

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”.

This sounds to me like the "No True Scotsman" argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

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 mean back in the day licensing Quake from iD was like that too. It was basically "hey, thanks for the $2 million, here's your cdr and never contact us again."

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.

Open source is literally just releasing the code under an OSS license.

Any additional meaning or steps isn't open source, it's something else...

Carmack was a shareware/proprietary software guy way before he was a open source person if ever.

Well said. Some people are misparsing your core point here.

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/

Quake III Arena is OSS

He doesn’t need to keep maintaining it

What do the people who are deep into open source mean by the term then, in your understanding?

>This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps

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.

I don't think his AI company is the issue, it's that he desired the effect of a public domain/unlicense, a completely unfettered gift, while he was constrained by the business people to use a copyleft license. However, most people using a copyleft license are using it with (some) intent, and choosing it with (some) explicit preference over public domain/unlicenses, i.e., they are not intending it to be an unconstrained gift, they want a social dynamic of code recycling only in the open and with attribution (each optional and with variations depending on the license, but those are commonly desired constraints).

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.

Carmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though

I think it’s more than that. He is always pro performance, pro technology, and maybe libertarian, too.

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.

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.

If people need money they should seriously considering charging money for the software they make instead of giving it away for free and hoping it somehow becomes profitable.

arguments are stronger without insults

Except him being wealthy could just as well be used to support the argument for using GPL instead of gifting. "He does not have to make real money off of it, he is privileged".

Oldheads are not the exclusive group of people who have ever meant actual altruism by their open-source licenses. You can't just pick an attribute to dismiss an opinion based on. Creative control over the lineage of a line of code is just not something the open source world is very concerned with in aggregate.

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.

> But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.

What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.

This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!

People were violating the terms of GPL without consequence long before AI. It is very difficult to determine if binaries were compiled from fragments of GPL code.

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.

IP laundering is a big part of AI, it's why big companies are so excited and workers / artists are less excited

If it is clearly the same code, the copyright would apply to the copy. If it is meaningfully different it does not.

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,

Exactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and eat it too.

I would want to use the license that does not ask for credit; the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to combine it with software having such licenses).

> and this is the problem

Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use 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.

> - OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence

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

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

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.

AI is written by a for profit company whose long term objective is more profit.

I’m not against AI, I’m against the inevitable enshittification which will screw us all over, one way or another.

> I have a secret fear about AI - that at one point when AI models get good enough, AI companies will no longer give you the source these tools generate - you'll get the artifacts (perhaps hosted on a subscription website), but you won't get the code.

This is a likelier outcome than the various utopian promises (no more cancer!) that AI boosters have been making.

That highlights the importance of open models keeping up with the state of the art.

> 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 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.

You sound like a commie, friend! Have you thought of poor millionaires and they right to finally scratch their OCD by adding another useless feature to slop nobody will ever use? Have you considered challenges they face at work, when their billionaire overlords don't make enough obscene money to match Lizard Ellison or Beff Jezos?

Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. (c) Scam Altman

Stallman rarely cared about the rights of the writer, even reading the GPL makes it clear that it's all about the rights of the user.

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.

In the "When you're a star^H^H^H^H big tech, they let you do it. You can do anything." kind of way.

> but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use

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.

Even if not an explicit gift, isn't all OSS implicitly a gift? I'm having trouble understanding the practical difference.

He is not stupid. He is just like most tech people - ignorant of history, sociology and matters of policy.

For decades STEM people asked why we even need humanities when we have science and technology.

This is why.

He's anything but stupid, he is also human, makes mistakes (like you) and the last time I checked he was working on AI for years now so, yeah, he's probably going to gravitate towards "AI good" instead of "AI took my job".

Not stupid, just doesn't give a shit. He's 50+, has $100+ mil net worth and can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants. He's a cunt, but not a stupid cunt.

id Software released the source code to Wolfenstein in 1995, he was only rich at that point on merit and the success of their games.

Bethesda ended that practice.

If someone wants just the former they shouldn't make it open source.

Corporate lawyers for id wanted GPL iirc

Replace GPL in his sentence with something anti-AI and think of back in time when Carmack did that, it's exactly the same situation now except he's in a much more favorable position to make that stance, it's ironic if he can't see that most of us are on the other side of that fence with AI right now.

If OpenAI, Anthropic, and all other US labs stopped developing LLM’s, the Chinese and Europeans would still continue.

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.

id also released the source code to:

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.

Yeah — isn’t he confusing the arguments against AI art?

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

Oh, I thought it was about the wholesale theft (relicensing) of code by laundering through an LLM trained on the same code. ¿Porque no los dos?

I don't have problem with AI learning from FOSS code bases. I have a big problem with FOSS code bases helping to create non-FOSS code which does not return the favor. AI-washed Windows code for Wine would be fantastic.

It's both, although the latter is more prominent.

[dead]

It was certainly a gift to anyone who was able to fork those games and continue their maintenance

The gift metaphor might work if you think of it like birthday gifts: yes, it's a gift, but everyone knows that you're supposed to give one in return on their birthday.

If you accept gifts on your birthday but never give any in return, you're quickly left with a vanishingly small number of friends.

Copyleft is copyright held in smart way. Nobody can take code under GPL and make its _copy_ proprietary because it would be violation of copyright.

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?

This is completely speculative and not factual.

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.

Added above. Thanks!

This is exactly it. The people who release stuff under the GPL do so precisely because they want the software and derivatives to stay free. The software has strings attached; the AI removes them. What's so hard to understand here?

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.

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

Indeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past did so with the conviction that the license itself would in some measure protect the source code itself — as source code — from being exploited by commercially entities.

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.