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Free Software Is a Failure

http://www.paritybit.ca/blog/free-software-is-an-abject-failure/
12•gum_wobble•1h ago

Comments

ipaddr•45m ago
"GPL has become so complicated that only a programmer with relatively advanced legal knowledge and ability to read and properly understand “legalese” will be able to decipher it to know what they are able and unable to do with it"

Have you ever seen legal terms in easy to understand form in any software, service or agreements?

7e•44m ago
It's a failure because AI beat the FSF to the punch: it made software effectively free, as in freedom. You can have whatever software you like, now. The FSF never came close to that.
paulryanrogers•43m ago
It is a contradiction that FOSS relies so much on heavy handed copyright. I'd be open to shorter copyrights and letting the chips fall where they may.
fsforever•43m ago
You can still create free software, and use free software, and even charge money for support for free software. The relative success of commercial software and the rise of AI- assisted software doesn't affect the idea and practice of free software. If you don't like that AI companies train on the code, well, the whole point was that you can't really control what people do with the code you send them other than directly copying it without the same license, because that makes it nonfree.

If your problem is that someone you don't like can benefit from your work, well, that was always the case. How many Russian drones run Linux?

krapp•33m ago
>If you don't like that AI companies train on the code, well, the whole point was that you can't really control what people do with the code you send them other than directly copying it without the same license, because that makes it nonfree.

Which is exactly what they do. LLMs don't respect licenses or attribution. So your assertion that the rise of AI assisted software doesn't affect free software is incorrect - it completely disregards and undermines it.

It also adversely affects the ability of people to exercise freedom over that software. LLMs serve as a proprietary middleman controlling the management, generation and distribution of code and humans are constantly being pushed out of the loop, having no direct access to that code, and being unable to learn from it or edit it without an LLM.

Yes you can still create and use free software but it becomes a problem when everyone is only ever training on your code and no human ever contributes anything back.

fsforever•25m ago
Aargh, matey, why be ye entitled to contributions for code ye uploaded freely

But seriously, that's what I mean, and what TFA talks about. A fork doesn't diminish your project at all. You're free to upload or not. Others are free to build on your project, and as long as they don't pretend it's theirs, they don't have to contribute anything from their fork to yours, or even keep it compatible.

LLMs don't copy code, they learn it, the same as you did. You'd better add a copyright notice to every file you write acknowledging the original authors you're paraphrasing, me hearty.

uhhhd•43m ago
There’s something familiar about promising to get rid of ownership and ending up with a bunch of people deciding what everyone else is allowed to do.
petcat•41m ago
I think the failure came with the erosion of copyleft like GPL in favor of BSD, MIT, and other "free for all" licenses that companies exploited to the detriment of the community instead of being forced to participate as equals.
jeremyjh•28m ago
I can’t think of an example of what you are talking about. When those have been exploited, it was generally to the detriment of a business built by the core team. When communities were split it’s generally been due to non-free licenses trying to prevent that.
glimshe•16m ago
The failure comes exactly from GPL because it wants to tie well-meaning people to a hard contract which they are generally not willing to agree with.

Sometimes people just want to make a little money on the side and not conquer the world. If a BSD open source project can help people sell a proprietary product, there's now a new stream of income in the community that could be partially reinvested in the project's core. GPL is excessively ideological and only makes sense for a narrow set of scenarios.

Please note that I'm not against GPL at all. Without it, I don't think we would have Linux and many other projects. What I'm against is promoting GPL to every scenario, which essentially kneecaps the community to protect against a hypothetical greedy large corporate entity.

GPL shouldn't be the default license when someone thinks of open sourcing their project. They should first consider MIT/BSD/etc and only pick GPL for reasons that are specific to that project or industry.

LanceH•31m ago
This rant seems to be all over the place. It mostly seems to be the usual BSD is more free than GPL, but then he comes back that Redhat source is only available to people who paid for the binary (the only way to get the binary). You wouldn't even be entitle to the source under the BSD license.

Maybe I read some of it wrong, but it was painful to get through with the constant telling me how bad things are before telling me what those things are. I truly despise this writing style. Set things up first, then discuss them, please. Then come to the conclusion of how bad it is with the reader.

bemtevi•23m ago
Seems like this is more a bash against the GPL.

> As soon as you leave this club and want to pull code from a GPL-licensed project into your MIT-licensed project, well, sorry, too bad for you.

So what? The GPL seems like a decently fair way of saying that "I'll make a contribution, as long as everyone else using it keeps making that same open contribution".

Personally, if I wanted to release open source code, I wouldn't want it to fall under an MIT license, because then some corp could simply take it and not make the same contribution back.

The author claims this "harms developers of non-GPL-licensed FOSS software" - give me a break. Does it break their legs? Give them the flu? It doesn't harm anyone. Maybe just inconveniences them. Cry me a river.

collinfunk•22m ago
> rewrites of coreutils to be faster and cleaner (e.g. Busybox or various Rust projects)

Note that busybox is under the GPL.

As someone involved with coreutils, I can’t say anything specific without examples, but speaking generally I would caution against putting too much weight into benchmarks.

smitty1e•21m ago
Needs a (2021) in the title.
gnabgib•19m ago
Some similar comments back then too (11 points, 8 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29153396
ChicagoDave•19m ago
As much as I love open source software, I always thought it was naive to believe our capitalist overlords would ever allow it to succeed as intended.

We should be more ambitious with the software we build

https://danluu.com/ambitious/
80•ltratt•2h ago•47 comments

America Has Lost 200k of Jobs in Media, Film and the Arts. How Much Is AI?

https://www.apricitas.io/p/ai-and-the-fall-of-the-creative-class
23•gnabgib•52m ago•12 comments

Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin

https://stealmybitcoin.com/
359•cloudlandsdev•3h ago•199 comments

The Goose Programming Language

https://aardappel.github.io/goose/
185•bobbydigitales•4h ago•142 comments

Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab

https://blog.roku.com/developer/gitlab-move
242•cxr•7h ago•160 comments

Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz

https://missileer.watch
99•liotier•4h ago•64 comments

Small Programs and Languages

https://ratfactor.com/cards/pl-small
18•andsoitis•2h ago•0 comments

SpeedCrunch 1.1

https://www.speedcrunch.org/
58•LordNibbler•4h ago•8 comments

Full Disk Encryption on Fedora with TPM2

https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2026/ent_luks/
23•speckx•2d ago•29 comments

The St. Helena 5 pence coin shows Jonathan, a roughly 190 year old tortoise

https://de.numista.com/9866
85•schleck8•7h ago•25 comments

I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers

https://rootkitlabs.com/2026/10/06/i-built-a-stereo-vision-board-for-hardware-hackers/
15•machinehum•4d ago•0 comments

FreeDNS

https://freedns.afraid.org/
239•esher•8h ago•61 comments

The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning

https://ratfactor.com/cards/limitations
10•andsoitis•2h ago•3 comments

I don't understand quantum physics (2018)

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~doug/quantum_physics/index.html
267•rramadass•14h ago•203 comments

Argus – a free, open-source agentic security operations platform – MIT

https://thomasunise.com/argus
22•humxn•2h ago•7 comments

Neural chip decodes interactions between brain regions

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/neural-chip-decodes-interactions-between-brain-r-2/
84•giuliomagnifico•8h ago•29 comments

Node2Shell evolves to HTTP2Shell, blast radius affects many HTTP libs and apps

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/python-packages-vulnerable-node2shell-brotli-cve-2026-111497
269•theanonymousone•15h ago•135 comments

Making a VGA Driver in SystemVerilog

https://lukaswerner.com/post/2026-10-20@bottom-up-vga
42•derHackerman•4d ago•9 comments

No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector

https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-th...
438•the-mitr•4h ago•429 comments

Physicists trap a single antimatter particle for a month

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-trap-a-single-antimatter-particle-for-a-month/
273•mooreds•3d ago•80 comments

GPU-unlock: FP/BF16 instruction issue rate on Nvidia 3000's cards

https://github.com/Zagitta/gpu-unlock
170•fragebogen•14h ago•61 comments

Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you

https://edjefferson.com/localwiki/
1543•sohkamyung•2d ago•242 comments

Symbolic Learning in Python and Julia

https://github.com/astroautomata/PySR
54•alex_hirner•4d ago•8 comments

Google has officially turned these Nest thermostats back into dumb thermostats

https://www.makeuseof.com/google-nest-thermostats-unsupported/
9•gnabgib•49m ago•0 comments

Oai-math-revised: a community hub for revising OpenAI's math write-ups

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/24/oai-math-revised-a-community-hub-for-revising-openais-m...
31•tokepi•8h ago•21 comments

Twelve years of distributed SQLite

https://philipotoole.com/twelve-years-of-distributed-sqlite/
359•otoolep•22h ago•62 comments

Zac-OS-9: The classic Platinum desktop, reborn for modern PCs

https://sourceforge.net/projects/zac-os-9/
44•felixding•2d ago•29 comments

TornadoVM 7 Enables GPU-Native Workloads from Java Applications

https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/10/tornadovm-7-gpu/
83•pjmlp•2d ago•14 comments

Bringing uv and ty together

https://astral.sh/blog/uv-ty-integration
297•Ravencentric•4d ago•107 comments

Cecilia Berdichevsky, Clementina expert (1961)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Berdichevsky
31•fedecaccia•3d ago•2 comments