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.

Added above. Thanks!

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

What seems stranger to me is not acknowledging, that most popular OSS explicitly permitted for profit use. It's essentially what made it 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's both, although the latter is more prominent.

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

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?

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.

> 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.

> But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.

What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.

arguments are stronger without insults

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.

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.

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.

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

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 developers are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies practice.

> 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?

I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is finally going to bite us in the ass.