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
Keyword being "can"
The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
The original post in this thread was:
> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. 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. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.
Skrebbel probably shouldn't have said that Carmack "doesn't really do OSS", but what they clearly meant was, Carmack doesn't participate in the sort of community development as the Linux kernel or Apache or whatever.
> The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.
It does
The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”
From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.
And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.
While you can have a cathedral-like development and publish it under an open-source license, that's not what RMS was talking about in his essay.
I'm also not arguing about what is good or bad, but about what was meant by the term "open source" when it was introduced, and how it is still understood by many people since then.
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
A bazaar is a chaotic market with a million vendors, not anything remotely cooperative. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is meant to convey the idea that OSS code develops without central organization, through endless forking and cloning.
The bazaar model definitely isn't the cooperation and vibes model that the HN crowd thinks it is...
In it, the bazaar is a metaphor for the development process of the Linux kernel.
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".
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.
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.
Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.
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.
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.
Just like many cultural rules, they keep growing in complexity until they reach a phase change where they become ignored because they have become too complicated.
Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.
I’m not sure whether this is implemented or not since I don’t use generative AI for coding.
As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.
> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
How?
The current implementation has recently become obsolete.
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.
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”.
Any additional meaning or steps isn't open source, it's something else...
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.)
I agree there's a difference between publishing code under an OSS license and actively maintaining a project while fielding the flood of low-quality AI issues and PRs. Someone in the latter category is obviously closer to that pain.
I still wouldn't go so far as to dismiss Carmack's view on that basis alone, though. It just means his experience is less representative of maintainers dealing with that specific problem every day.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
FUTO is also exploring this space: https://sourcefirst.com/
The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from it.
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.
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".
The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom", not related to whether you profit from it or not.
To clarify further: "freedom" for the end user, and not the developer leveraging GPL code in their software product.
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
> My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.
Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.
Copyright isn't "done", copyright has just been restricted to the rich and powerful. AI has essentially made it legal to steal from anyone who isn't rich enough to sue you - which in the case of the main AI companies means everyone except a handful of giants.
I use AI every day in my dev workflows, yet I am still easily able to empathize with those who did not intend for their code to be laundered through AI to remove their attribution (or whatever other caveats applied in their licensing.)
Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI
A compromise might have been possible, based on treaties engineered by the people who brought us the TPP, but nobody in the current US government is capable of negotiating anything like that or inclined to try. And it wouldn't exactly leave the rest of us better off if they did.
As a result, copyright is a zero-sum game from a US perspective, which matters because that's where the majority of leading research happens on the majority of available compute. Every inch of ground gained by Big IP comes at America's expense.
So they must lose, decisively and soon. Yes, the GPL will be lost as collateral damage. I'm OK with that. You will be, too.
Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
there are binary files that some companies are allowing you to download, for now. it was called shareware in the old days.
one day the tap will close and we'll see then what open models really means
For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.
At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late.
> Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests
The companies training big models are actively respecting copyright from anyone big enough to actually fight back, and soaking everyone else.
They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.
That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits
My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose.
LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320
If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything?
And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.
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.
I've never written or contributed to open source code with this being the goal. I never even considered this is why people do it.
(edit: the comment i replied to was edited to be more a statement about themselves rather than a question about other developers, so my comment probably makes less sense now)
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!
Not exactly. You can modify Linux and run it yourself all you want without obligation to share your changes. The sharing requirements are more limited and involve distribution.
Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
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.
What specific paragraph in the GPL prohibits training of AI on it? I guess it might be a matter of interpretation, but by my reading, it is allowed.
Ps. In the future, try to refrain from using demeaning rethorical questions like the one this comment starts with, it only serves to foster toxicity. Please and thank you Ds.
AI has simply increased the intensity of this friction between IP and reality to a degree that it can’t be ignored or patched over any longer.
There were source available licenses against commercial use. Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition said a license must allow any use.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Not a community-developed project with a lot of contributors, but a software that would realistically qualify as being mostly attributable to one person?
Redis is an easy example, but the author of that doesn't need to say "Netflix uses my X" because the software is popular by itself. AI being trained on Redis code hasn't done anything to diminish that, as far as I can tell.
FAANG specifically? no, i am not familiar with their entire tech stacks.
but i have leaned on my single-developer projects (being used in other, not owned by me, software) to help land consulting gigs.
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.
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.
The whole point of contributing to open source is to make decisions and the code is the medium.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't me, but probably because this was unnecessary and rude. An example, or a link, when a claim is made, is always nice, turns a hollow claim into something informative. Better signal to noise is nice.
I find it pretty rude to ask a question on a fairly well-documented historical topic that you could also very easily have found out with a simple Google search. Back in the day, we used to reply to people, “Let me Google that for you,” when someone asked such a low-effort question.
Your original reply strongly indicated that you were skeptical and questioning the user’s claim. There is a very large body of historical research documenting all of these things.
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.
It's just so depressing. You see Microsoft and Google's CEOs being completely reckless with investment & the economy. And it's just ... HAVE THEY NOT LOOKED INTO A MIRROR? DO THEY NOT REALIZE THEY ARE THE FALL GUYS?!
Nevermind how the vast majority of major CEOs can't even run a business anymore. An old boys club of morons running the entire economy.
> And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.
It's just more of the same old "Software dev doesn't need unions". The top 1% always think they're pointless because they made it without unions.
> Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.
Amusingly, I hold the opposite sentiment.
Labor isn't going anywhere. These executives and managers can barely tie their own shoelaces. Big Tech and the current startup scene are laughably dysfunctional.
The moment the economic recession really starts to set in, everyone's gonna try to cut down their SaaS spending. Then, the days of being able to shit out some (AI or not) slop and charge double price will be well and truly over.
Once software firms have to compete on quality again, labor is going to be more important than ever.
AI may not even be meaningfully involved in software dev. To break even at the API prices would require charging on the order of 1-2 thousand dollars, per month, per seat. Factoring in long term training costs will will make that several times worse.
... Before we consider that we're probably heading into an oil crisis making energy and computer hardware much more expensive.
I doubt employers are going to pay the $10,000/month/seat required to make AI profitable for everyone in the supply chain. Certainly not during the worst recession this side of WWII.
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.
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.
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.
- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence
- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
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
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.
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.
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.
He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.
But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.
I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.
Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
That's not true. There are business models around open source, and many companies making money from open source work.
(I'm only reacting to this specific part of your comment)
The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
Again, as I said, I was only reacting to that specific part of your comment, because it is obviously wrong.
(and thus the rest can't follow since you use it to draw a conclusion -- which doesn't mean you can't fix this, I don't know, actually I didn't get your point and I don't see how it counters what you replied to -- but I'm not really concerned about this part)
GPL is transactional. The author's profit is in the up streaming of enhancements.
Those who release under GPL absolutely do care about profit, it's just that the profit is measured in contributions.
saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the other hand...
What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.
The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
But the man's argument is that since he sees something a given way then it's the truth. What people are doing in return is showing that he can only do so because of who he is.
Ah, how naive. You're not squinting hard enough.
Meanwhile I only use social media throwaways, correctly understanding this is all ephemeral gibberish that will be effectively rm -Rf'd when the next generations accept there is no knowledge of value to them stored in the database that backs this site.
Just the vanity of a whole lot of Millennials, GenXers, a few Boomers, who latched onto an economic meme of the day; software engineering!
Oh noes; a social credit score meaningful to a bunch of nobodies lack of a social safety net keeps me off the hook for! You can die penniless in the streets and I don't have to lift a finger! I don't have to value your life itself to say nothing of your rhetorical positions. Lmao out of touch terminally online Americans. What an unserious joke of a people
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.
And that is a big reason why he's making this post, is what I'm saying. It doesn't excuse him, but it's not surprising in the least.
Can you give some examples, outside of this post? I only know about Carmack by the things he'd worked on, but not anything personal like this. This would help me get a more complete picture of him.
I've (unoriginally) always been impressed by his technical ability and work ethic, and while I used to religiously read his .plan updates (you might not know what that is, because I'm an old, OK? It's the precursor to blogs) and also follow the old Armadillo Aerospace development blogs, and watch the very long QuakeCon talks, I haven't kept up much as I got older, just come across things here and there (like this Twitter post), and I have not picked up a big change in demeanor or humility in regards to labor, political and societal issues from back then, and those are things he's written about. It's very much objectivism, the criticism of which is beyond this topic, but suffice it to say it's not a philosophy conducive to empathy. I seem to recall he made a bunch of libertarian rants on Facebook when he worked there too, but I'm not going to give Zuck the traffic. I'm sure you can find some.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
People who call themselves anti-AI activists are largely reacting to the opacity of large models and legitimate concerns about concentration of power. That is a reasonable thing to worry about. The answer to that is not to stop building AI. It is to build it more openly.
Carmack has been consistent on this. He builds things. He wants the tools to be available. Hard to argue with that position from a craft perspective.
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.
Other FOSS developers, not so much. They are the ones who are exploited.
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?
Open sourcing code is a form of power, power to influence, inspire, and propagate one's worldview on whomever reads that code. Thank you OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, thank you for amplifying the voices of all us open source contributors!
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.
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.
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.
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
Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.
- 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.
Edit: typo
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?
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 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.
"AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!"
Si tacuisses ...
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.
It sounds like he understands the problem perfectly. Is he not capable of thinking through how a non-millionaire would think about this? Sheesh.
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.
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.
Should we protect developers and their rights? Surely, and users' rights too definitely. But protecting source-code as such seems a bit abstract to me.
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"