[HN Gopher] John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
___________________________________________________________________
John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171
Author : tzury
Score : 192 points
Date : 2026-03-13 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| nkassis wrote:
| 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...)
| bombcar wrote:
| Stallman rarely cared about the rights of the _writer_ , even
| reading the GPL makes it clear that it's all about the rights
| _of the user_.
|
| In a world without copyright, code obfuscation, or compliers,
| where everything ran interpreted as it was written and nobody
| could do anything to you if you modified it, Stallman would be
| perfectly content.
| skilled wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171
| dang wrote:
| Added above. Thanks!
| OSaMaBiNLoGiN wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| if no code is contributed back then why is there an ongoing
| problem with massive amounts of PRs?
| sublinear wrote:
| 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.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Plus unless I'm wrong he's talking about products that were
| released several years ago and milked for money already.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| You were not wrong.
| gruez wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Qwertious wrote:
| I don't dispute your own personal motives, but if it's
| never been a goal for _most people_ , then CC0 would be
| more popular than the BSD or MIT license - it's simpler
| and much more legally straightforward to apply.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _What makes this more objectionable than profiting off open
| source projects by using it directly?_
|
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is an edge case in OSS. Even among software packages
| used by Netflix and Amazon, few of them were attributable
| to a single maintainer or small group of individuals.
| They've long since become community developed projects.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Netflix and Amazon use many packages of all sizes. And
| contributions to projects with many contributors helped
| people get jobs.
| Gud wrote:
| How would you even know that Netflix or Amazon uses your
| package?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Their open source software depended on or derived from
| your package. They included your copyright notice with
| software they distributed. Someone contributed code.
| Someone reported a bug. Someone requested a feature.
| Someone mentioned it at a conference. I could continue.
| js2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Its a lot less odd when you remember that he's running an AI
| company himself.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Ah.. So the old "It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding
| it!".
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Because whether there is a conflict of interest or not, the
| argument can and should be examined on its own merits.
| amarant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| I do know what it is, I've even read the licence in full!
|
| 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.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| IP as a concept has always been equal parts dystopian and
| farcical, and efforts to enforce it have become
| increasingly strained over time. Property requires
| scarcity. Ideas aren't scarce. My consumption of an idea is
| affected by your consumption of an idea.
|
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| j-bos wrote:
| So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take
| the lion's share of benefit from public research. That
| said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale
| up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The
| extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public
| research and trialing and developing it into a viable
| drug.
|
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| Seems pretty understandable to me. In the former, you work
| on something hoping that real people will find it useful.
| In the latter, you're explicitly doing work for a paycheck.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all
| stronger now. Don't fight AI, _fight for open models._
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| there are no open models. none. zero.
|
| 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
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models .
|
| 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.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > and that's the point where the righteous indignation
| displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and
| helpful
|
| 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.
| skeledrew wrote:
| From a political perspective there's no closing that tap,
| only opening it further. As long as China exists there
| will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at
| least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully
| increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the
| slip that causes a serious migration to their models.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| The thing is, copyright is _not_ done. The legal
| framework still exists and is enforced so I am not sure
| how to read your reply as anything other than a strongly
| worded opinion. Just ask Disney.
|
| 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.)
| hamdingers wrote:
| > Just ask Disney.
|
| Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested
| over a billion into OpenAI
| k12sosse wrote:
| If they saw the wind they wouldn't have chosen OpenAI
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been
| able to just force through their desired outcome (to the
| detriment of society), but I don't think they are going
| to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who
| depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech
| has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone
| once they have the leverage.
|
| Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was
| adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
| crote wrote:
| Great! So I assume it is now Completely Fine to rip
| Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / whatever and share it with
| everyone I know?
|
| 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.
| skeledrew wrote:
| If you want to attach strings which involve restricting
| access, open source is _not_ the way to go.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| You're right - the _reality_ of the world _today_ is that
| open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all
| questions of legality /ethics aside. But this was not the
| reality of the world that existed when the code was
| licensed and released. That is why it is easy to
| empathize with code authors who did not expect their code
| to be used in this manner.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a
| reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows
| that putting something on it means that thing can be used
| in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's
| something one implicitly signs up for when posting
| content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be
| wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall
| so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't
| a gift.
| Jare wrote:
| 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".
| pseudalopex wrote:
| MIT license requires credit.
| Jare wrote:
| Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with.
| MIT says:
|
| > 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".
| Gud wrote:
| So does the BSD license. Copyright must be reproduced
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Most licenses do.
| liuliu wrote:
| To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is
| free as in "freedom".
|
| The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom",
| not related to whether you profit from it or not.
| overfeed wrote:
| > To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it
| is free as in "freedom
|
| To clarify further: "freedom" for the _end user,_ and not
| the developer leveraging GPL code in their software
| product.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > 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
| overfeed wrote:
| Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single
| software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-
| generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's
| milages vary.
|
| 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."
| jraph wrote:
| Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd
| like to use my work to deny end users the rights to
| control their computing.
|
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| So, definitely not just for corporations to make insanely
| massive profits off?
| toast0 wrote:
| How much do you think people would pay for this patch?
|
| 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.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It's also odd to release software under a license allowing
| commercial use if the authors didn't want that.
| sobiolite wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| >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.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I haven't given a cent to openai or anthropic but they have
| given me many thousands of tokens for free.
| raincole wrote:
| > 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.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| It's both, although the latter is more prominent.
| 3rodents wrote:
| Yeah -- isn't he confusing the arguments against AI art?
|
| I'm against AI art because it is built on stealing the work of
| artists who did not consent to their work being trained on.
|
| I couldn't care less about models trained on the open source
| software I released, because I released it to be used.
|
| edit: I'm assuming licenses were respected
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > edit: I'm assuming licenses were respected
|
| Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses
| require credit at least.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| "BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa
| 2026" is arguably attribution enough.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| This would be useless. And false. It could not be argued
| in good faith. And open source licenses require the
| original copyright notice specifically.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Oh, I thought it was about the wholesale theft (relicensing) of
| code by laundering through an LLM trained on the same code.
| ?Porque no los dos?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I don't have problem with AI learning from FOSS code bases. I
| have a big problem with FOSS code bases helping to create non-
| FOSS code which does not return the favor. AI-washed Windows
| code for Wine would be fantastic.
| etchalon wrote:
| This fellow Shawnee Mission East alum gets it.
| lavela wrote:
| 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.
| gensym wrote:
| I find it pretty simple:
|
| - OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence
|
| - AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
| dysoco wrote:
| > AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
|
| Depends on how you see it.
|
| I know many people building oss, local alternatives to
| enterprise software for specific industries that cost thousands
| of dollars all thanks to AI.
|
| If everyone can produce software now and at a much complex and
| bigger scale, it's much easier to create decentralized and free
| alternatives to long-standing closed projects.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| You do understand that the above comment is talking about how
| the use and reliance on LLMs is what centralizes power right?
| It's great people can build these tools, but if the means to
| build these tools are controlled by three central companies
| where does that leave us?
| MrScruff wrote:
| That would imply that there will never be an adequate open
| weights coding model. That might be true, but seems
| unlikely.
| truted2 wrote:
| I agree with you. One counterargument is that producing
| software was never a path to adoption unless you had
| distribution and the big companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) have
| distribution on a scale that individuals will not.
| Sol- wrote:
| > AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
|
| The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate
| code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal
| project you have certainly democratizes Software.
|
| And even though open source models are a year behind, they
| address your remaining criticism about the AI being
| centralized.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| AI is written by a for profit company whose long term objective
| is more profit.
|
| I'm not against AI, I'm against the inevitable enshittification
| which will screw us all over, one way or another.
| gaigalas wrote:
| Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack
| said it.
| moogly wrote:
| 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.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
|
| What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your
| argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it
| with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him
| knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest
| character traits.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| arguments are stronger without insults
| moogly wrote:
| Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has
| trouble empathizing. I don't even think it's his fault per
| se. I'm fairly sure he would actually agree with the
| assessment. His raw intelligence is sky-high.
|
| 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.
| tavavex wrote:
| > Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has
| trouble empathizing.
|
| 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.
| moogly wrote:
| I'd read _Masters of Doom_ (the psych eval /juvie story
| and the cat story stand out). You might think "oh he was
| so young back then", and it's true, but keep in mind that
| book details id Software up to and including Doom 3
| development, and he was in his early 30s there. I'm sure
| you can find excerpts if you don't want to read the whole
| thing. It's an interesting book though; great glimpse
| into trenches of 90s game development.
|
| 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.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| true/false and insult/not insult are two different axes.
| elteto wrote:
| Attack the argument not the man. Whether he is set for life or
| not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably,
| people who open source their code do not care about profit.
| jraph wrote:
| > presumably, people who open source their code do not care
| about profit
|
| 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)
| elteto wrote:
| I think you are splitting hairs. Yes those models "exist",
| if by exist you mean they have dual-licensing setups with
| different tiers (community, professional, etc).
|
| 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.
| crote wrote:
| You're forgetting about Red Hat & friends, where the
| software is 100% open source and the for-profit product
| is actually the _support contract_.
| jraph wrote:
| I'm not splitting hairs, it's a crucial aspect and a
| common misconception that it would be quite helpful to
| get rid of (hence my reaction). And no, it's not
| necessarily dual licensing (why not though) or different
| tiers, or fauxpensource or whatever, there are many
| projects which are completely open source. See for
| instance Nextcloud, XWiki, PostgreSQL, Linux...
|
| 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)
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Open Sourcing software has _nothing_ to do with 'gratis'.
| Can't believe this still needs repeating in 2026.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's
| no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a
| single paid open source tool off the top of my head but
| could name dozens that you can just use for free.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > people who open source their code do not care about profit
|
| 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.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in
| this context_, since, presumably, people who open source
| their code do not care about profit.
|
| 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.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > open source their code do not care about profit.
|
| Ah, how naive. You're not squinting hard enough.
| q3k wrote:
| > Attack the argument not the man.
|
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Says who?
|
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| No please, for the love of god, he's been an asshole for
| decades. He has set back gaming everywhere he's been in
| charge. The guy makes 1 kind of experience. He's the opposite
| of a good leader.
| pibaker wrote:
| Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom
| decades ago may have different priorities than present and
| future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial
| freedom decades ago may have different priorities than
| present and future wage slaves isn 't attacking the man._
|
| saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the
| other hand...
| wotTH wrote:
| The argument ignores the mans privilege
| elteto wrote:
| Go outside and touch grass my man.
| wotTH wrote:
| Posts the user clinging to a 15 year old HN login.
|
| 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
| liuliu wrote:
| GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to
| have freedom with their hardware.
|
| If you want to make money, use a proper license.
|
| To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither.
| Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to
| make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they
| can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware
| way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in
| business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give
| me your money" neither.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Oldheads are not the exclusive group of people who have ever
| meant actual altruism by their open-source licenses. You can't
| just pick an attribute to dismiss an opinion based on. Creative
| control over the lineage of a line of code is just not
| something the open source world is very concerned with in
| aggregate.
|
| Anti-AI sentiment comes primarily from slop PRs (and slop
| projects) along with the water use hoax; copyright concerns
| originate almost entirely from the art sphere, crossing over
| into the open source sphere by osmosis and only representing a
| small minority of opinion-havers therein.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If people need money they should seriously considering charging
| money for the software they make instead of giving it away for
| free and hoping it somehow becomes profitable.
| poszlem wrote:
| Except him being wealthy could just as well be used to support
| the argument for using GPL instead of gifting. "He does not
| have to make real money off of it, he is privileged".
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who
| work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when
| they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the
| exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit
| from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary
| reason for his STB libraries.
|
| https://github.com/nothings/stb
| Findecanor wrote:
| Indeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past
| did so with the conviction that the license itself would in
| some measure protect the source code itself -- as source code
| -- from being exploited by commercially entities.
|
| The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into
| improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to
| create competing software.
|
| Many of those are disappointed with leading free software /
| open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance
| against the AI companies' practice.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I don't think we should protect "source-code", we should
| protect people. Source-code doesn't care, people do.
|
| 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.
| yunnpp wrote:
| This is exactly it. The people who release stuff under the GPL
| do so precisely because they want the software and derivatives
| to stay free. The software has strings attached; the AI removes
| them. What's so hard to understand here?
|
| Carmack's argument makes no sense, but I guess it has "Carmack"
| in it so obviously it must be on the front page of HN.
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| John Carmack seems to think isomorphic plagiarism and piracy
| bleed though is good for FOSS.
|
| 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"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
| dminik wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If someone wants just the former they shouldn't make it open
| source.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| How will someone contribute back without the code?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Code can still be published and merge requests can still be
| handled even if the code isn't under an open source
| license. As a prime example check out Unreal Engine. One of
| the most popular game engines that powers many AAA games
| and cinema today. They are not open source, but they
| actively take outside contributions on GitHub. Though
| unlike what the parent comment is saying Epic can afford to
| pay people to work on the project instead of having all of
| the work done for free.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| They let people contribute by making the source open,
| which also lets the AI companies use it as training data.
| The question was how would you take contributions without
| letting the training happen.
|
| Edit: typo
| dwroberts wrote:
| I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you're running
| an AI startup/lab, yeah
| fritzo wrote:
| 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!
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| > 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.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > in recent history where technology has displaced workers,
| labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had
| stronger labor organization
|
| what examples are you thinking of?
| _doctor_love wrote:
| Most of 19th and early-20th century history, which is very
| much recent history.
|
| 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.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| lol this got downvoted - sorry that I studied history!
| ryandvm wrote:
| I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is
| finally going to bite us in the ass.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force
| will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered.
|
| A major economic crash as the only consequence would be the
| good ending.
|
| The real societal risk here is that software development is not
| just a field of primarily white men, it was one of the last few
| jobs that could reliably get one homeownership & an (upper)
| middle class life.
|
| And the current US government is not, shall we say, the most
| liberal. There is a substantial risk that when forced with the
| financial destitution of being unemployed while your field is
| dying, people will radicalize.
|
| It takes a good amount of moral integrity to be homeless under
| a bridge and still oppose the gestapo deporting the foreigners
| who have jobs you'd be qualified for. And once the deportations
| begin, I doubt they'll stop with only the H1Bs. The Trump
| admin's not exactly been subtle about their desire to undo
| naturalizations and even birthright citizenship.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I totally agree. I've written about this topic a lot on this
| site, probably most recently here:
|
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I'm not aware of any labor efforts that have successfully
| fought automation long term.
|
| There's been plenty of temporary victories, but even the unions
| often acknowledge it's temporary.
| CrossVR wrote:
| 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.
| indemnity wrote:
| This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about
| licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder
| it into a plausibly different structure!
| slantedview wrote:
| Keep in mind, Carmack heads an AI company now. His opinion should
| be viewed with that context.
| fresh_broccoli wrote:
| 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.
| jcmfernandes wrote:
| > 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?
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| Replace GPL in his sentence with something anti-AI and think of
| back in time when Carmack did that, it's exactly the same
| situation now except he's in a much more favorable position to
| make that stance, it's ironic if he can't see that most of us
| are on the other side of that fence with AI right now.
| Isognoviastoma wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| Exactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably
| just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he
| has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and
| eat it too.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I would want to use the license that does not ask for credit;
| the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not
| legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is
| allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to
| follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to
| combine it with software having such licenses).
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/Keen-Technologies/physical_atari
| crote wrote:
| The gift metaphor might work if you think of it like _birthday
| gifts_ : yes, it's a gift, but everyone knows that you're
| supposed to give one in return on _their_ birthday.
|
| If you accept gifts on your birthday but never give any in
| return, you're quickly left with a vanishingly small number of
| friends.
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| beastman82 wrote:
| The assumption here is that the people who maintain something
| in a painstaking manner did not intend people to take it and do
| whatever they want with it in accordance with its license?
| sumeno wrote:
| "in accordance with its license" is the key part that's
| missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.
| dartharva wrote:
| > The licenses are completely ignored.
|
| 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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The user would know how?
| sumeno wrote:
| Are you doing a full search of every GPL licensed
| repository every time you use an LLM to ensure that it
| isn't giving you GPL licensed code? That doesn't seem
| reasonable
| dartharva wrote:
| Why not? Up until a year or two ago LLM pair programmers
| weren't even a thing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is what GitHub promised years ago. Showing
| repositories where similar code is present so you can
| guess the license and use appropriate outputs.
|
| I'm not sure whether this is implemented or not since I
| don't use generative AI for coding.
| patagurbon wrote:
| In reproducing code that requires the license be
| reproduced alongside it.
| nickff wrote:
| It seems to be a common view on HN that licenses and
| conditional access to websites should be ignored (i.e. WRT
| ad-blockers), but also that licenses on Open-Source
| Software repositories should be respected (i.e. WRT LLM
| training). I believe that holding these contradictory views
| is common, but the conflict would need to be resolved to
| come to a conclusion on how to proceed with LLM training.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| There is no contradiction. Open source software licenses
| allow use without conditions. Ad blocker use does not
| distribute the modified web pages.
| nickff wrote:
| I have not seen any evidence that LLMs 'distribute'
| modified software, though they do seem capable of
| replicating it.
| lavela wrote:
| I fail to see how mass scale reproduction of copyrighted
| code isn't a form of distribution.
| nickff wrote:
| Replication is not the same as reproduction; I can
| replicate an API without violating someone's license or
| copyright (which I would by reproducing their work).
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The view LLMs should respect open source software
| licenses is not for replication alone. Models and
| generated code are derived from training data.
| nickff wrote:
| Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open
| source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those
| lessons to developing other software which does not
| comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
|
| 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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| You seem to be conflating copyright with access rights.
| Two very different things. Regardless of your feelings on
| either, there is no contradiction in holding different
| views on them.
| nickff wrote:
| Copyright is all about gating access, as media rights
| holders for sports well know.
| SllX wrote:
| Well no, it's about legally gating the ability to _copy_
| so the original author doesn't have to compete in the
| same market to sell his own book with every other bloke
| with a printing press and a copy of the book. Everything
| else is an addendum.
| nickff wrote:
| That may be the reason copyright came to be, but it's
| much more expansive now.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does
| code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift").
|
| That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never
| meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's just incorrect. "Open source" can mean the licensing
| as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been
| associated with the development model since _The Cathedral
| and the Bazaar_ [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
| source_software_developme...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
| Aurornis wrote:
| > "Open source" can mean
|
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm saying that "open source" can mean both things. The
| parent was arguing that it only means the licensing. I'm
| _not_ arguing that it always means the development model.
|
| > 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.
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
| Aurornis wrote:
| > By that logic, "open source licensing" would also imply
| a different concept than "open source" by itself.
|
| It does
| layer8 wrote:
| It looks like we're in agreement then.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You and Bigstrat2003 are arguing a technicality, and
| you're technically correct, but in context I think that's
| somewhat beside the point. Skrebbel and Layer8 are
| focused on the cultural associations of "open source"
| development, and this mismatch is causing everyone to
| talk past each other.
|
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open
| Source'?
| layer8 wrote:
| The "cathedral" model refers to closed-source
| development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
| source_software_developme...
| nickff wrote:
| Appending 'development' seems like a significant
| departure from 'vanilla' "Open Source" to me, and
| wouldn't all development be 'closed-source' at least
| between commits, if not between pull requests?
| layer8 wrote:
| See https://opensource.org/about/history-of-the-open-
| source-init... under 'Coining "Open Source"':
|
| _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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| > _In closed-source software development, the programmers
| are often spending a lot of time dealing with and
| creating bug reports, as well as handling feature
| requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing
| further development plans. This leads to part of the
| development team spending a lot of time on these issues,
| and not on the actual development._
|
| 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| "Open source" means the source code is open to the public
| for reading and copying. Licenses have complicated the
| idealistic definition to restrict copying, but that is only
| within the context of taking credit (ie implicit
| relicensure). The only winning move is not to play the game
| at all.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's not open source in the way anyone thinks about the term.
| He isn't maintaining free software in the open
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| It's been a conflation issue (and major point of contention)
| since the 90s. "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" are
| two different things that have traditionally been used
| together to promote the rights of the user and the
| dissemination of knowledge in software development.
|
| Edit, see:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
| skrebbel wrote:
| I agree but he's arguing with people who's personal
| attachment to their OSS work goes a lot deeper than "I did a
| few code dumps back in the day".
|
| 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".
| mjr00 wrote:
| > It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it,
| and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away.
|
| You're right and it's worth pointing out that a lot of open
| source has the opposite lifecycle: the authors make a thing,
| aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to
| eventually sell something peripheral, i.e. "open core" with
| paid plugins or enterprise support.
|
| In these cases, open source isn't a gift so much as a marketing
| strategy. So it makes sense the maintainers wouldn't see LLM
| training on their code as a good thing; it was never a "gift",
| it was a loss leader.
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| There's been something lost over time about the philosophy of
| open source. It appeared at a time when it was becoming
| apparent that computers represented a new type of technology
| where you couldn't just "look under the hood". An independent
| mechanic or machinist could repair a car to spec. A carpenter
| didn't need original blueprints of the house to create an
| addition. You could disassemble a typewriter or a sewing
| machine and with some ordinary skill actually manage to
| figure out how it worked. With compiled software the bar to
| understanding by the owner or operator was raised
| significantly. Open source was about being able to actually
| work on the thing you owned.
|
| Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but
| there's a long history of politics about why the two are
| different.
| sirtaj wrote:
| Indeed. Maybe it's just a function of passed time, but it
| feels like people surrounded by hustlers - including
| themselves - look at this and think "what's the hustle
| behind this?" because they can't imagine anyone doing this
| for any other reason. I get it, but it's quite sad.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| It's a function of the economy going in the shitter, with
| food and housing prices tripling or quadrupling while
| wages go up 5 or 10%. People want to be paid for their
| work because they can't afford to pay rent giving gifts
| away, and hustling is the way to survive because there
| aren't enough jobs or even if they have a job it's not
| enough.
| wmf wrote:
| _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 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.
| bloblaw wrote:
| This sounds to me like the "No True Scotsman" argument.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
|
| I break down what you said as: "Sure, he's released code with
| an open-source license, but that's not real open source in the
| sense that matters."
|
| I happen to disagree. OSS is OSS. AGPL is OSS. MIT is Open
| Source. Unlicense is OSS.
| daemonologist wrote:
| The point is not that it's not "real" open source, the point
| is that he has less interaction with the big part of the open
| source ecosystem which is feeling the brunt of the downsides
| of AI, namely, giant useless bug reports and PRs.
|
| (I do agree that it's still OSS even if you never maintain it
| or anything.)
| bloblaw wrote:
| That framing makes more sense to me.
|
| 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.
| dartharva wrote:
| What do the people who are deep into open source mean by the
| term then, in your understanding?
| stock_toaster wrote:
| He also (presumably) doesn't have to worry as much about money
| as many OSS folks might, so dual licensing (as a means to keep
| working on the OSS version while also making ends meet) is
| likely not something he would consider.
|
| He also started an AI company, right?
| losvedir wrote:
| > _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.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I have the same attitude as Carmack. I have several libraries
| and sites I maintain as well as contributing to several popular
| open source projects. I still have his attitude about this.
| Both my open source and my ongoing maintenance are gifts. I'm
| also free to stop giving when I don't feel like it.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| OSS is a big umbrella. At the end of the day, if you are not
| hurting for money, you might be okay donating your work for AI
| training. Meanwhile if you're working hard on projects while
| sacrificing a lot (including money) you are very much allowed
| to not want AI use it for training if it means financial gain
| for a select few at the top.
|
| It has the same undertones as how rich people talk about
| philanthropy. "Look I donated a portion of my wealth that
| barely affected my life, I must be better than all those poor
| people who never donate to chariTy".
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| 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
| skeledrew wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259850
| Isognoviastoma wrote:
| Copyleft is copyright held in smart way. Nobody can take code
| under GPL and make its _copy_ proprietary because it would be
| violation of copyright.
|
| In the other thread you argued that AI output is not
| copyrighted.
|
| Do you think I can take proprietary code and lauder through AI
| to get a non-copyrighted copy of it, then modify to my needs?
| How can I obtain the proprietary code legally in the first
| place?
| leni536 wrote:
| Try it with unreal engine first.
| arjie wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if
| i build something to make my linux experience better and share
| that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make
| the linux experience for their customers better, then that is
| fine.
|
| but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to
| promote their own commercial closed source features alongside
| it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL,
| it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one
| that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than
| 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of
| revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)
|
| and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me
| something adequate.
| dartharva wrote:
| Who is stopping you from licensing your code that way then?
| crote wrote:
| It's not open source, because the definition of open source
| doesn't allow you to place _any_ restrictions on who can
| use it or for what purpose. It 's why licenses like "Don't
| use it for evil" or "Everyone except Anish Kapoor" aren't
| acceptable for a lot of Linux distros.
|
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| some people are working on that, among others there is
| bruce perens: https://web.archive.org/web/20251206160538/ht
| tps://perens.co... (sadly his site seems broken, the static
| files still work however:
| https://perens.com/static/DEVELOPMENT_LICENSE.txt )
|
| FUTO is also exploring this space: https://sourcefirst.com/
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| I think we've all been burned by 20+ years of exploitation in
| the guise of "free product." Google more or less spearheaded
| that movement. I agree we should all be community-minded and
| have nice things, but when you look at how the rewards (social
| and monetary) are shared it's overwhelmingly disproportionate.
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception
| that, while these companies have always profited off of our
| inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public
| good, they provided the platform, and profited off that
| platform.
|
| Now it feels like the public good is being diminished
| (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob,
| trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.
|
| The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives
| less back.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Yes, this 100x.
| logicchains wrote:
| Because the ratio of developers who do it for money to
| developers who do it for love of developing has dramatically
| increased, as computer science became a subject people studied
| for economic reasons, not just for fun.
| jltsiren wrote:
| MIT and BSD licenses are kind of obvious. They are academic
| licenses, named after universities.
|
| The idea is that you have people paid to create something of
| potential value, but the value of the outputs has only a
| limited and indirect impact on their compensation. If someone
| finds the outputs valuable, they should mention it in public,
| to let the creators use it to demonstrate the value of their
| work to funders and other interested parties.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that
| something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted
| a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments
| about working for free for a corporation that's making money
| off me.
|
| Did you respond by asking them how Reddit makes money?
|
| The anti-corporate mentality isn't new, but it does surface in
| different ways and communities over time. The Reddit hivemind
| leans very anti-corporate, albeit with a huge blind spot for
| corporations they actually like (Reddit itself, their chosen
| phone brand, the corporations that produce the shows they
| watch).
|
| The Reddit style rebellion is largely symbolic, with a lot of
| shaming and snark, but it usually stops when it would require
| people to alter their own behavior. That's why you got dog-
| piled for doing something productive on a site where user-
| generated content is the money maker.
| malfist wrote:
| Hell, reddit hates on reddit all the time. Spez in particular
| is hated across the board.
|
| 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.
| arjie wrote:
| Haha, that's funny. I didn't think of it at the time and I
| was more surprised than anything.
|
| By the way, I have had your comments highlighted for a while
| now and I've never regretted it. Good stuff.
| zahlman wrote:
| ... There's a highlighting feature?
| pjmlp wrote:
| It has always been like that, except we used to call it demos,
| sharewhare, beerware, postware,...
|
| The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably
| influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from
| it.
| crote wrote:
| > I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a
| corporation that's making money off me
|
| The problem is that the big tech companies aren't holding up
| their end of the traditional social contract.
|
| I like to think of the wider open source community as one giant
| group project. Everyone contributes what they can, and in turn
| they can benefit from the work everyone else has done. The work
| you do goes towards making the world a better place. I have
| absolutely zero problem filing pull requests for bugs I
| encounter or submitting issues on OpenStreetMap, because I know
| that in return I get the Linux DE and reliable maps in _other_
| towns. If you want to make it political, it 's a "from each
| according to their means, to each according to their needs".
|
| The big tech companies operate completely differently. They see
| open source contributors primarily as a resource to exploit.
| Submit a single fix on Google Maps? You'll get zero credit,
| they'll never stop bothering you with popups about "making
| improvements", design their map around what is most profitable
| to show, and they will of course log your location history and
| sell it to the highest bidder. And they are getting _filthy_
| rich off of it as well.
|
| I couldn't care less about getting monetary compensation for
| some odd work I do in my spare time, but there's no way in hell
| I'm going to do free labor for some millionaire who's going to
| reward me by spitting in my face.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The amount of value Google Maps has given me is far beyond
| what I'd be willing to pay in actual dollars.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The problem is that the big tech companies aren't holding
| up their end of the traditional social contract.
|
| 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.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization
| of output?
|
| I think it's simply due to the economy being in the shitter for
| the non-"Capital Ownership Class".
|
| 1977-2007 was generally a good time in the US if you survived
| by trading your time/knowledge/expertise for a wage as most
| people do. This is also the time in which F/OSS came into
| existence.
|
| If you had a decent job during that time, then the future
| looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of
| your leisure time away for free.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| I've never publicly scolded someone for doing free work for
| tech monopolies but I do understand the impulse. The problem is
| that it's a completely one-sided relationship, and there are
| perfectly legitimate concerns about how the biggest tech
| companies are using their wealth and power. At this point I
| doubt much of anyone would expect a large tech company to go
| out of its way to lose money in order to support human
| communities. They take what they can, and ruthlessly kill
| products and services the minute they think it helps their
| bottom line.
|
| Google and others don't need to rely on free volunteers, but
| it's certainly more profitable for them. Does Google making an
| extra $10B/year make the world a better place? Maybe, I don't
| know, but it's not crazy to think the answer is no.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| It not a completely one sided relationship. I'm using google
| maps for free!!! That's HUGE benefit to me. That google makes
| money from it is irrelevant to me. They're paying me by
| providing a free service that I get tons of usage out all the
| time.
| NuclearPM wrote:
| The MIT license didn't require a lot of thought.
| raincole wrote:
| > someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps
| was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how
| to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free
| for a corporation that's making money off me
|
| This tells you about Reddit's demographic and nothing else.
|
| Remember Reddit has a dedicated sub for antiwork. It used to
| have a sub for shoplifting (I'm not kidding.)
| karteum wrote:
| IMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft
| codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft
| license.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Im convinced a lot of open source proponents dont really like
| open source based on all the complaints about how the software is
| used.
| leni536 wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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".
| agentultra wrote:
| 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.
| throwerofways67 wrote:
| Carmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| teladnb wrote:
| 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 ...
| jjj123 wrote:
| "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.
| ohrus wrote:
| Even if not an explicit gift, isn't all OSS implicitly a gift?
| I'm having trouble understanding the practical difference.
| mpyne wrote:
| > but not everyone's open source projects are meant as a gift
| to the world for anyone and everyone to use
|
| How is that open source then? There's a reason they added the
| "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no
| discrimination against fields of endeavor" clauses when OSI
| came up with the open source definition in the 90s.
| https://opensource.org/osd
|
| "Anyone and everyone" was always part of the gig if you wanted
| to release something as actual open source.
|
| If you wanted to wrote proprietary source-available software
| you always had that choice. Likewise with Free Software's
| copyleft.
| nickjj wrote:
| 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.
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > 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.
| bronlund wrote:
| 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.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| AstroBen wrote:
| If people who open sourced their code were told: "just know that
| by making this public, in 5 years from now tech companies are
| going to use it to threaten your livelihood and take away the
| things you enjoy most about programming. It doesn't matter what
| license you put on it - they'll still use it."
|
| How many would still do it?
|
| Feels like a bit of a bait and switch.
|
| Of course this doesnt apply to those most excited about the tech.
| Weird coincidence.
| maxothex wrote:
| 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.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Millionaire tells millionaire wannabes what to do and not to do.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-13 23:00 UTC)