John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171

by tzury • 4 months ago

376 453 4 months ago

https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171

nkassis• 4 months ago

I've been wondering, Stallman was driven to create free software after an incident trying to get the code for firmware on his office printer. I'm wondering if today, would he have just reverse engineered it with AI?

Edit: I'm also thinking of what he did rewriting all of Symbolics code for LISP machines

(similar to the person that accidentally hacked all vacuum of a certain manufacturer trying to gain access to his robot vacuum? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/acciden...)

bombcar3• 4 months ago

Stallman rarely cared about the rights of the writer, even reading the GPL makes it clear that it's all about the rights of the user.

In a world without copyright, code obfuscation, or compliers, where everything ran interpreted as it was written and nobody could do anything to you if you modified it, Stallman would be perfectly content.

skilled• 4 months ago

https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171

dang• 4 months ago

Added above. Thanks!

OSaMaBiNLoGiN• 4 months ago

I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

In his follow-up post he talks about him open sourcing old games as a gift, and he doesn't much care how people receive that gift, just that they do.

He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not.

The original authors most of the time didn't write the software to profit. But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.

It's odd to me that he doesn't acknowledge this.

sublinear2• 4 months ago

It's not even the profit, but that there is often no new code being contributed.

AI provides an offramp for people to disengage from social coding. People don't see the point because they still don't understand the difference between barely getting something to work and meaningfully improving that thing with new ideas.

dahrkael• 4 months ago

if no code is contributed back then why is there an ongoing problem with massive amounts of PRs?

evrimoztamur• 4 months ago

There is a major difference between open-sourcing a completed product versus being an open source maintainer, and I'm disappointed that Carmack is drawing a false equivalence here.

truncate3• 4 months ago

Plus unless I'm wrong he's talking about products that were released several years ago and milked for money already.

gruez• 4 months ago

I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

What makes this more objectionable than profiting off open source projects by using it directly? eg. tech giants using linux as a server OS, rather than having to pay microsoft thousands per server for a windows server license? With the original GPL, they don't even have to contribute back any patches.

truncate3• 4 months ago

More people use Linux, more recognition Linux itself get which directly or indirectly gets some more donations, developers etc.

With AI, the link is not clear at all. Its just pure consumption. There is no recognition.

john_strinlai4• 4 months ago

What makes this more objectionable than profiting off open source projects by using it directly?

i can brag if netflix is using my X or facebook runs all their stuff with my Y. that can help me land consulting gigs, solicit donations, etc.

alwaysbeconsing• 4 months ago

Competition. Using my open source projects directly doesn't kill my employment. AI company explicitly say they want to put me out of work, using my code aginst me.

js2• 4 months ago

This is just the divide between capital and labor though, isn't it? See also: everything is a remix; great artists steal.

I'm on both sides. I've contributed to open source. I use AI both in my personal projects now and to make money for my employer.

I'm still not sure how I feel about any of it, but to me the bigger problem is the division between capital and labor and the growing wealth inequality divide.

alpaca128• 4 months ago

great artists steal.

That quote is about inspiration, not just using others' work or style.

T. S. Eliot's version from 1920 put it best imho:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

boredtofears• 4 months ago

Its a lot less odd when you remember that he's running an AI company himself.

Findecanor2• 4 months ago

Ah.. So the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.

barrowclift• 4 months ago

I'm seeing your comment's downvoted, I'd like to hear from those that did as to why. Doesn't his current venture with his AGI startup Keen Technologies deserve being called out as a potential conflict of interest, here?

amarant4• 4 months ago

Isn't that the case, and even the point, of all open source, even before AI?

What's the point of a gift if the receiver isn't allowed to benefit/profit from it?

For instance, do you think Linus is upset that ~90% of all internet servers are running his os, for profit, without paying him?

Of course he isn't, that was the point of the whole thing!

Are you upset Netflix, Google, and heck, even Microsoft are raking in millions from services running on Linux? No? Of course you aren't. The original author never expected to be paid. He gave the gift of open source, and what a gift it is!

tuna74• 4 months ago

Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.

lelanthran3• 4 months ago

You dont know what GPL is?

It's not an unconditional gift, it's got strings attached.

AI training on GPL works is basically IP laundering, you're taking the product without paying the asking prices.

toast02• 4 months ago

I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strings isn't exactly a gift.

If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me, there were no strings. Your users presumably benefit from the software I wrote, unless you're using it for evil, but I don't have enough clout to use an only IBM may use it for evil license. You benefit from the software I wrote. I've made the world a better place and I didn't have to market or support my software; win-win.

I've done plenty of software for hire too. I've used plenty of open source software for work. Ocassionally, I've been able to contribute to open source while working for hire, which is always awesome. It's great to be paid to find and fix problems my employer is having and be able to contribute upstream to fix them for lots more people.

bombcar3• 4 months ago

It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.

radlad3• 4 months ago

Presumably you are licensing your code as MIT or a similar license.

Not all code is licensed that way. Some open-source code had strings attached, but AI launders the code and makes them moot.

Jare2• 4 months ago

I'm the same, I've seen some of my stuff pop up in the weirdest places and I was ok with it. But I understand and respect that people who published code under restrictive licenses may have a problem. The GPL is absolutely "NOT-a-free-gift" license, in both wording and spirit.

If someone published something as MIT and doesn't like it being used for LLM training, yeah that person can only blame themselves.

For GPL, it all depends if you consider a LLM "derivative software" of the GPL code it was trained on. It's fair to have an opinion on that either way, but I don't think it's fair to treat that opinion as the obvious truth. The same applies to art, a lot of it is visible on the Internet but that doesn't make it "a gift".

bluefirebrand4• 4 months ago

If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me

My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits

emigre2• 4 months ago

Most open source licenses have strings attached, the terms of the licence say what those “strings” are. Like requiring attribution.

dminik2• 4 months ago

I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly.

Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.

johnisgood2• 4 months ago

That sounds fun. I am trying to find potential employers who need me to write or fix code, and ideally contribute upstream along with it. Any ideas where to start? I am thinking something "chill". I am trying to avoid large corporations.

Lerc4• 4 months ago

One of the changes I have made in recent years is to move to the unlicence. I am ok with people using my code. I'm not ok with people saying that other people shouldn't be allowed to use my code.

johnsmith1840• 4 months ago

That's the point? I agree and roughly it's one of two.

A: you made this as a free gift to anyone including openai B: you made this to profit yourself in some way

The argument he makes is if you did the second one don't do opensource?

It does kill a ton of opensource companies though and truth is that model of operating now is not going to work in this new age.

Also is sad because it means the whole system will collapse. The processes that made him famous can no longer be followed. Your open source code will be used by countless people and they will never know your name.

It's not called a distruptive tech for nothing. Can't un opensource all that code without lobotomizing every AI model.

jstummbillig• 4 months ago

What seems stranger to me is not acknowledging, that most popular OSS explicitly permitted for profit use. It's essentially what made them popular.

Obviously LLMs are new and nobody knew that they would happen. But the part where most popular OSS willfully committed to broad for profit use is not.

bombcar3• 4 months ago

I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away.

I think it's interesting that nobody would cry that Fabien should shovel cash from his book sales towards Carmack, nor should those who learned how to code by reading source owe something to the authors beyond gratitude and maybe a note here and there.

Even things like Apple's new implementation of SMB, which is "code clean" from GPLv3 Samba, but likely still leans on the years and years of experience and documentation about the SMB protocol.

sumeno4• 4 months ago

He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away.

That's his choice and I assume he licensed his code accordingly. That doesn't mean that the choices of others who used different licenses are invalid.

sowbug• 4 months ago

It's also odd to release software under a license allowing commercial use if the authors didn't want that.

sobiolite• 4 months ago

Are you suggesting that authors didn't know or understand that commercial exploitation of their OSS contributions was possible? If so, that is a complete misrepresentation of history. There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. Authors have chosen not to use them, and instead chose licenses, such as MIT/GPL, that allowed commercial use. And there has always been commercial use of OSS. Big companies, small companies, tech companies, oil and gas companies, weapons manufacturers, banks, hardware companies, etc. They all use OSS and they all make a profit from it, without giving anything back to the people who originally wrote it. That's not an edge case or an unexpected consequence, it a fundamental tenet of free (as in freedom) software: You do not get to choose who uses it, or how they use it.

pseudalopex14• 4 months ago

There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use.

There were source available licenses against commercial use. Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition said a license must allow any use.

ryandvm2• 4 months ago

If folks don't want LLMs scanning their codebases we should just make some new OSS licenses. Basically, "GPL/BSD/MIT + You pinky promise not to scan this for machine learning".

Either it works and the AI makers stop stop slurping up OSS or it doesn't hold up in court and shrinkwrap licenses are deemed bullshit. A win/win scenario if you ask me.

PaulKeeble• 4 months ago

A lot of the use of open source code has directly breached the terms under which that code is shared and they are now monetising the sale of this code.

Aurornis9• 4 months ago

He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not.

How is this different than any company that uses the open source software?

I find this argument hard to swallow. If open source contributors want to profit from their code being used and prevent big companies from using it or learning from it, open sourcing it would be an irrational choice.

john_strinlai4• 4 months ago

How is this different than any company that uses the open source software?

recognition for the authors, which can lead to all sorts of opportunities. "netflix uses my X for their Y, worldwide" opens doors.

supern0va2• 4 months ago

I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

I've noticed this thing where people who have decided they are strongly "anti-AI" will just parrot talking points without really thinking them through, and this is a common one.

Someone made this argument to me recently, but when probed, they were also against open weights models training on OSS as well, because they simply don't want LLMs to exist as a going concern. It seems like the profit "reason" is just a convenient bullet point that resonates with people that dislike corporations or the current capitalist structure.

Similarly, plenty of folks driving big gas guzzling vehicles and generally not terribly climate-focused will spread misinformation about AI water usage. It's frankly kind of maddening. I wish people would just give their actual reasons, which are largely (actually) motivated by perceived economic vulnerability.

yndoendo2• 4 months ago

I am anti-AI art and will never fund any thing created from AI-art. It lacks emotion. It only can copy and attempt to duplicate existing art.

The time taken to make art is therapeutic to the artist and is expressed in their end product. It helps them keep balance in their lives, calm them, and fight depression.

Everything I have seen from AI-art is dis-formed from reality. AI-art will enhance body dis-morphia in the younger generation the more real looking it gets.

I am 100% for laws that Norway has were it must be labeled that a photo has been edit. AI-art should need to be labeled to help prevent body dis-morphia. Body dis-morphia leads to eating disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions.

skeledrew7• 4 months ago

But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work

This doesn't make sense. You make something and put out there, for free, of your own will. Why do you care if someone takes it and makes a profit? Shouldn't you have taken that profit route yourself before if that's what you wanted?

lelanthran3• 4 months ago

Getting the credit and the modifications is the profit.

You basically are looking at a contract and saying you aren't going to agree to the terms but you're taking the product anyway.

salawat• 4 months ago

Carmack is the same person comfortable with delaying talks of ethical treatment of a digital being, or what even constitutes one until in his eyes "they demonstrate the capabilities of a two year old" by which point, with the scale we distribute these models at, and the dependence we're pushing the world to adopt on them, we'll be well into the "implicit atrocity zone", and so far down the sunk cost trail, everyone will just decide to skip the ethics talk altogether if we wait that long. This is in spite of being a family man, which raises serious questions to me about how he must treat them. It does not surprise me at all the man has blindspots I could fit a semi-truck in.

emtel• 4 months ago

It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.

If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.

What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!

ThrowawayTestr3• 4 months ago

I haven't given a cent to openai or anthropic but they have given me many thousands of tokens for free.

raincole2• 4 months ago

But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.

He clearly states his opinions. He doesn't care if other people profit from his code.

> GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift

He believes other members in OSS community should have this mindset. Of course it might not be fair, especially for members who are as financially fortunate as him. His point is clear nevertheless.

tejohnso• 4 months ago

profiting for having done it.

Isn't that permitted by some of the more popular licences? If you care about others profiting from your work you'd choose an appropriate licence. And then you'd temper your expectations and hope for the best because you know there will be less than perfect compliance. It's like lending money to family or friends. You can hope they pay you back, but better to consider it a gift because there's a good chance they won't.

Is it worse because it's AI for some reason? I'm having trouble pinning down exactly what the gripe is. Is it license compliance? Is it AI specific? Is it some notion about uncool behavior in what some people see as a community?

nicman23• 4 months ago

so what?

meheleventyone• 4 months ago

Yeah the main difference seems to be that he open sourced the games after he got very wealthy from them not before. So of course at that point you can easily feel magnanimous about bestowing gifts.

Open sourcing something from the start and essentially giving up any ability to profit from the use of your work when companies are often making huge profits from it seems less easy in comparison.

make3• 4 months ago

why is someone making money out of it a bad thing, if they're not preventing other people from using the code?

emiliobumachar2• 4 months ago

As I understand it, the anti-AI stance of open source software people in particular has nothing to do with AI learning from code bases, and everything to do with AI slop clogging all unrestricted community feedback channels.

minimaxir• 4 months ago

It's both, although the latter is more prominent.

3rodents• 4 months ago

Yeah — isn’t he confusing the arguments against AI art?

I’m against AI art because it is built on stealing the work of artists who did not consent to their work being trained on.

I couldn’t care less about models trained on the open source software I released, because I released it to be used.

edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected

pseudalopex14• 4 months ago

edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected

Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.

tadfisher• 4 months ago

Oh, I thought it was about the wholesale theft (relicensing) of code by laundering through an LLM trained on the same code. ¿Porque no los dos?

ahartmetz• 4 months ago

I don't have problem with AI learning from FOSS code bases. I have a big problem with FOSS code bases helping to create non-FOSS code which does not return the favor. AI-washed Windows code for Wine would be fantastic.

etchalon• 4 months ago

This fellow Shawnee Mission East alum gets it.

lavela2• 4 months ago

There is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar.

I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.

gensym2• 4 months ago

I find it pretty simple:

- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence

- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

dysoco• 4 months ago

AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

Depends on how you see it.

I know many people building oss, local alternatives to enterprise software for specific industries that cost thousands of dollars all thanks to AI.

If everyone can produce software now and at a much complex and bigger scale, it's much easier to create decentralized and free alternatives to long-standing closed projects.

contagiousflow• 4 months ago

You do understand that the above comment is talking about how the use and reliance on LLMs is what centralizes power right? It's great people can build these tools, but if the means to build these tools are controlled by three central companies where does that leave us?

truted2• 4 months ago

I agree with you. One counterargument is that producing software was never a path to adoption unless you had distribution and the big companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) have distribution on a scale that individuals will not.

Sol-• 4 months ago

AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal project you have certainly democratizes Software.

And even though open source models are a year behind, they address your remaining criticism about the AI being centralized.

hsbauauvhabzb• 4 months ago

AI is written by a for profit company whose long term objective is more profit.

I’m not against AI, I’m against the inevitable enshittification which will screw us all over, one way or another.

munificent• 4 months ago

- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence

That was the intention and hope, but I think the past twenty years has shown that it largely had the opposite effect.

Let's say I write some useful library and open source it.

Joe Small Business Owner uses it in his application. It makes his app more useful and he makes an extra $100,000 from his 1,000 users.

Meanwhile Alice Giant Corporate CEO uses it in her application. It makes her app more useful by exactly the same amount, but because she has a million users, now she's a billion dollars richer.

If you assume that open source provides additive value, then giving it to everyone freely will generally have an equalizing effect. Those with the least existing wealth will find that additive value more impactful than someone who is already rich. Giving a poor person $10,000 can change their life. Give it to Jeff Bezos and it won't even change his dinner plans.

But if you consider that open source provides multiplicative value, then giving it to everyone is effectively a force multiplier for their existing power.

In practice, it's probably somewhere between the two. But when you consider how highly iterative systems are, even a slight multiplicative effect means that over time it's mostly enriching the rich.

Seven of the ten richest people in the world got there from tech [1]. If the goal of open source was to lead to less inequality, it's clearly not working, or at least not working well enough to counter other forces trending towards inequality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires

gaigalas• 4 months ago

Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.

IshKebab• 4 months ago

TL;DR: I really wanted to use a more permissive license so I don't mind AI scraping my code.

Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.

throwaway20274• 4 months ago

You hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary reason for his STB libraries.

https://github.com/nothings/stb

Findecanor2• 4 months ago

Indeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past did so with the conviction that the license itself would in some measure protect the source code itself — as source code — from being exploited by commercially entities.

The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to create competing software.

Many of those are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.

galaxyLogic2• 4 months ago

I don't think we should protect "source-code", we should protect people. Source-code doesn't care, people do.

Should we protect developers and their rights? Surely, and users' rights too definitely. But protecting source-code as such seems a bit abstract to me.

yunnpp• 4 months ago

This is exactly it. The people who release stuff under the GPL do so precisely because they want the software and derivatives to stay free. The software has strings attached; the AI removes them. What's so hard to understand here?

Carmack's argument makes no sense, but I guess it has "Carmack" in it so obviously it must be on the front page of HN.

wiseowise6• 4 months ago

but I guess it has "Carmack" in it so obviously it must be on the front page of HN

Fanaticism is hell of a drug.

throwaway20274• 4 months ago

Personally for me I don't see it as gift, he licensed out the engine but didn't want to be in the engine business, after selling enough it feels he just put it out there so it's his stamp forever with the GPL infection. I think he already felt the diminishing returns at the time. He knew about the sharing of floppy discs and hacker scene and eventually someone would've done it and I think he felt cornered and said fuck it might as well put it out there to beat them to it.

shdh10• 4 months ago

This is completely speculative and not factual.

A lot of work was done by the team to release the source code of many of these games.

I know TTimo did a lot of work to help.

ekjhgkejhgk• 4 months ago

There's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software.

https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889

I find him speaking really soothing.

Joel_Mckay• 4 months ago

John Carmack seems to think isomorphic plagiarism and piracy bleed though is good for FOSS.

This is demonstrably incorrect given how LLM are built, and he should retire instead of trolling people that still care about workmanship. =3

"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

dminik2• 4 months ago

Surely we can all agree that there is a difference between:

- Sharing/working on something for free with the hopes that others like it and maybe co tribute back.

- Sharing something for free so that a giant corporation can make several trillion dollars and use my passion to train a machine for (including, but not limited to) drone striking a school.

charcircuit3• 4 months ago

If someone wants just the former they shouldn't make it open source.

nitwit0053• 4 months ago

How will someone contribute back without the code?

dwroberts• 4 months ago

I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah

jhatemyjob2• 4 months ago

those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift

I respect Carmack so much more now. I always scratched my head why he made Quake GPL. It was such a waste. Now it doesn't matter anymore. I so thankful copyleft is finally losing its teeth. It served its purpose 30 years ago, we don't need it anymore.

shdh10• 4 months ago

Corporate lawyers for id wanted GPL iirc

jhatemyjob2• 4 months ago

that's more or less what carmack said in the tweet in the OP, no?

SirensOfTitan2• 4 months ago

In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.

It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout.

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.

nomel4• 4 months ago

in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization

what examples are you thinking of?

_doctor_love4• 4 months ago

Most of 19th and early-20th century history, which is very much recent history.

Look up:

- The Haymarket Affair

- The Homestead Strike

- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

- The Ludlow Massacre

- The Battle of Blair Mountain

You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.

ryandvm2• 4 months ago

I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is finally going to bite us in the ass.

SlinkyOnStairs2• 4 months ago

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered.

A major economic crash as the only consequence would be the good ending.

The real societal risk here is that software development is not just a field of primarily white men, it was one of the last few jobs that could reliably get one homeownership & an (upper) middle class life.

And the current US government is not, shall we say, the most liberal. There is a substantial risk that when forced with the financial destitution of being unemployed while your field is dying, people will radicalize.

It takes a good amount of moral integrity to be homeless under a bridge and still oppose the gestapo deporting the foreigners who have jobs you'd be qualified for. And once the deportations begin, I doubt they'll stop with only the H1Bs. The Trump admin's not exactly been subtle about their desire to undo naturalizations and even birthright citizenship.

SirensOfTitan2• 4 months ago

I totally agree. I've written about this topic a lot on this site, probably most recently here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115597

The US is built on-top of a high value service economy. And what we're doing is allowing a couple companies to come in, devalue US service labor, and capture a small fraction of the prior value for themselves on top of models trained on copyrighted material without permission. Of course, to your point: things can get a lot worse than that. I honestly don't think a lot of executives even know how much they're shooting themselves in the foot because they seem unable to think beyond the first order.

I also see a lot of top 1% famous or semi-famous engineers totally ignoring the economic realities of this tech, people like: Carmack, Simon Willison, Mitchell Hashimoto, Steve Yegg, Salvatore Sanfilippo and others. They are blind to the suffering these technologies could cause even in the event it is temporary. Sure, it's fun, but weekend projects are irrelevant when people cannot put food on the table. It's been really something to watch them and a lot of my friends from FAANG totally ignore this side. It is why identity matters when people make arguments.

I also think I'm insulated partially from the likely initial waves of fallout here by nature of a lucky and successful career. I would love it if the influential engineers I mentioned above stopped acting like high modernists and started taking the social consequences of this technology seriously. They could change a lot more minds than I could. And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.

Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.

nitwit0053• 4 months ago

I'm not aware of any labor efforts that have successfully fought automation long term.

There's been plenty of temporary victories, but even the unions often acknowledge it's temporary.

markus_zhang3• 4 months ago

The point is not to fight automation. The point is to fight for a better distribution model.

Well you are still right though. There were only temporary wins.

skybrian• 4 months ago

Software engineers have been automating away workers' jobs from the beginning. "Computer" was once a job title. There were armies of switchboard operators at the phone company. Companies had typing pools, mail clerks, and file clerks. We write shell scripts and development tools to automate our own jobs.

sph2• 4 months ago

Most of us got into engineering for the means (programming computers) rather than the ends (automating away jobs).

I guess the people that have been rejoicing from the AI revolution are of the latter type.

Atomic_Torrfisk• 4 months ago

Those were electrical engineers, digital switches came out later... regardless we are talking about labor of a much larger industry.

poopbutt22• 4 months ago

the US is built on a high value service economy

The purist forms of capitalism I’ve seen are places with low prices, a large working class, practical marketing, and high competition - often they’re considered “3rd world” places.

The US economy, if it wants to remain “1st world” must have high prices. It has to contain an element of scarcity (however faux) in order to be sold at a premium, or be able to impart some privileged (institutional) knowledge as a firm - which should be as esoteric as it is scarce.

It can’t be quality alone since all building and manufacturing is effectively outsourced. It has to have a premium brand recognition or monopolistic aspects to it that necessitate a high price.

So the challenge for the first world, during the rise of China (Mexico, etc.), is to find new ways to justify the privileged position using this new technology as a lever to do so.

CrossVR• 4 months ago

There's one elephant in the room that's not being addressed:

Training an AI on GPL code and then having it generate equivalent code that is released under a closed source license seems like a good way to destroy the copy-left FOSS ecosystem.

indemnity• 4 months ago

This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!

sidewndr46• 4 months ago

This kind of reminds me how I saw some teams deal with a vulnerability scanner flagging an OSS dependency as having a reported vulnerability. The dependency was always OSS anyways. Copy & paste the entire thing into your project. Voila, dependency scanner doesn't find any problems any longer.

deckar01• 4 months ago

People were violating the terms of GPL without consequence long before AI. It is very difficult to determine if binaries were compiled from fragments of GPL code.

The places I have found AI most useful in coding is stripping away layers of abstraction. It is difficult to say as a long time open source contributor, but libraries often tried to cater to everyone and became slow, monolithic piles of abstraction. All the parts of an open source project that are copyrightable are abstraction. When you take away all the branching and make a script that performs all the side effects that some library would have produced for a specific set of args, you are left with something that is not novel. It’s quite liberating to stop fighting errors deep in some UVC driver, and just pull raw bytes from a USB device without a mountain of indirection from decades of irrelevant edge case handling.

gentleman11• 4 months ago

IP laundering is a big part of AI, it's why big companies are so excited and workers / artists are less excited

Lerc4• 4 months ago

If it is clearly the same code, the copyright would apply to the copy. If it is meaningfully different it does not.

This is what it was before AI, and it remains so today.

AI reproducing code without holding rights to it are a failure case that should be eliminated,

slantedview• 4 months ago

Keep in mind, Carmack heads an AI company now. His opinion should be viewed with that context.

fresh_broccoli• 4 months ago

Well, if Carmack wants to give gifts to AI companies then he's free to do it, but it doesn't mean that other people want it too.

I think this debate is mainly about the value of human labor. I guess when you're a millionaire, it's much easier to be excited about human labor losing value.

shdh10• 4 months ago

If OpenAI, Anthropic, and all other US labs stopped developing LLM’s, the Chinese and Europeans would still continue.

You can’t put this genie back in the bottle, and this type of event of human labor being deprecated isn’t new.

The forecasts are still not well defined and speculative.

jcmfernandes• 4 months ago

and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift.

I can understand his stance on AI given this perspective. I have a harder time empathizing his frustrations. Did he also have a hard time coming to terms with the need for AGPL?

throwaway20274• 4 months ago

Replace GPL in his sentence with something anti-AI and think of back in time when Carmack did that, it's exactly the same situation now except he's in a much more favorable position to make that stance, it's ironic if he can't see that most of us are on the other side of that fence with AI right now.

Isognoviastoma3• 4 months ago

Most of FOSS is not a free gift, but asks for some form of repay.

MIT asks for credit. GPL asks or credit and GPL'ing of things built atop. Unlicense is a free gift, but it is a minority.

AI reproduces code while removing credit and copyleft from it and this is the problem.

throwaway20274• 4 months ago

Exactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and eat it too.

zzo38computer• 4 months ago

I would want to use the license that does not ask for credit; the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to combine it with software having such licenses).

godd2• 4 months ago

and this is the problem

Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use it.

tombert• 4 months ago

If I release something as MIT or Apache, all I want is some credit, either for my own self-satisfaction or for resume fuel.

If a library I wrote was used by BigCo, then I could point to their license file and mention that in a job interview or something. If they have Claude generate something based on my code, they don't put it into their license, I don't get the resume fuel, and my work is unrewarded.

I have gone back and forth about how I feel about AI training on code, and whether I think it's "theft", but my point is that the original code being available is kind of missing the point.

Isognoviastoma3• 4 months ago

Current social consensus is that copyright exists and one can only use software on conditions stated in license. Thus, proprietary and copyleft have same protection.

Another possible consensus would be that copyright don't exist, and anyone can copy proprietary or copyleft work and improve it. Nobody would be harmed in such situation, original author still have its copy. I would have no problem with such state - but it must be same for everyone, not just FOSS.

imiric• 4 months ago

Thinking of open source as a gift is such a strange take. It implies that the relationship is merely a transaction where the giftee is the beneficiary and the gifter is a philanthropist. It has subtle financial undertones, and a sense that gifters are somehow morally superior.

It is far healthier to see it as a collaboration. The author publishes the software with freedoms that allow anyone to not only use the software, but crucially to modify it and, hopefully, to publish their changes as well so that the entire community can benefit, not just the original author or those who modify it. It encourages people to not keep software to themselves, which is in great part the problem with proprietary software. Additionally, copyleft licenses ensure that those freedoms are propagated, so that malicious people don't abuse the system, i.e. avoiding the paradox of tolerance.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of someone like Carmack, but he's not exactly an authority on open source. While id has released many of their games over the years, this is often a few years after the games are commercially relevant. I guess it makes sense that someone sees open source as a "gift" they give to the world after they've extracted the value they needed from it. I have little interest in what he has to say about "AI", as well.

Hey John, where can I find the open source projects released by your "AI" company?

Ah, there's physical_atari[1]. Somehow I doubt this is the next industry breakthrough, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

[1] https://github.com/Keen-Technologies/physical_atari

crote4• 4 months ago

The gift metaphor might work if you think of it like birthday gifts: yes, it's a gift, but everyone knows that you're supposed to give one in return on their birthday.

If you accept gifts on your birthday but never give any in return, you're quickly left with a vanishingly small number of friends.

shdh10• 4 months ago

It was certainly a gift to anyone who was able to fork those games and continue their maintenance

skrebbel2• 4 months ago

This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.

beastman82• 4 months ago

The assumption here is that the people who maintain something in a painstaking manner did not intend people to take it and do whatever they want with it in accordance with its license?

sumeno4• 4 months ago

"in accordance with its license" is the key part that's missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.

bigstrat2003• 4 months ago

This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift").

That is, in fact, OSS. Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community.

layer87• 4 months ago

That’s just incorrect. “Open source” can mean the licensing as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been associated with the development model since The Cathedral and the Bazaar [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

edgyquant• 4 months ago

It’s not open source in the way anyone thinks about the term. He isn’t maintaining free software in the open

adiabatichottub3• 4 months ago

It's been a conflation issue (and major point of contention) since the 90s. "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" are two different things that have traditionally been used together to promote the rights of the user and the dissemination of knowledge in software development.

Edit, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

skrebbel2• 4 months ago

I agree but he's arguing with people who's personal attachment to their OSS work goes a lot deeper than "I did a few code dumps back in the day".

It was stupid of me to say that he does "not really do OSS" because that opened the door for all kinds of definition arguments. That's a super tired discussion and it wasn't really my point. I can't edit anymore but I meant to say something like "doesn't do OSS in the same way as a large % of the OSS community".

mjr00• 4 months ago

It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away.

You're right and it's worth pointing out that a lot of open source has the opposite lifecycle: the authors make a thing, aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to eventually sell something peripheral, i.e. "open core" with paid plugins or enterprise support.

In these cases, open source isn't a gift so much as a marketing strategy. So it makes sense the maintainers wouldn't see LLM training on their code as a good thing; it was never a "gift", it was a loss leader.

adiabatichottub3• 4 months ago

There's been something lost over time about the philosophy of open source. It appeared at a time when it was becoming apparent that computers represented a new type of technology where you couldn't just "look under the hood". An independent mechanic or machinist could repair a car to spec. A carpenter didn't need original blueprints of the house to create an addition. You could disassemble a typewriter or a sewing machine and with some ordinary skill actually manage to figure out how it worked. With compiled software the bar to understanding by the owner or operator was raised significantly. Open source was about being able to actually work on the thing you owned.

Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.

wmf• 4 months ago

the authors make a thing, aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to eventually sell something peripheral

I know it sucks but we need to admit that this doesn't work and we need to beat the hope out of people. You aren't going to make money later. The very few cases where it worked were flukes or fake.

throwaway17_174• 4 months ago

I think your comment leads to discussing a distinct third ‘cause’ for open source development: where a developer realizes their ambition is greater than their abilities, either in the technical sense or (more likely) in the sense that a single developer stands no realistic chance of ever completing an implementation of the idea alone.

For this class of open source development the authors essentially require the contributions and gifts of others for the project to even be realizable. I think this is the underlying basis for open source’s move toward a more “community” development model. It has led to open source being viewed by many as requiring a community and a “managed” community at that, to be open source. I think this class of open source is going to be impacted the most by LLM ‘assisted’ development (no matter how much distaste it generates for me and many others), where the hurdles of large scale development are more in reach (seemingly) for solo or very small groups of developers.

The really interesting thing is going to be to see how many of these projects move toward the Carmack ‘gift’ model and look to leave the community-centric model behind as an unnecessary externality.

bloblaw2• 4 months ago

This sounds to me like the "No True Scotsman" argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I break down what you said as: "Sure, he's released code with an open-source license, but that's not real open source in the sense that matters."

I happen to disagree. OSS is OSS. AGPL is OSS. MIT is Open Source. Unlicense is OSS.

daemonologist• 4 months ago

The point is not that it's not "real" open source, the point is that he has less interaction with the big part of the open source ecosystem which is feeling the brunt of the downsides of AI, namely, giant useless bug reports and PRs.

(I do agree that it's still OSS even if you never maintain it or anything.)

GuB-42• 4 months ago

The thing is, he is not working in open source.

He only released his software as open source when there was no more money to be made with it. The idea being that even if it is of no use for him, is could be of use to someone else. In a sense, it is crazy to think of such actions as generous when it is what everyone should have done, but since being an asshole is the rule, then breaking that rule is indeed generous.

To me, working in open source means that your work goes to open source projects right now, not 10 years later when your software is obsolete and have been amortized. The difference matters because you are actually trying to make money here, and the protection offered by the licence you picked may be important to your business model.

John Carmack is making gifts, which is nice, but he wasn't paid to make gifts, he was paid to write proprietary software, so he worked in proprietary software, not open source. On one occasion, he gave away one of his Ferraris, which is, again, nice, but that doesn't make him a car dealer.

dartharva4• 4 months ago

What do the people who are deep into open source mean by the term then, in your understanding?

stock_toaster• 4 months ago

He also (presumably) doesn't have to worry as much about money as many OSS folks might, so dual licensing (as a means to keep working on the OSS version while also making ends meet) is likely not something he would consider.

He also started an AI company, right?

losvedir2• 4 months ago

He also started an AI company, right?

Yes, but IIRC it's different than the current "download the internet" large language model approach. More like learning to play video games or something.

socalgal22• 4 months ago

I have the same attitude as Carmack. I have several libraries and sites I maintain as well as contributing to several popular open source projects. I still have his attitude about this. Both my open source and my ongoing maintenance are gifts. I'm also free to stop giving when I don't feel like it.

anon-3988• 4 months ago

There's more to open source than just the code or output, it is also the community. There's apparenticeship, sharing of knowledge, sense of comradery, supporting each other, etc.

My day job uses a lot of open source libraries and projects, and do you know what we do when we fix things? We fork internally and don't upstream any patches.

Do you not see a loss here?

With LLMs, there's even LESS reason to keep up with upstream. We would probably just ask LLM to keep up with the changes commit by commit.

darth_avocado• 4 months ago

OSS is a big umbrella. At the end of the day, if you are not hurting for money, you might be okay donating your work for AI training. Meanwhile if you’re working hard on projects while sacrificing a lot (including money) you are very much allowed to not want AI use it for training if it means financial gain for a select few at the top.

It has the same undertones as how rich people talk about philanthropy. “Look I donated a portion of my wealth that barely affected my life, I must be better than all those poor people who never donate to chariTy”.

K0balt• 4 months ago

That is, in fact, open source.

The community is not the license. The “open source” development community is a user of that kind of licensing.

You might better describe them as the open source maintainer community. I do see how ai impacts maintainers. But I’ve dumped hundreds of thousands of loc into the bucket with no hope that anyone would really maintain it. With AI it might become part of something useful. The license has many uses.

nayuki• 4 months ago

Then by your definition, SQLite isn't open-source because it's a code dump with a license, but outsiders are not allowed to participate in shaping (the official copy of) the code.

Quekid5• 4 months ago

SQLite is public domain while the code released by id/Carmack is GPL.

The latter technically doesn't prevent anyone making money off it, but in practice it does (other than nominal fees).

That alone is a massive difference.

skeeter2020• 4 months ago

Not sure if this was your intent, but what WOULD the result be of an AI reimplemented SQLite? They've got some of the best technical documentation in the game; there are lots of directions this could go...

SouthSeaDude• 4 months ago

It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away.

He didn't have to give it away, but he did, and for that I thank him

dismalaf3• 4 months ago

Open source is literally just releasing the code under an OSS license.

Any additional meaning or steps isn't open source, it's something else...

westurner2• 4 months ago

Though I agree that a healthy, vibrant, open source software project requires community and merge maintainer(s), open source "code dumps" (contributions of one's work for others to share) are open source.

There's no need to shame or diminish people into a different open source contribution pattern.

We can be grateful for open source code dumps with no express or implied commitment to future performance. We aren't entitled to ongoing support or ongoing development.

westurner2• 4 months ago

Furthermore, there are different types of contributors.

So often the people with divergent thinking and creative problem solving abilities aren't apt to stay focused on one thing for so long.

It's normal for more operations-focused folks to handle the day-to-day on things designed by sometimes flighty, absent-minded, distracted, and unreliable chief engineers such as the aforementioned.

Unless they want to stick with a project, you probably don't want to force those types to do the normal operations daily grind that's so normal to most people.

"We'll take it from here"

"Actually I can code, but on that one [...]"

kashyapc• 4 months ago

Well said. Some people are misparsing your core point here.

Skrebbel is largely referring to the OSS projects that need people to do consitent grunt work like shipping predictable releases, stable branch maintenance, backporting security fixes, etc. This is the kind of work maintains that the internet's infrastructure.

A bit like the Nebraska guy from the famous XKCD, dependecy: https://xkcd.com/2347/

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 4 months ago

This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS

It's a little disheartening that someone can release their code and still be told they "don't really do OSS".

enraged_camel• 4 months ago

It’s a pretty nasty form of No True Scotsman.

“I do open source. Oh, that guy? He doesn’t do real open source.”

RunSet• 4 months ago

He *did* really do OSS. But he don't really do OSS.

id Tech 4 is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, and is to date the last id Tech engine to be open-sourced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4

At QuakeCon 2007, Carmack told LinuxGames that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release." Carmack resigned from id in 2013, and no source code release followed the launch of id Tech 6 in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_5#Marketing_and_licens...

serf• 4 months ago

This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps

OSS wasn't always endless PRs and other git-specific related crap, and I think that line of logic is fucking ridiculous.

Open source when I started was a website or BBS where a tarball of code was there waiting for me to download it. It wasn't PRs/issues/CI/career-finagling/virtue-seeking/etc; it was just the tarballl full of source code.

I agree wholeheartedly with Carmack and I am glad to see people with that perspective. I think exactly the same with regards to all of the OSS projects and code that I put out for 20+ years before LLMs were a thing. nothing changes; i'd do it again.

I didn't do it to make a career, I did it because I believe in the greater ethos of OSS.

cholantesh3• 4 months ago

I didn't do it to make a career, I did it because I believe in the greater ethos of OSS.

The greater ethos of OSS, as it is conceived of by most of its practitioners isn't "source availability is the same thing".

jasonwatkinspdx• 4 months ago

I mean back in the day licensing Quake from iD was like that too. It was basically "hey, thanks for the $2 million, here's your cdr and never contact us again."

It was night and day between them and Epic back then, which I think is entirely why Unreal Engine grew to be such a juggernaut, and iD tech stagnated.

shdh10• 4 months ago

Megatexture was also subpar and overcomplicated

briandw• 4 months ago

This the “no true scott”! fallacy. I sure he writes code and makes it open with an open source license, but he not really doing open source.

bickfordb• 4 months ago

Carmack was a shareware/proprietary software guy way before he was a open source person if ever.

shdh10• 4 months ago

Quake III Arena is OSS

He doesn’t need to keep maintaining it

GeoAtreides2• 4 months ago

everyone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous

meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class)

'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things

wiseowise6• 4 months ago

You sound like a commie, friend! Have you thought of poor millionaires and they right to finally scratch their OCD by adding another useless feature to slop nobody will ever use? Have you considered challenges they face at work, when their billionaire overlords don't make enough obscene money to match Lizard Ellison or Beff Jezos?

Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. (c) Scam Altman

skeledrew7• 4 months ago

I said it just recently[0] and I'll say it again: those who're big on open source (or at least copyleft) should be jumping hard on the AI opportunity. The core purpose of copyleft is to ensure the freedom of users to do whatever they want with the covered works, chained ad infinitum. Letting AI at said works (and more) now means even more freedom, as now users can trivially (compared to previously) update that code to fit their use case more precisely, or port it to another language, or whatever.

I really can't see a valid reason to be against it, beyond something related to profiting in some way by restricting access, which - I would think - is the antithesis of copyleft/permissively licensed open source.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259850

Isognoviastoma3• 4 months ago

Copyleft is copyright held in smart way. Nobody can take code under GPL and make its _copy_ proprietary because it would be violation of copyright.

In the other thread you argued that AI output is not copyrighted.

Do you think I can take proprietary code and lauder through AI to get a non-copyrighted copy of it, then modify to my needs? How can I obtain the proprietary code legally in the first place?

leni5362• 4 months ago

Try it with unreal engine first.

skeledrew7• 4 months ago

you argued that AI output is not copyrighted

I didn't argue it. The US courts made - and implicitly upheld - the ruling.

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...

arjie3• 4 months ago

Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.

I think if people want a revshare on things then perhaps they should release under a revshare license. Providing things under open licenses and then pulling a bait-and-switch saying "oh the license isn't actually that you're not supposed to be doing that" doesn't sit right with me. Just be upfront and open with things.

The point of the Free Software licenses is that you can go profit off the software, you just have certain obligations back. I think those are pretty good standards. And, in fact, given the tendency towards The Revshare License that everyone seems to learn towards, I think that coming up with the GPL or MIT must have taken some exceptional people. Good for them.

em-bee2• 4 months ago

yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine.

but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)

and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.

dartharva4• 4 months ago

Who is stopping you from licensing your code that way then?

adiabatichottub3• 4 months ago

I think we've all been burned by 20+ years of exploitation in the guise of "free product." Google more or less spearheaded that movement. I agree we should all be community-minded and have nice things, but when you look at how the rewards (social and monetary) are shared it's overwhelmingly disproportionate.

rconti• 4 months ago

Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception that, while these companies have always profited off of our inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public good, they provided the platform, and profited off that platform.

Now it feels like the public good is being diminished (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob, trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.

The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives less back.

hn_acc1• 4 months ago

Yes, this 100x.

logicchains• 4 months ago

Because the ratio of developers who do it for money to developers who do it for love of developing has dramatically increased, as computer science became a subject people studied for economic reasons, not just for fun.

jltsiren• 4 months ago

MIT and BSD licenses are kind of obvious. They are academic licenses, named after universities.

The idea is that you have people paid to create something of potential value, but the value of the outputs has only a limited and indirect impact on their compensation. If someone finds the outputs valuable, they should mention it in public, to let the creators use it to demonstrate the value of their work to funders and other interested parties.

Aurornis9• 4 months ago

A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.

Did you respond by asking them how Reddit makes money?

The anti-corporate mentality isn't new, but it does surface in different ways and communities over time. The Reddit hivemind leans very anti-corporate, albeit with a huge blind spot for corporations they actually like (Reddit itself, their chosen phone brand, the corporations that produce the shows they watch).

The Reddit style rebellion is largely symbolic, with a lot of shaming and snark, but it usually stops when it would require people to alter their own behavior. That's why you got dog-piled for doing something productive on a site where user-generated content is the money maker.

malfist• 4 months ago

Hell, reddit hates on reddit all the time. Spez in particular is hated across the board.

Agree that they largely don't change behavior. Although I will say, I've not logged into my account since the API shenanigans and don't regularly visit the site anymore. I'm mostly just on here and fark.

arjie3• 4 months ago

Haha, that's funny. I didn't think of it at the time and I was more surprised than anything.

By the way, I have had your comments highlighted for a while now and I've never regretted it. Good stuff.

bcrosby95• 4 months ago

Avoiding every corporation that does stuff you disagree with just isn't feasible. All we can do is weigh their business model and other practices with the value we get out of it. People on Reddit who also have a problem with Reddit are obviously on Reddit. That is tautological. It doesn't mean they aren't avoiding other companies for similar reasons, which wouldn't make them a hypocrite either.

pjmlp• 4 months ago

It has always been like that, except we used to call it demos, sharewhare, beerware, postware,...

The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from it.

crote4• 4 months ago

I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

The problem is that the big tech companies aren't holding up their end of the traditional social contract.

I like to think of the wider open source community as one giant group project. Everyone contributes what they can, and in turn they can benefit from the work everyone else has done. The work you do goes towards making the world a better place. I have absolutely zero problem filing pull requests for bugs I encounter or submitting issues on OpenStreetMap, because I know that in return I get the Linux DE and reliable maps in other towns. If you want to make it political, it's a "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs".

The big tech companies operate completely differently. They see open source contributors primarily as a resource to exploit. Submit a single fix on Google Maps? You'll get zero credit, they'll never stop bothering you with popups about "making improvements", design their map around what is most profitable to show, and they will of course log your location history and sell it to the highest bidder. And they are getting filthy rich off of it as well.

I couldn't care less about getting monetary compensation for some odd work I do in my spare time, but there's no way in hell I'm going to do free labor for some millionaire who's going to reward me by spitting in my face.

ThrowawayTestr3• 4 months ago

The amount of value Google Maps has given me is far beyond what I'd be willing to pay in actual dollars.

Aurornis9• 4 months ago

The problem is that the big tech companies aren't holding up their end of the traditional social contract.

This analogy feels too strained.

Google gives away Maps, Gmail, and other products for free. A little UI widget inviting users to submit fixes is hardly an onerous demand.

and they will of course log your location history and sell it to the highest bidder.

Google does not do this, no matter how many times this myth gets repeated online.

I think a lot of people in the Reddit and Reddit-adjacent world believe this is true because it gets repeated so much, but it's not true.

Ironically, Reddit makes money by packaging up user's content and selling it to 3rd parties.

acuozzo2• 4 months ago

Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output?

I think it's simply due to the economy being in the shitter for the non-"Capital Ownership Class".

1977-2007 was generally a good time in the US if you survived by trading your time/knowledge/expertise for a wage as most people do. This is also the time in which F/OSS came into existence.

If you had a decent job during that time, then the future looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of your leisure time away for free.

Aurornis9• 4 months ago

1977-2007 was generally a good time in the US if you survived by trading your time/knowledge/expertise for a wage as most people do. This is also the time in which F/OSS came into existence.

FOSS came into existence during this time because computers and the internet became available, not because it was a specific economic situation.

If you had a decent job during that time, then the future looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of your leisure time away for free.

This seems like rewriting history. Tech salaries today are higher than they were back then. There was even a whole lawsuit against companies caught suppressing wages during that time. Tech compensation went up significantly after the period you cited.

rurp2• 4 months ago

I've never publicly scolded someone for doing free work for tech monopolies but I do understand the impulse. The problem is that it's a completely one-sided relationship, and there are perfectly legitimate concerns about how the biggest tech companies are using their wealth and power. At this point I doubt much of anyone would expect a large tech company to go out of its way to lose money in order to support human communities. They take what they can, and ruthlessly kill products and services the minute they think it helps their bottom line.

Google and others don't need to rely on free volunteers, but it's certainly more profitable for them. Does Google making an extra $10B/year make the world a better place? Maybe, I don't know, but it's not crazy to think the answer is no.

socalgal22• 4 months ago

It not a completely one sided relationship. I'm using google maps for free!!! That's HUGE benefit to me. That google makes money from it is irrelevant to me. They're paying me by providing a free service that I get tons of usage out all the time.

waffletower• 4 months ago

You can't demonize Google, in binary fashion, and remain intellectually honest. Economically the big tech relationship is clearly one-sided, but that ignores what the tech companies are actually providing. If we didn't find a need for their products, they wouldn't be streaming billions in revenue. Even before 2017, while deservedly subject to global anti-trust suits, they provided arguably the best and most popular search tool which empowered and connected its literal billions of users. In 2017 Google researchers published "Attention is all you need" for all eyes to read -- without a software patent. This came after a long trajectory of AI investment. This seminal work, more than any other single advance, birthed modern AI, an undeniably powerful and disruptive technology which is largely supplanting Google's search products. While I am supportive of big tech giving back in the form of higher taxation upon their profits, you can't deny the arguably insane research gifts they have bestowed upon all. But you still certainly can ask the question, "is this technology making the world a better place?" as you have suggested.

NuclearPM• 4 months ago

The MIT license didn’t require a lot of thought.

_zagj2• 4 months ago

The MIT license

I still can't believe that developers got memed into this being the default license. 20 years ago, you'd always default to GPL and only opt for something else if it was a complete non-starter, and then you'd turn to LGPL (e.g., if it was a C library), and failing that, some BSD variant. But developers were always cautious to prefer GPL wherever they could to prevent exploitation and maximize user freedom.

It's crazy that even in compiled languages like Rust, MIT is now the default, though I think that's probably due to the lack of a stable ABI complicating dynamic linking enough to make LGPL less viable.

raincole2• 4 months ago

someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

This tells you about Reddit's demographic and nothing else.

Remember Reddit has a dedicated sub for antiwork. It used to have a sub for shoplifting (I'm not kidding.)

jasomill3• 4 months ago

Reddit is…Reddit.

Here's a fan sub for a nonexistent video game with 85,000 members:

https://reddit.com/r/DCAllies/

Say what you will about shoplifting, at least it's a physically realizable activity.

vovavili• 4 months ago

I definitively noticed a major uptick in both my well-being and an ability to hold a nuanced opinion on the world when I have stopped using reddit. The medium is the message.

registeredcorn• 4 months ago

I would like to offer a similar, but somewhat different opinion on one aspect of what you talked about regarding "revshare":

If I notice and issue on my own, and it bothers me enough / I feel that other users would benefit from it, I have no issue providing that information to the source maintainer for free.

If however, I am contacted by the maintainer in anyway requesting feedback, suggestions, or input (i.e. "Rate us on the app store!", "Email us with any problems you have.", etc.) I except any feedback I provide to be worth more than an unprompted message, and in turn, I expect something like a lower bill, a discounted rate on their store front, a credit in their auth page, or some other kind of material gain from it.

Basically, if I am being solicited and prompted to do something, it wasn't my idea in the firsr place, so it ought to be worth my time to do so. They have already gone to the effort of asking, so they (presumably) find value in it. I ought be compensated for that value.

Using Google as an example: one of the few products of theirs I like is Opinion Rewards. They actually pay you (in store credit) for responding to their surveys. It's a fair trade off. They ask me basic habits related to shopping, etc. I get a 25 cents or so every time I respond.

safety1st• 4 months ago

This cultural shift exists and it will intensify as long as consumer prices and cost of living continue to rise at the same time corporate profit margins do. This is a simple, easy link to make, pretty much everyone's now aware and has stopped buying the excuses. Consolidation and an increase in straight up, unpunished criminal monopoly and cartel activity within corporate America have given rise to this new culture. Luigi Mangione will not be the last of his kind.

_zagj2• 4 months ago

submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

After it became obvious that 1) these LLMs were trained heavily on OSS, and 2) that they (arguably) wantonly violated the licenses of the OSS they were trained on (as even the most permissive of which mandated attribution), 3) that LLMs could be used to rewrite code licensed with terms (e.g., copyleft) deemed unsuitable for certain commercial purposes to nullify those terms, and 4) that these LLMs would ultimately be used to reduce the demand for developers and suppress developer wages (even as cost of living keeps rising, and now even cost of compute, once deflationary, rises quickly as well, ironically thanks to LLMs), the culture of unbounded enthusiasm for open source amongst devs ought to have quickly been supplanted by one of peer pressure-bordering-on-public-shaming against open source participation.

Yet people still go out of their way to open source projects, or work, uncompensated, on open source beyond the "good citizen" stuff of reporting bugs (possibly with fixes) in things you use.

It really boggles the mind. Even if you can't starve the beast, why willingly feed it, and for free?

seba_dos12• 4 months ago

This has nothing to do with monetization of output and everything to do with power balance. Google can take your contributions and do whatever they want with it, including banning you from using the data you contributed ever again. This doesn't happen with OpenStreetMap for example, which can be and is being monetized just fine as well, because all contributors have equal rights to the data.

It's the same thing as with CLAs with copyright assignment in FLOSS.

Yokohiii• 4 months ago

Really weird how you compare contribution to a commercial market leading company with open source licensing. How does that even make sense? If you give your knowledge or workforce away for free, do it. Google will not notice you in any case.

karteum• 4 months ago

IMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft license.

nonethewiser• 4 months ago

Im convinced a lot of open source proponents dont really like open source based on all the complaints about how the software is used.

leni5362• 4 months ago

Prople choosing MIT-0, BSD0 or some equivalently permissive licence do gift their code to the world without expecting anything in return.

Other FOSS developers, not so much. They are the ones who are exploited.

galaxyLogic2• 4 months ago

I think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".

agentultra2• 4 months ago

All due respect to Carmack but I think his take is probably influenced by his investment in his own AI company. There doesn’t seem to be many on this space who have any ethical or moral problems with profiting from the work of others and not contributing anything back to the commons. If we all intended our work in OSS the way he did maybe we’d all see it his way too.

Copy left licenses are generally intended, afaict, to protect the commons and ensure people have access to the source. AI systems seem to hide that. And they contribute nothing back.

Maybe they need updating, IANAL. But I’d be hesitant to believe that everyone should be as excited as Carmack is.

throwerofways67• 4 months ago

Carmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though

cholantesh3• 4 months ago

Practically every major company in the LLM space claims to have a core mission of pursuing AGI, just like Keen.

markus_zhang3• 4 months ago

I think it’s more than that. He is always pro performance, pro technology, and maybe libertarian, too.

cholantesh3• 4 months ago

There's no maybe about it, he has openly identified as such.

dundarious• 4 months ago

I don't think his AI company is the issue, it's that he desired the effect of a public domain/unlicense, a completely unfettered gift, while he was constrained by the business people to use a copyleft license. However, most people using a copyleft license are using it with (some) intent, and choosing it with (some) explicit preference over public domain/unlicenses, i.e., they are not intending it to be an unconstrained gift, they want a social dynamic of code recycling only in the open and with attribution (each optional and with variations depending on the license, but those are commonly desired constraints).

It is of course fine to have his opinion, but if he thinks most people are in fact like him when they chose a copyleft license, then I think he's projecting rather than observing.

rurp2• 4 months ago

Many people who provided quality technical content on blogs, Stack Overflow, and other forums thought they were providing a public good and helping to create a lasting culture and community. Turns out they were making fuel pellets to power money machines for the richest tech oligarchs in the world.

Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.

teladnb• 4 months ago

He threw Quake 3 over the wall after having made tons of money off it. He is now invested in AI and should just shut up.

"AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!"

Si tacuisses ...

shdh10• 4 months ago

id also released the source code to:

Wolfenstein 3D: 1995

DOOM: 1997

Quake: 1999

Quake II: 2001

Quake III Arena: 2005

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: 2010

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory: 2010

Doom 3: 2011

Some people are still leveraging those codebases and are thankful for their releases.

Maybe just don’t read what he has to say.

jjj1232• 4 months ago

“My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world”

That’s great for John, but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use. That he cannot understand that others think differently than him is disappointing.

ohrus• 4 months ago

Even if not an explicit gift, isn't all OSS implicitly a gift? I'm having trouble understanding the practical difference.

mpyne2• 4 months ago

but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use

How is that open source then? There's a reason they added the "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" clauses when OSI came up with the open source definition in the 90s. https://opensource.org/osd

"Anyone and everyone" was always part of the gig if you wanted to release something as actual open source.

If you wanted to wrote proprietary source-available software you always had that choice. Likewise with Free Software's copyleft.

jjj1232• 4 months ago

Fair point! I was conflating source-available and open source.

I guess you cannot limit based on user or use case, but you can set rules on attribution and copyleft in OSS, both of which aren’t respected by AI. Still seems different than a no strings attached gift.

nickjj• 4 months ago

I really admire Carmack and followed everything id software since the beginning.

They really did put a lot of things out in the open back then but I don't think that can be compared to current day.

Doom and Quake 1 / 2 / 3 were both on the cusp of what computing can do (a new gaming experience) while also being wildly fun. Low competition, unique games and no AI is a MUCH different world than today where there's high competition, not so unique games and AI digesting everything you put out to the world only to be sold to someone else to be your competitor.

I'm not convinced what worked for id back then would work today. I'm convinced they would figure out what would work today but I'm almost certain it would be different.

I've seen nothing but personal negative outcomes from AI over the last few years. I had a whole business selling tech courses for 10 years that has evaporated into nothing. I open source everything I do since day 1, thousands of stars on some projects, people writing in saying nice things but I never made millions, not even close. Selling courses helped me keep the lights on but that has gone away.

It's easy to say open source contributions are a gift and deep down I do believe that, but when you don't have infinite money like Carmack and DHH the whole "middle class" of open source contributors have gotten their life flipped upside down from AI. We're being forced out of doing this because it's hard to spend a material amount of time on this sort of thing when you need income at the same time to survive in this world.

eqvinox• 4 months ago

I mean, yeah, sure, I can see that for open source.

And GPL'd code is not open source, it's free software. The license implies the code cannot find its way into non-GPL codebases, and you can't profit*1 from the code. (But you can profit from services on top, e.g. support services, or paid feature development.)

Now the question is, is that intersection set all GPL developers?

*1 note profit would imply distribution

torginus• 4 months ago

I have a secret fear about AI - that at one point when AI models get good enough, AI companies will no longer give you the source these tools generate - you'll get the artifacts (perhaps hosted on a subscription website), but you won't get the code.

Tools like CC already push a workflow where you're separated from the code and treat the model as a 'wishing well'. I think the fact that we get the source is just adminssion that these models are not good enough to really take our jobs (yet).

I wonder how much a gift AI companies think their models (and even outputs of their models) are, considering their weights are proprietary and their training methods even moreso.

gensym2• 4 months ago

I have a secret fear about AI - that at one point when AI models get good enough, AI companies will no longer give you the source these tools generate - you'll get the artifacts (perhaps hosted on a subscription website), but you won't get the code.

This is a likelier outcome than the various utopian promises (no more cancer!) that AI boosters have been making.

ricardobeat• 4 months ago

That highlights the importance of open models keeping up with the state of the art.

themafia• 4 months ago

and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors

It sounds like he understands the problem perfectly. Is he not capable of thinking through how a non-millionaire would think about this? Sheesh.

bronlund• 4 months ago

All in all, I think copyright and patents should be abolished. They're just holding back the world for the sake of greed. There has to be another way.

joecool1029• 4 months ago

The foundation to which all of these licenses are tied to will likely be dissolved. Words/code had value in the old system. But now it's cheap to generate, way cheaper than hiring legions of writers/developers to write it. When it was a valuable asset lobbyists spent to protect it under law. I want you to think as you read this comment, do you think Disney would rather pay unionized workers or abolish copyright law and use other (trademark) mechanisms to protect their IP? A decade or so ago, this kind of thought would be crazy but things have changed.

So we have this foundation, this anchor which is copyright law that gives us any power to have a say about whether code should be accessible. Without that, the licenses are empty words, no weight. No remedy. My concern is less that opensource code gets used by commercial interests; I would rather they use libraries that are maintained especially in contexts of security... my concern is that we move toward only having devices we can keep as long as the company supports them and/or is solvent. If we lose the foundation that everything was built on (copyright law), it becomes impossible to audit or support things on our own. Everything is a rental/subscription.

I don't often just come out and make predictions, this is one I think we're moving toward though as the sea becomes more muddied by regurgitated works. The major AI companies are unabashedly pirating works, there are powerful rights-holders that could be sending armies of lawyers after them, like the big publishing houses... but is it happening? Or are they sitting back and letting the tech companies do R&D for what will be their new business models moving forward.

markus_zhang3• 4 months ago

John Carmack and all 10x programmers are going to benefit a lot from the advancement of AI, while we the ordinary programmers are going to suffer in the mid-long term. I mean he is one of the guys I look up to, but I don't want to lose my job.

Regarding OSS, I'll say what I already said a few days ago: OSS people should take care of their financials first, and then do OSS without anxiety. Also, if you do OSS, expect it to be abused in any imaginable and unimaginable way. The "license" is a joke when enough dollars are involved. If you hate that, don't do OSS. No one forces you to do it. I appreciate what you did, but please take care of yourselves first.

Actually, now that I thought about it, every successful OSS people that I look up to took care of their financials first. Many of them also did it in Carmack's way -- get a cool project, release it, don't linger, go to the next one while others improve it. Maybe you should do it, too.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

Millionaire tells millionaire wannabes what to do and not to do.

olivierestsage• 4 months ago

He's downplaying the "social change" aspect. For many, open source/free software has a political element, at least implicitly. That element is strongly opposed to aggressive centralization of capital and surveillance power. You can point out how different licenses were always written in a way that permitted monetization/for-profit use, but that's beside the point -- the people who chose those licenses never imagined that their code would be used at this scale for this kind of purpose.

nunez• 4 months ago

My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world.

Says yet another person who's hilariously rich, financially invested in the success of AI and isn't materially affected by AI displacing them.

shdh10• 4 months ago

id Software released the source code to Wolfenstein in 1995, he was only rich at that point on merit and the success of their games.

Bethesda ended that practice.

wiseowise6• 4 months ago

What's your point though? That just because he's extremely smart, got lucky and got rich in the process he's somehow immune to critique?

No one can argue that John is an exceptional programmer and human being, but millions of developers aren't Carmacks – they're shmucks trying to survive under increasing pressure of corporate boot squeezing ever more. They're the ones being threatened by AI, not wealthy John for whom it's all games now.

cmrdporcupine• 4 months ago

Not everybody means the same thing by open source, it's always been a rather bad umbrella phrase for a lot of different things (and I'm old enough to remember when it first became current).

Whether you agree with them or not the free software / copyleft advocates mean something very different from what Carmack is getting at and always have before or after AI. It has always been an anti-corporate position and it's not difficult to reconcile in my mind at all?

That said, I'm personally a free software advocate, and in favour of the GPL as a license but I use "AI" (LLMs) (critically). To help make [A]GPL software. I kinda feel by copylefting the output, in some sense I'm helping to right the wrong.

mwkaufma• 4 months ago

Pulling out the ol' "activist" dog whistle. Cope.

nabbed• 4 months ago

Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors,...

I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)

snickerbockers• 4 months ago

If github trained models on the contents of your private repos, that would be a violation.

Really don't see why that should change anything. Surely you'd want your gift to the Microsoft corporation to appreciate in value! Why would we ever withold this boon from somebody on the basis that they gifted their source exclusively to microslop!?

steele• 4 months ago

Carmack can afford to gift his labor

Mon0t0n• 4 months ago

the grift that keeps on grifting

rDr4g0n• 4 months ago

Who contributed their work to open source (as a gift) with the expectation that their contribution would eventually be ground into a paste, fully stripped of attribution, and sold as a service?

Maybe something has materially changed?

mempko• 4 months ago

John Carmack already had his bag and reputation when he did the code dumps.

muyuu2• 4 months ago

I don't consider myself anti AI at all, but I find relicensing concrete solutions by supposed AI rewrites to be completely callous and an attack on human work. I don't think this can be just dismissed as being against using a particular technology.

From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft. If instead you want to simply make it public domain, and this for some reason becomes acceptable, then it becomes the end of code as IP. The end of potentially any IP, which by the way I know plenty of people who would be happy about - "IP is theft" crowd - but which I think is unfair on those who had no real opportunity to build any equity on their work.

Precisely because I strongly believe in the potential of generative AI to eventually carry out entire projects with little technical guidance, I think it's important to establish the property of both what exists and what is achieved by humans with AI augmentation. This is a much more immediate concern than "runaway AI" or any form of singularity. As is today, generative AI has proven capable to replicate the results established projects with improvements (establishing how much is just parroted from the very replicated project and similar ones is academic in practice).

FreakyT• 4 months ago

From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft.

If you replace “AI” with “a software engineering team”, does that change your argument? It seems like you’re essentially arguing that APIs should be copyrightable, which seems like a Bad Thing to me.

qaadika• 4 months ago

an attack on human work

A "software engineering team" is human, so that does change the argument. It becomes a human-human problem, not a human-machine problem. Or in OSHA terms, a problem to be solved with administrative controls rather than engineering controls.

Plywood12• 4 months ago

Hello

wiseowise6• 4 months ago

https://x.com/Rahll/status/2032473978179039260

Is a better comment.

Plywood12• 4 months ago

So, big tech takes the "gift" of passionate developers and: 1. Use them to threaten their jobs (and so many other jobs like lawyers, artists, tech writers...). 2. Hoard hardware, causing prices to raise to absurd levels and effectively making it harder for passionate developers to tinker at home. 3. Set up circular deals between themselves to raise stock prices, creating a bubble that will make 2008 seem like a joke. 4. Close the models and refuse to give credit to anyone or be transparent about training data. 5. Hire cheap labor to label training data in third world countries. 6. Use their models to gather data about the users and profile them, essentially paving the way for mass AI surveillance. 7. Fearmonger about how their models have the potential to wipe the human race. 8. And many other wonderful things.

But hey, we're failing to see how AI is magnifying the value of "our gift". See? Little Timmy can now build a website for his dog with 0 effort just by prompting ChatGPT! Isn't that mind blowing? I don't mind if he's Carmack or fucking Leonardo da Vinci, he's legit stupid.

revanx_• 4 months ago

He's anything but stupid, he is also human, makes mistakes (like you) and the last time I checked he was working on AI for years now so, yeah, he's probably going to gravitate towards "AI good" instead of "AI took my job".

wiseowise6• 4 months ago

Not stupid, just doesn't give a shit. He's 50+, has $100+ mil net worth and can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants. He's a cunt, but not a stupid cunt.

wolvesechoes• 4 months ago

He is not stupid. He is just like most tech people - ignorant of history, sociology and matters of policy.

For decades STEM people asked why we even need humanities when we have science and technology.

This is why.

poolnoodle• 4 months ago

In a way, doesn't AI violate non-commercial open source licenses because it takes the code and then profits from it but in a way that is so opaque that nobody can prove it?

pepperoni_pizza• 4 months ago

In the "When you're a star^H^H^H^H big tech, they let you do it. You can do anything." kind of way.

cadamsdotcom• 4 months ago

It’s a shame John Carmack made enough money to get rich.

It shields him from the need to truly hustle.. and the world really needs his hustle right now.

albatross79• 4 months ago

Carmack can be enthusiastic about AI because it's no threat to him, he's already set. He's not going to be laid off, and if he is, he can just do coding as a hobby for the rest of his life. He doesn't need to worry about what blue collar job to retrain for in middle age to be able to pay his mortgage and clothe his kids.

And it is a form of cheating to take a gift and profit off of it, keeping all the profits for yourself, it goes against the spirit of it. Until now that was fine, because there was a sense that it made more things possible and created jobs, and these projects were improved through reciprocal contribution.

AI vacuumed everything up for itself and turned around and said now I'm going to replace you.

0dayz• 4 months ago

It's a bit of a complicated topic in general.

Personally I think ai code should always be open source to at least make it the most "ethical", others can see and edit it as they see fit.

Generally though I've noticed that the spirit of open source (community owned code) has slowly been morphing into a few pointers that in some way undermine open source, whenever that be the fact that folks get more entitled towards open source projects or that they see certain open source licenses (specifically GPL) as a tool to build an anti-capitalist moat.

Despite the fact that almost every open source or accepted open source license by OSI or FSF explicitly states no warranty and commercialization of said project is allowed, just that most people don't contribute money let alone code (just look at the xz debacle even now the dev is not given sufficient attention in terms of commercial and social support to maintain it).

To be fair to Carmack, his vision of open source is one shared by a lot of the "free means anarcho-free" developer camp and as such if said code is used in ai or to bomb children then so be it.

I guess this is one of the major tension of open source is exactly what open source ought to be:

A drive towards ethical code or a drive towards anarcho-free, because stating "free as in freedom" is too vague; freedom has the connotation of both the idea of freedom TO DO something and the freedom to be EXEMPT from something.

In the end I believe that freedom to be exempt is more important than the freedom to do.

Due to the fact that the bad actors usually benefit more to exploit freedom-to than freedom-from, hence why beyond community building the (A|L)GPL helps out in ensuring both as a user but also as a developer that the code written is protecting us both.

Whenever or not AI is part of that is well going back to my point that ai code should most likely almost always be open-sourced if one wants to "lift the burden".

crakhamster01• 4 months ago

I can maybe see this argument being valid for OSS - as Carmack says, by nature it should be "no strings attached".

I don't think that's all anti-AI activists care about though. Honestly, I would say most activists don't talk about the use of OSS? The most prominent anti-AI sentiment seems to come from creatives. Artists, musicians, designers, etc.

They didn't publish their works with the same notion as OSS developers, but it was scraped up by corporations all the same. In many cases, these works were protected by copyright law and used anyways.

To me that feels like the equivalent of training on "private repos", which Carmack would call a violation [1].

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2031769354401091988

YeGoblynQueenne2• 4 months ago

I have to ask, are there really "anti-AI activists"? Like, are there people marching against AI, attacking data center, spray-painting "AI OUT" on computers, and so on? Or is it just an exaggeration by Carmak?

emigre2• 4 months ago

I imagine that he is not that committed to open source, when he chooses to post on X.

notepad0x90• 4 months ago

Let's say I put out a bag of candies for halloween or something for anyone to come and take without restrictions. A few of them take most of the candies, then go around the corner and sell it for a significant profit, so much that they are billionaires now, but I've only grown poorer.

Would I have any right to be pissed off? No. Once I shared the candies, I have surrendered all entitlements over them.

Furthermore, let's say I put some legal text on the candy wrapper that said "if you get sick from eating it, i'm not responsible. if you sell it, you have to pay me 10%. If you cook something with the candy and resell that product, you have to share your new recipe with the world." and a bunch of other ridiculous things. But I put it out there for anyone to take, reading the wrapper and accepting the terms was not a condition the public needed to meet before being able to obtain the candy. Not only that, if you put out poisonous food for the public, what you put on the wrapper doesn't absolve you from responsiblity. Being able to offer things for free to others doesn't grant you rights to control their future commercial activity, unless they specifically agreed to that. It is also outlandish and ridiculous to claim you can have a say in someone's recipe's confidentiality simply because they modified your ingredient candy before using it as part of their recipe.

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oxag3n• 4 months ago

Open sourcing old games is OSS corner case.

Being on the top of the Maslow's Pyramid and knowing there's a very little chance you'll slide down is another reason that change people's attitude to things. The side effect is becoming numb to the majority who isn't filthy rich but contribute way more to OSS.

John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

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