alt Hacker NewsJohn Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
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Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. 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.
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.
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.
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.
In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.
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 one elephant in the room that's not being addressed:
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.
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.
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.
Most of FOSS is not a free gift, but asks for some form of repay.
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.
All due respect to Carmack but I think his take is probably influenced by his investment in his own AI company. There doesn’t seem to be many on this space who have any ethical or moral problems with profiting from the work of others and not contributing anything back to the commons. If we all intended our work in OSS the way he did maybe we’d all see it his way too.
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.
I find it pretty simple:
- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence
- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
I think if you've been set for life since the late 90s/early 2000s and didn't really have to work another day in your life if you didn't want to, it's a lot easier to be cavalier about giving away some of your output from way back when.
He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.
But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
>Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors,...
I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)
The foundation to which all of these licenses are tied to will likely be dissolved. Words/code had value in the old system. But now it's cheap to generate, way cheaper than hiring legions of writers/developers to write it. When it was a valuable asset lobbyists spent to protect it under law. I want you to think as you read this comment, do you think Disney would rather pay unionized workers or abolish copyright law and use other (trademark) mechanisms to protect their IP? A decade or so ago, this kind of thought would be crazy but things have changed.
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.
I've been wondering, Stallman was driven to create free software after an incident trying to get the code for firmware on his office printer. I'm wondering if today, would he have just reverse engineered it with AI?
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...)
He's downplaying the "social change" aspect. For many, open source/free software has a political element, at least implicitly. That element is strongly opposed to aggressive centralization of capital and surveillance power. You can point out how different licenses were always written in a way that permitted monetization/for-profit use, but that's beside the point -- the people who chose those licenses never imagined that their code would be used at this scale for this kind of purpose.
everyone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous
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
I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah
“My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world”
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.
I think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".
The open source vs closed AI debate often misses what practitioners actually care about: can I use it, can I inspect it when things go wrong, and can I run it on my own infrastructure if I need to.
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.
Prople choosing MIT-0, BSD0 or some equivalently permissive licence do gift their code to the world without expecting anything in return.
Other FOSS developers, not so much. They are the ones who are exploited.
Many people who provided quality technical content on blogs, Stack Overflow, and other forums thought they were providing a public good and helping to create a lasting culture and community. Turns out they were making fuel pellets to power money machines for the richest tech oligarchs in the world.
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.
> and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift.
I can understand his stance on AI given this perspective. I have a harder time empathizing his frustrations. Did he also have a hard time coming to terms with the need for AGPL?
I feel similarly to Carmack, and have felt this way since the late 1990s when I was in college.
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!
All in all, I think copyright and patents should be abolished. They're just holding back the world for the sake of greed. There has to be another way.
There's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software.
https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889
I find him speaking really soothing.
There is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar.
I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.
I really admire Carmack and followed everything id software since the beginning.
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.
IMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft license.
Im convinced a lot of open source proponents dont really like open source based on all the complaints about how the software is used.
John Carmack and all 10x programmers are going to benefit a lot from the advancement of AI, while we the ordinary programmers are going to suffer in the mid-long term. I mean he is one of the guys I look up to, but I don't want to lose my job.
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.
Not everybody means the same thing by open source, it's always been a rather bad umbrella phrase for a lot of different things (and I'm old enough to remember when it first became current).
Whether you agree with them or not the free software / copyleft advocates mean something very different from what Carmack is getting at and always have before or after AI. It has always been an anti-corporate position and it's not difficult to reconcile in my mind at all?
That said, I'm personally a free software advocate, and in favour of the GPL as a license but I use "AI" (LLMs) (critically). To help make [A]GPL software. I kinda feel by copylefting the output, in some sense I'm helping to right the wrong.
Pulling out the ol' "activist" dog whistle. Cope.
As I understand it, the anti-AI stance of open source software people in particular has nothing to do with AI learning from code bases, and everything to do with AI slop clogging all unrestricted community feedback channels.
Surely we can all agree that there is a difference between:
- 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.
> My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world.
Says yet another person who's hilariously rich, financially invested in the success of AI and isn't materially affected by AI displacing them.
Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.
I said it just recently[0] and I'll say it again: those who're big on open source (or at least copyleft) should be jumping hard on the AI opportunity. The core purpose of copyleft is to ensure the freedom of users to do whatever they want with the covered works, chained ad infinitum. Letting AI at said works (and more) now means even more freedom, as now users can trivially (compared to previously) update that code to fit their use case more precisely, or port it to another language, or whatever.
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.
I mean, yeah, sure, I can see that for open source.
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
Well, if Carmack wants to give gifts to AI companies then he's free to do it, but it doesn't mean that other people want it too.
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.
He threw Quake 3 over the wall after having made tons of money off it. He is now invested in AI and should just shut up.
"AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!"
Si tacuisses ...
> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift
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.
Personally for me I don't see it as gift, he licensed out the engine but didn't want to be in the engine business, after selling enough it feels he just put it out there so it's his stamp forever with the GPL infection. I think he already felt the diminishing returns at the time. He knew about the sharing of floppy discs and hacker scene and eventually someone would've done it and I think he felt cornered and said fuck it might as well put it out there to beat them to it.
Millionaire tells millionaire wannabes what to do and not to do.
> and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors
It sounds like he understands the problem perfectly. Is he not capable of thinking through how a non-millionaire would think about this? Sheesh.
Thinking of open source as a gift is such a strange take. It implies that the relationship is merely a transaction where the giftee is the beneficiary and the gifter is a philanthropist. It has subtle financial undertones, and a sense that gifters are somehow morally superior.
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.
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TL;DR: I really wanted to use a more permissive license so I don't mind AI scraping my code.
Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.
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.