Comment by Gormo
6 hours ago
To whom would you attribute the greater part of that reduction in trust: the people using FOSS to train LLMs, or the people trying to block them?
6 hours ago
To whom would you attribute the greater part of that reduction in trust: the people using FOSS to train LLMs, or the people trying to block them?
People who break the social contract are the ones responsible for breaking the social contract, not the ones who take steps in response to social contract being broken.
So the questions here are (a) is any generally accepted social contract actually being broken, and (b) if so, who are the ones who are breaking it?
The contract behind open source was something like (GPL):
"If you copy my work, you should share your work too."
or at minimum (MIT):
"If you copy my work, you should credit me."
I think it is no longer under dispute that the legal contract is satisfied by LLMs. The AI companies won and will continue to win.
But we are talking about a social contract, which is not quite the same thing. The social contract is what leads some devs who previously enjoyed publishing their work openly to no longer feel the same way. What did the authors mean by "copy"? Did they mean literally CTRL+C, CTRL+V or something broader?
This is a matter of opinion which only each individual creator can answer. For me, copying meant something like:
"To reproduce the function of my work, dependent on my having published it, without effort nor understanding of your own"
Ten years ago this basically required doing a CTRL+C, CTRL+V so there was no need to be more specific. Anybody who did enough work to, say, rewrite in another language (with that language's idioms), met the bar of clause 3. Now AI enables a form of "copying" that matches my definition, without the user even being aware of whose works they are copying. It perfectly launders the origins of its output. It can write an FFmpeg clone in Rust for you that would appear to be a novel work.
Of course, I cannot say that my own little bits and pieces of open source code would make a scratch in AI's capability, were it removed.
But I do strongly believe that if all the code that was published by authors with the same mindset was unavailable, Claude would be a far weaker developer.
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Are you asking how AI coding agents, the companies selling them and the individuals using them break the FOSS social contract (copyleft, attribution, upstreaming), or are you disputing that they do?
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Yes, and obviously: bots crushing servers in strict contravention of the robots.txt rules.
“No, no, what was she wearing?”
People who take steps in response to social contract being broken are the ones responsible for the steps they've taken, not the ones who break the social contract.
Its definitely the ones DDOSing websites while giving no attribution in any way to the original creators.
DDOSing websites seems to be an unrelated problem, and one that has traditionally been solved through response throttling and IP blocking.
Attribution is often required even on MIT or BSD licenses where code is being redistributed, either in original or modified versions, but that would relate to this discussion only to the extent that one regards using LLMs whose training data included a certain bit of code as itself constituting redistribution of that specific code -- but that in turn is a very debatable premise which really ought to be argued for, and not merely argued upon as though it is already generally recognized as true.
Why? You stole my stuff and now are pretending I need to argue for you to stop stealing it. It's a joke.
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