Comment by carlosjobim
8 hours ago
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them!
4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me!
5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit.
How about instead?:
1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software.
2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it.
3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour.
4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary.
5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.
I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary
Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.
Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.
And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood
You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.
You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.
FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.