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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 follo

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.

sublinear 6mo ago
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.
- dahrkael 6mo ago
  if no code is contributed back then why is there an ongoing problem with massive amounts of PRs?
  - sublinear 6mo ago
    I didn't say slop. I said code. The whole point of contributing to open source is to make decisions and the code is the medium.
  - crote 6mo ago
    [flagged]
evrimoztamur 6mo ago
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.
- truncate 6mo ago
  Plus unless I'm wrong he's talking about products that were released several years ago and milked for money already.
  - pseudalopex 6mo ago
    You were not wrong.
gruez 6mo ago
>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.
- truncate 6mo ago
  More people use Linux, more recognition Linux itself get which directly or indirectly gets some more donations, developers etc. With AI, the link is not clear at all. Its just pure consumption. There is no recognition.
  - nomel 6mo ago
    > 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.
    - john_strinlai 6mo ago
      it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that. (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)
    - truncate 6mo ago
      I worked on several open source projects both voluntarily or for work. The recognition doesn't really need to be financial. If people out there are using what you are building, contributing back, appreciating it -- it gives you motivation to continue working. Its human nature. One of the reason why there are so many abandoned projects out there.
    - 6mo ago
js2 6mo ago
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.
- alpaca128 6mo ago
  > great artists steal. 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.
boredtofears 6mo ago
Its a lot less odd when you remember that he's running an AI company himself.
- Findecanor 6mo ago
  Ah.. So the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.
  - NeutralCrane 6mo ago
    Yes, but likely in the exact inverse than what is implied here. Carmack has generational wealth, he is likely fine financially regardless of how AI pans out. The many individuals who feel they should be financially compensated for code they open sourced are likely far more invested financially in that particular outcome.
- barrowclift 6mo ago
  I'm seeing your comment's downvoted, I'd like to hear from those that did as to why. Doesn't his current venture with his AGI startup Keen Technologies deserve being called out as a potential conflict of interest, here?
  - NeutralCrane 6mo ago
    Because whether there is a conflict of interest or not, the argument can and should be examined on its own merits.
amarant 6mo ago
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!
- tuna74 6mo ago
  Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    > but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications. 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.
  - amarant 6mo ago
    Correct! This is the exact reason anyone who wants to use the os itself as a moat uses FreeBSD as a base instead, and add proprietary modifications to it. FreeBSD also being a open source gift, that does not have those requirements that Linux does. Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
  - throwaway613746 6mo ago
    [dead]
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  You dont know what GPL is? It's not an unconditional gift, it's got strings attached. AI training on GPL works is basically IP laundering, you're taking the product without paying the asking prices.
toast0 6mo ago
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.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  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.
  - j-bos 6mo ago
    Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
    - tw04 6mo ago
      >it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity 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.
johnsmith1840 6mo ago
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.
jstummbillig 6mo ago
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.
bombcar 6mo ago
> 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.
- sumeno 6mo ago
  > He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away. 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.
sowbug 6mo ago
It's also odd to release software under a license allowing commercial use if the authors didn't want that.
sobiolite 6mo ago
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.
- pseudalopex 6mo ago
  > There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. There were source available licenses against commercial use. Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition said a license must allow any use.
ryandvm 6mo ago
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.
PaulKeeble 6mo ago
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.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> 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.
- john_strinlai 6mo ago
  >How is this different than any company that uses the open source software? recognition for the authors, which can lead to all sorts of opportunities. "netflix uses my X for their Y, worldwide" opens doors.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"? 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.
    - john_strinlai 6mo ago
      >Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using [...] 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.
supern0va 6mo ago
>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.
- yndoendo 6mo ago
  I am anti-AI art and will never fund any thing created from AI-art. It lacks emotion. It only can copy and attempt to duplicate existing art. The time taken to make art is therapeutic to the artist and is expressed in their end product. It helps them keep balance in their lives, calm them, and fight depression. Everything I have seen from AI-art is dis-formed from reality. AI-art will enhance body dis-morphia in the younger generation the more real looking it gets. I am 100% for laws that Norway has were it must be labeled that a photo has been edit. AI-art should need to be labeled to help prevent body dis-morphia. Body dis-morphia leads to eating disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions.
  - supern0va 6mo ago
    >I am anti-AI art and will never fund any thing created from AI-art. It lacks emotion. It only can copy and attempt to duplicate existing art. Sure, but there's a difference between being anti-AI in X use case, and anti-AI across the board. I see you didn't mention LLMs here, which are the biggest AI use case right now. That said, a competent artist can produce cool collaborative works with AI image models. Folks have won art competitions using these tools. As AI image models like Nano Banana get more adept at manipulating images, it's likely to become yet another tool like Photoshop for human expression. That said, I don't think people one-shotting fully synthetic images is really artistic expression, so I agree with that much. >Everything I have seen from AI-art is dis-formed from reality. AI-art will enhance body dis-morphia in the younger generation the more real looking it gets. Is this...new? The advertising industry mastered this long before AI. We probably needed regulation back then, too. I'm not sure why AI is special here.
skeledrew 6mo ago
> 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?
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  Getting the credit and the modifications is the profit. 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.
salawat 6mo ago
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.
emtel 6mo ago
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!
ThrowawayTestr 6mo ago
I haven't given a cent to openai or anthropic but they have given me many thousands of tokens for free.
raincole 6mo ago
> 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.
tejohnso 6mo ago
> 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?
nicman23 6mo ago
so what?
meheleventyone 6mo ago
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.
make3 6mo ago
why is someone making money out of it a bad thing, if they're not preventing other people from using the code?

sublinear 6mo ago

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.

dahrkael 6mo ago
if no code is contributed back then why is there an ongoing problem with massive amounts of PRs?
- sublinear 6mo ago
  I didn't say slop. I said code. The whole point of contributing to open source is to make decisions and the code is the medium.
- crote 6mo ago
  [flagged]

evrimoztamur 6mo ago

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.

truncate 6mo ago
Plus unless I'm wrong he's talking about products that were released several years ago and milked for money already.
- pseudalopex 6mo ago
  You were not wrong.

gruez 6mo ago

>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.

truncate 6mo ago
More people use Linux, more recognition Linux itself get which directly or indirectly gets some more donations, developers etc. With AI, the link is not clear at all. Its just pure consumption. There is no recognition.
- nomel 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - john_strinlai 6mo ago
    it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that. (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)
  - truncate 6mo ago
    I worked on several open source projects both voluntarily or for work. The recognition doesn't really need to be financial. If people out there are using what you are building, contributing back, appreciating it -- it gives you motivation to continue working. Its human nature. One of the reason why there are so many abandoned projects out there.
  - 6mo ago

js2 6mo ago

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.

alpaca128 6mo ago
> great artists steal. 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.

boredtofears 6mo ago

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

Findecanor 6mo ago
Ah.. So the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.
- NeutralCrane 6mo ago
  Yes, but likely in the exact inverse than what is implied here. Carmack has generational wealth, he is likely fine financially regardless of how AI pans out. The many individuals who feel they should be financially compensated for code they open sourced are likely far more invested financially in that particular outcome.
barrowclift 6mo ago
I'm seeing your comment's downvoted, I'd like to hear from those that did as to why. Doesn't his current venture with his AGI startup Keen Technologies deserve being called out as a potential conflict of interest, here?
- NeutralCrane 6mo ago
  Because whether there is a conflict of interest or not, the argument can and should be examined on its own merits.

amarant 6mo ago

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!

tuna74 6mo ago
Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications. 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.
- amarant 6mo ago
  Correct! This is the exact reason anyone who wants to use the os itself as a moat uses FreeBSD as a base instead, and add proprietary modifications to it. FreeBSD also being a open source gift, that does not have those requirements that Linux does. Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
- throwaway613746 6mo ago
  [dead]
lelanthran 6mo ago
You dont know what GPL is? It's not an unconditional gift, it's got strings attached. AI training on GPL works is basically IP laundering, you're taking the product without paying the asking prices.

toast0 6mo ago

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.

bombcar 6mo ago
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.
- j-bos 6mo ago
  Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
  - tw04 6mo ago
    >it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity 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.

johnsmith1840 6mo ago

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.

jstummbillig 6mo ago

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.

bombcar 6mo ago

> 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.

sumeno 6mo ago
> He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away. 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.

sowbug 6mo ago

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

sobiolite 6mo ago

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.

pseudalopex 6mo ago
> There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. There were source available licenses against commercial use. Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition said a license must allow any use.

ryandvm 6mo ago

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.

PaulKeeble 6mo ago

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.

Aurornis 6mo ago

> 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.

john_strinlai 6mo ago
>How is this different than any company that uses the open source software? recognition for the authors, which can lead to all sorts of opportunities. "netflix uses my X for their Y, worldwide" opens doors.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"? 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.
  - john_strinlai 6mo ago
    >Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using [...] 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.

supern0va 6mo ago

>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.

yndoendo 6mo ago
I am anti-AI art and will never fund any thing created from AI-art. It lacks emotion. It only can copy and attempt to duplicate existing art. The time taken to make art is therapeutic to the artist and is expressed in their end product. It helps them keep balance in their lives, calm them, and fight depression. Everything I have seen from AI-art is dis-formed from reality. AI-art will enhance body dis-morphia in the younger generation the more real looking it gets. I am 100% for laws that Norway has were it must be labeled that a photo has been edit. AI-art should need to be labeled to help prevent body dis-morphia. Body dis-morphia leads to eating disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions.
- supern0va 6mo ago
  >I am anti-AI art and will never fund any thing created from AI-art. It lacks emotion. It only can copy and attempt to duplicate existing art. Sure, but there's a difference between being anti-AI in X use case, and anti-AI across the board. I see you didn't mention LLMs here, which are the biggest AI use case right now. That said, a competent artist can produce cool collaborative works with AI image models. Folks have won art competitions using these tools. As AI image models like Nano Banana get more adept at manipulating images, it's likely to become yet another tool like Photoshop for human expression. That said, I don't think people one-shotting fully synthetic images is really artistic expression, so I agree with that much. >Everything I have seen from AI-art is dis-formed from reality. AI-art will enhance body dis-morphia in the younger generation the more real looking it gets. Is this...new? The advertising industry mastered this long before AI. We probably needed regulation back then, too. I'm not sure why AI is special here.

skeledrew 6mo ago

> 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?

lelanthran 6mo ago
Getting the credit and the modifications is the profit. 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.

salawat 6mo ago

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.

emtel 6mo ago

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!

ThrowawayTestr 6mo ago

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

raincole 6mo ago

> 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.

tejohnso 6mo ago

> 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?

nicman23 6mo ago

so what?

meheleventyone 6mo ago

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.

make3 6mo ago

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