Comment by iamnothere
8 hours ago
Interesting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.
On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.
The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.
The reason for NetBSD rejecting any use of AI is the concern that a future legal case will rule that the output of LLMs trained on GPL code is itself subject to the GPL due to the viral clause in the licence.
God that would be amazing. How incredible would it be if basically all software was free?
... or commercial software vendors would roll back a couple of years in their VCS and start again from that point.
The chances american courts would find for this is basically zero. Maybe in other markets....
I think it's a good thing. In a couple of years we'll have a clear way to measure the true productivity and impact (or lack thereof) of AI on software dev. It's the perfect "natural experiment".
We have ways to measure productivity now. AI doesn't change what to measure unless you just want to flex. Every time I see "100k lines of code, all AI," I think they probably could have done the same thing with a fraction of that. Anytime productivity is measured that way, you will always fail. As a CTO, my mantra was "I pay for outcomes, not hours." AI coding tools are just that, tools. My outlook on that hasn't changed. I enjoy working with LLM's especially locally, to handle quite a bit of the heavy lifting. I'm not paying for tokens, I'm paying for outcomes.
projected ideology doesn't really match reality, so not really.
detecting AI written code without a minder chained to your arm watching your every movement is still a topic of research...
...and as someone who has been to the last 10 miscellaneous FSF/GNU celebrations I can tell you that community has just as many license cheaters and scoundrels as the rest of the computing world, they just tend to bias towards the good stuff, similarly to how every microsoft employee isn't required to drink the blood of infants (it just looks good on quarterlies.)
It doesn't need to be 0% ai vs 100% ai for the comparison to work.
No. If an open source project allows small amounts of LLM slop to please their foundation donors, is all productivity in that project due to LLMs? Of course not.
If 10 of 20 developers work for corporations and have to pretend that their code is AI written to please the corporations, is that AI productivity?
The advertising and social pressure machinery is so AI heavy right now because most techies are cowards and only speak up on issues (including DEI as we see since Trump) if HR tells them to.
Then of course many projects like Linux or git are entrenched. You can't copy Unix and bitkeeper like Linus did and be immediately successful, because the whole culture is against you (unlike in the 1990s, when the culture was anti-Microsoft).
So yeah, if Gen-Alpha declares OpenAI and Anthropic the new Microsoft and builds up a new counter-culture, then in 10 years you might have some clue.
Otherwise, we have to stick to the current situation and observe that no software has gotten better since AI.
So if software is developed with AI and that's better then we should discount AI's contribution, but if software is developed without AI is better then obviously it's because AI had no productivity boost?
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[flagged]
Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.
Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.
It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.
Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)
Linux (Linus T himself iirc) is very GPLv2.
They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc. But the result was also that big corps liked GPLv3 even less than GPLv2.
On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.
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I think what you're finding is that people who don't care about low quality of LLM outputs also don't care about licensing. If you're in the faction that supports all of this, you don't see a lot of people around you still caring about licensing or quality.
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The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?
Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?
With Linux I meant the Linux kernel
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Interestingly, Linux is GPLv2 and NetBSD is permissive, so I assume AlpineBSD is permissive as well?
> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.
The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.
> no contributions
That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.
Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:
One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)
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Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.
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> The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL.
Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
BSD was tied up in lawsuits for years, giving Linux a head start.
Also why did you mention MIT licensed, it is obviously BSD licensed.
Literally nothing is less interesting than yet another "discussion" about the relative merits of software licenses, or generalizations about the kinds of people that prefer license A to license B.
I have flagged this comment.
I'll flag yours, because it was a completely senseless flagging.
It wasn't even a discussion about that, I wonder if you read the two lines of the comment.
> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars
It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?
It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.
Most of what you use is built by "code monkeys" and is on the way to being vibe coded.
Yeah. We noticed. We've been complaining about the quality for a while.
I wasn’t referring to the specifics of the disagreement, I meant the level of vitriol.
Except in this case the monkeys are pretty good at coding as long as you have enough bananas (tokens). They can follow directions pretty accurately and work independently for at least short periods and incrementally test the work even if you’re not present onsite monkey-handling all the time. I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue. If and when nearly the entire professional industry changes to LLM-based code in most cases, what are they going to do to find those relatively few people who are still willing to write everything manually and spend their spare time maintaining these projects?
>I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue.
plagiarism machine can not be trusted.
therefore plagiarism machine must not be allowed to make decisions.
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Perhaps one day we’ll finally understand the value of simpler software that moves ever-closer to “complete” (simple maintenance only), rather than constantly reinventing Zawinsky’s Law.
It’s ok for software to be replaced when something better comes along for a new generation, but what I wouldn’t give for more well-maintained tools that are feature complete.
What is the modern version of Zawinsky’s Law, anyway? Every program expands until it contains a web browser (Electron), notifications, and a chatbot?