Comment by bjourne
4 hours ago
People taking your work and not giving anything back was ALWAYS the risk you took when writing free software. LLM training doesn't change that much. That the us military no doubt is using gcc to compile embedded software for their icbm:s no doubt irks the gnu people. But you can't have it any other way. "You can only use my software for good things" just is not consistent with "free software".
Yeah, I really can't comprehend these sentiments as anything other than an "I don't like AI" argument. FOSS has always been about just writing code and putting it out into the world where others can do as they please with it.
I see a lot of risks involved in people surrendering their own decision-making to LLMs, but that's a question of how they're used, not how they're trained. The idea that using FOSS software to train LLMs is somehow a violation of FOSS norms just doesn't seem valid.
> FOSS has always been about just writing code and putting it out into the world where others can do as they please with it.
Not true. Most FOSS licenses require attribution and many require derivatives to be released under the same license.
Sure, but I guess I'm not seeing the relevance here. Are we seeing some greater-than-normal wave of people redistributing FOSS code without attribution, or creating derivative works without adhering to the license terms? LLM training doesn't seem to be either of these things.
2 replies →
There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP.
I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet.
And the AI IP that makes that possible is still enclosed rather than open.
> There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP.
Could you perhaps explain that irony a bit more explicitly?
Can you provide any examples of "commercialized enclosure of software IP" somehow backwashing into the FOSS ecosystem and closing things up that are already open?
Don't open-weight models sort of returning the favor?
> But we're not quite there yet.
Judging from the number of projects I've seen from people who aren't software developers, we're there enough.
Before LLMs, you could use the GNU GPL or other copyleft licenses to protect your code from being used to develop non-free software. Unfortunately, the courts have decided that LLMs are free to ignore licenses.