alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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Presumably you are licensing your code as MIT or a similar license.
Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.
I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly.
Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.
That sounds fun. I am trying to find potential employers who need me to write or fix code, and ideally contribute upstream along with it. Any ideas where to start? I am thinking something "chill". I am trying to avoid large corporations.
It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.
Most open source licenses have strings attached, the terms of the licence say what those “strings” are. Like requiring attribution.
> If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me
My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits
I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit.
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".