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.
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].
The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
You and Bigstrat2003 are arguing a technicality, and you're technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point. Skrebbel and Layer8 are focused on the cultural associations of "open source" development, and this mismatch is causing everyone to talk past each other.
The original post in this thread was:
> 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.
Skrebbel probably shouldn't have said that Carmack "doesn't really do OSS", but what they clearly meant was, Carmack doesn't participate in the sort of community development as the Linux kernel or Apache or whatever.
More succinctly, Carmack only contributes his code to OSS, but not his time, and shouldn't impose his values on the wider community that contribute both.
> technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point
Talking past people to argue on semantics and pedantry is a HN pastime. It may even be it's primary function.
If that was the intent don’t you think it would be stated somewhere, or in the faq?
>“Talking” past
It’s only text, there’s no talking past. You can’t talk past someone when the conversation isn’t spoken. At best, you might ignore what they write and go on and on and on at some length on your own point instead, ever meandering further from the words you didn’t read, widening the scope of the original point to include the closest topic that isn’t completely orthogonal to the one at hand, like the current tendency to look for the newest pattern of LLM output in everyone’s’ comments in an attempt to root out all potential AI generated responses. And eventually exhaust all of their rhetoric and perhaps, just maybe, in the very end, get to the
I’m saying that “open source” can mean both things. The parent was arguing that it only means the licensing. I’m not arguing that it always means the development model.
> The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.
Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?
The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”
From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.
And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.
I think you have confused RMS (Richard Stallman) and ESR (Eric S. Raymond). It was ESR that coined and popularized the cathedral and bazaar development analogy and terminology. It was also ESR who was at the conference your comment is discussing. RMS is “free software”, copyleft, and GNU. ESR is “open source” and the author of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
Of course, I could have misunderstood your comment, if so, mea culpa and feel free to ignore.
I was arguing against this statement: "Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community." It is simply false that it has never meant that.
While you can have a cathedral-like development and publish it under an open-source license, that's not what RMS was talking about in his essay.
I'm also not arguing about what is good or bad, but about what was meant by the term "open source" when it was introduced, and how it is still understood by many people since then.
> In closed-source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing further development plans. This leads to part of the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development.
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
The "development model" of open source is that one person code dumps, another takes, changes it then dumps it, another picks up the copy with the changes, changes it again, and so on. Sometimes it finds it's way back.
A bazaar is a chaotic market with a million vendors, not anything remotely cooperative. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is meant to convey the idea that OSS code develops without central organization, through endless forking and cloning.
The bazaar model definitely isn't the cooperation and vibes model that the HN crowd thinks it is...
> No quiet, reverent cathedral-building
here — rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great
babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, which would take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could
seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.
The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well,
came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion
but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.
I always think about this section when I consider making my personal programming language public. I think if language development was, in 2026, happing the way ESR describes Linux here I might be more persuaded to release. But as it stands now, almost all modern language development is done in the rigid, semi-planned, hierarchical, and “cathedral”-esque development style.
The expectations for language developers is currently huge burden and a massive undertaking, even for small languages that look to publicize at nearly any level. The amount of users that seem to insist on participation in the language’s progress, semantics, or implementation is the vast majority of any online/vocal user base and those same voices seem to view languages with different development models as inherently toys.
I’m sure this is where I am expected to reference Rich Hickey’s comments/post about Clojure development, but I don’t have the link on mobile. But the discussions are legion and legendary at this point.
"Open source" means the source code is open to the public for reading and copying. Licenses have complicated the idealistic definition to restrict copying, but that is only within the context of taking credit (ie implicit relicensure). The only winning move is not to play the game at all.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I think your idealized list of attributes of “open source” is admirable. However, the apprenticeship, comradery, and support are a specific and often sought out feature of some development ‘communities’ for specific software. I’d also say that the ‘loss’ when fixes, updates, optimizations of open source software is not up-streamed is real, but this has very little to do with adopting or promoting the externalities (no matter how laudable) you want to see in certain software’s development.
I personally don’t care about the community, its composition, or its internal structure for a lot of software I use. Even when I’m compiling from source and customizing smaller applications for personal efficiency, I’m not usually interested in being a part of some distributed community centered on that software. Some times I am engaged in the community and appreciate it and the work required to maintain that community. But in either case, the software is “open source”.
> 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.
No there is not. That’s what you impose on it. My code is open, free, and unencumbered. If I don’t want you using it you don’t see it at all. The licenses are there to make people happy.
That's all great, but to me the primary point is rms' original grievance with that printer driver. If the source is open, anyone can improve it. Multiple anyones can improve it! They can even collaborate on message boards and make a nice community, but this is certainly not a requirement.
> 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.
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.
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.
Of course now everything is like that. Partially that's because of computers and software, but there's lots of other technologies that have contributed too.
There's an old tweet I can't find that was something like "We turned away from God when we invented the integrated circuit" that's always really spoken to the luddite in me.
Indeed. Maybe it's just a function of passed time, but it feels like people surrounded by hustlers - including themselves - look at this and think "what's the hustle behind this?" because they can't imagine anyone doing this for any other reason. I get it, but it's quite sad.
It's a function of the economy going in the shitter, with food and housing prices tripling or quadrupling while wages go up 5 or 10%. People want to be paid for their work because they can't afford to pay rent giving gifts away, and hustling is the way to survive because there aren't enough jobs or even if they have a job it's not enough.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It seems to be a common view on HN that licenses and conditional access to websites should be ignored (i.e. WRT ad-blockers), but also that licenses on Open-Source Software repositories should be respected (i.e. WRT LLM training). I believe that holding these contradictory views is common, but the conflict would need to be resolved to come to a conclusion on how to proceed with LLM training.
Replication is not the same as reproduction; I can replicate an API without violating someone's license or copyright (which I would by reproducing their work).
Developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
> Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.
> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
You seem to be conflating copyright with access rights. Two very different things. Regardless of your feelings on either, there is no contradiction in holding different views on them.
Well no, it’s about legally gating the ability to copy so the original author doesn’t have to compete in the same market to sell his own book with every other bloke with a printing press and a copy of the book. Everything else is an addendum.
Don’t confuse the social justification with the actual purpose of copyright law just because it’s written into the US Constitution that way. America didn’t invent copyright law.
Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.
Are you doing a full search of every GPL licensed repository every time you use an LLM to ensure that it isn't giving you GPL licensed code? That doesn't seem reasonable
That's because licenses are an abstract complexity tacked on to a simple material reality in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Just like many cultural rules, they keep growing in complexity until they reach a phase change where they become ignored because they have become too complicated.
OSS licenses haven't grown in complexity all that much in the past forty or so years. They're being ignored more now because it's become easier to ignore them, not because it's become harder to abide by them.
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.
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.
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...
It can generate plausible code because the examples are already in the training set, the documentation, the how-to-write-a-database, other databases, etc.
But unless you could write SQLite yourself it will be hard to specify a good one and to get the generator to produce a correct implementation.
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.
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”.
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.
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.)
I agree there's a difference between publishing code under an OSS license and actively maintaining a project while fielding the flood of low-quality AI issues and PRs. Someone in the latter category is obviously closer to that pain.
I still wouldn't go so far as to dismiss Carmack's view on that basis alone, though. It just means his experience is less representative of maintainers dealing with that specific problem every day.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> because computers and the internet became available
Because of Bell Labs (inventors of the transistor & Unix & UUCP & so much more) which was so well-funded by the post-WW2 US economic situation.
The Internet? DARPA!
DARPA? Post-WW2 US M.I.C.-driven economy.
The list goes on and on and on. F/OSS owes so much to The Marshall Plan.
Is this a sweeping, reductionist PeterZeihan-esque argument? Sure, but I think it's valid.
> This seems like rewriting history. Tech salaries today are higher than they were back then.
So? Does the future look bright to you? Most of the SWEs I know wouldn't say so.
How bright you think the future will be has a direct impact on your long-term planning and, for many, results in prioritizing hedonistic activities in the short term, not F/OSS.
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
It's not open source, because the definition of open source doesn't allow you to place any restrictions on who can use it or for what purpose. It's why licenses like "Don't use it for evil" or "Everyone except Anish Kapoor" aren't acceptable for a lot of Linux distros.
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
> My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.
You're right - the reality of the world today is that open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all questions of legality/ethics aside. But this was not the reality of the world that existed when the code was licensed and released. That is why it is easy to empathize with code authors who did not expect their code to be used in this manner.
Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.
Great! So I assume it is now Completely Fine to rip Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / whatever and share it with everyone I know?
Copyright isn't "done", copyright has just been restricted to the rich and powerful. AI has essentially made it legal to steal from anyone who isn't rich enough to sue you - which in the case of the main AI companies means everyone except a handful of giants.
The thing is, copyright is not done. The legal framework still exists and is enforced so I am not sure how to read your reply as anything other than a strongly worded opinion. Just ask Disney.
I use AI every day in my dev workflows, yet I am still easily able to empathize with those who did not intend for their code to be laundered through AI to remove their attribution (or whatever other caveats applied in their licensing.)
The thing is, nobody in China gives a rat's patoot about copyright. If we do, they win.
A compromise might have been possible, based on treaties engineered by the people who brought us the TPP, but nobody in the current US government is capable of negotiating anything like that or inclined to try. And it wouldn't exactly leave the rest of us better off if they did.
As a result, copyright is a zero-sum game from a US perspective, which matters because that's where the majority of leading research happens on the majority of available compute. Every inch of ground gained by Big IP comes at America's expense.
So they must lose, decisively and soon. Yes, the GPL will be lost as collateral damage. I'm OK with that. You will be, too.
I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been able to just force through their desired outcome (to the detriment of society), but I don't think they are going to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone once they have the leverage.
Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their models.
For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.
At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity
That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.
Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
Seems pretty understandable to me. In the former, you work on something hoping that real people will find it useful. In the latter, you're explicitly doing work for a paycheck.
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.
Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's milages vary.
My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd like to use my work to deny end users the rights to control their computing.
That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose.
LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything?
And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.
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?
>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.
This is an edge case in OSS. Even among software packages used by Netflix and Amazon, few of them were attributable to a single maintainer or small group of individuals. They've long since become community developed projects.
Their open source software depended on or derived from your package. They included your copyright notice with software they distributed. Someone contributed code. Someone reported a bug. Someone requested a feature. Someone mentioned it at a conference. I could continue.
it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that.
(edit: the comment i replied to was edited to be more a statement about themselves rather than a question about other developers, so my comment probably makes less sense now)
I worked on several open source projects both voluntarily or for work. The recognition doesn't really need to be financial. If people out there are using what you are building, contributing back, appreciating it -- it gives you motivation to continue working. Its human nature. One of the reason why there are so many abandoned projects out there.
I don't dispute your own personal motives, but if it's never been a goal for most people, then CC0 would be more popular than the BSD or MIT license - it's simpler and much more legally straightforward to apply.
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.
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.
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!
Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
> but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
Not exactly. You can modify Linux and run it yourself all you want without obligation to share your changes. The sharing requirements are more limited and involve distribution.
Correct! This is the exact reason anyone who wants to use the os itself as a moat uses FreeBSD as a base instead, and add proprietary modifications to it. FreeBSD also being a open source gift, that does not have those requirements that Linux does.
Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
I do know what it is, I've even read the licence in full!
What specific paragraph in the GPL prohibits training of AI on it? I guess it might be a matter of interpretation, but by my reading, it is allowed.
Ps. In the future, try to refrain from using demeaning rethorical questions like the one this comment starts with, it only serves to foster toxicity. Please and thank you
Ds.
IP as a concept has always been equal parts dystopian and farcical, and efforts to enforce it have become increasingly strained over time. Property requires scarcity. Ideas aren’t scarce. My consumption of an idea is affected by your consumption of an idea.
AI has simply increased the intensity of this friction between IP and reality to a degree that it can’t be ignored or patched over any longer.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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!
> 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.
Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"?
Not a community-developed project with a lot of contributors, but a software that would realistically qualify as being mostly attributable to one person?
Redis is an easy example, but the author of that doesn't need to say "Netflix uses my X" because the software is popular by itself. AI being trained on Redis code hasn't done anything to diminish that, as far as I can tell.
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.
> 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.
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?
Yes, but likely in the exact inverse than what is implied here. Carmack has generational wealth, he is likely fine financially regardless of how AI pans out. The many individuals who feel they should be financially compensated for code they open sourced are likely far more invested financially in that particular outcome.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.
Wasn't me, but probably because this was unnecessary and rude. An example, or a link, when a claim is made, is always nice, turns a hollow claim into something informative. Better signal to noise is nice.
I find it pretty rude to ask a question on a fairly well-documented historical topic that you could also very easily have found out with a simple Google search. Back in the day, we used to reply to people, “Let me Google that for you,” when someone asked such a low-effort question.
Your original reply strongly indicated that you were skeptical and questioning the user’s claim. There is a very large body of historical research documenting all of these things.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It's just so depressing. You see Microsoft and Google's CEOs being completely reckless with investment & the economy. And it's just ... HAVE THEY NOT LOOKED INTO A MIRROR? DO THEY NOT REALIZE THEY ARE THE FALL GUYS?!
Nevermind how the vast majority of major CEOs can't even run a business anymore. An old boys club of morons running the entire economy.
> And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.
It's just more of the same old "Software dev doesn't need unions". The top 1% always think they're pointless because they made it without unions.
> Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.
Amusingly, I hold the opposite sentiment.
Labor isn't going anywhere. These executives and managers can barely tie their own shoelaces. Big Tech and the current startup scene are laughably dysfunctional.
The moment the economic recession really starts to set in, everyone's gonna try to cut down their SaaS spending. Then, the days of being able to shit out some (AI or not) slop and charge double price will be well and truly over.
Once software firms have to compete on quality again, labor is going to be more important than ever.
AI may not even be meaningfully involved in software dev. To break even at the API prices would require charging on the order of 1-2 thousand dollars, per month, per seat. Factoring in long term training costs will will make that several times worse.
... Before we consider that we're probably heading into an oil crisis making energy and computer hardware much more expensive.
I doubt employers are going to pay the $10,000/month/seat required to make AI profitable for everyone in the supply chain. Certainly not during the worst recession this side of WWII.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
I think if you've been set for life since the late 90s/early 2000s and didn't really have to work another day in your life if you didn't want to, it's a lot easier to be cavalier about giving away some of your output from way back when.
He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.
But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
Attack the argument not the man. Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.
> people who open source their code do not care about profit
Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.
I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.
Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
I think you are splitting hairs. Yes those models “exist”, if by exist you mean they have dual-licensing setups with different tiers (community, professional, etc).
The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
I'm not splitting hairs, it's a crucial aspect and a common misconception that it would be quite helpful to get rid of (hence my reaction). And no, it's not necessarily dual licensing (why not though) or different tiers, or fauxpensource or whatever, there are many projects which are completely open source. See for instance Nextcloud, XWiki, PostgreSQL, Linux...
Again, as I said, I was only reacting to that specific part of your comment, because it is obviously wrong.
(and thus the rest can't follow since you use it to draw a conclusion -- which doesn't mean you can't fix this, I don't know, actually I didn't get your point and I don't see how it counters what you replied to -- but I'm not really concerned about this part)
Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom decades ago may have different priorities than present and future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
>Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom decades ago may have different priorities than present and future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the other hand...
It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a single paid open source tool off the top of my head but could name dozens that you can just use for free.
> Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.
What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.
The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
But the man's argument is that since he sees something a given way then it's the truth. What people are doing in return is showing that he can only do so because of who he is.
No please, for the love of god, he's been an asshole for decades. He has set back gaming everywhere he's been in charge. The guy makes 1 kind of experience. He's the opposite of a good leader.
Privilege does matter, obviously, because your perspective and biases influence your opinion. When someone says something, we can't just analyze what they are saying, but why they are saying it. What is their motivation? What are their incentives? If they're right, who wins? Who loses? How much do they lose?
This is why politicians are able to lie through their teeth. There's enough people out there who refuse to, or can't, deeply analyze people's words. "Well, the government hasn't yet announced their plans to abuse X Y and Z, so obviously it's not gonna happen!"
Such an argument seems painfully poor, but, believe it or not, it's, like, the primary argument when these things come up.
At the end of the day, you and me have a lot to lose from AI. Carmack has less, perhaps he even stands to gain. Hm, that colors things, no?
GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to have freedom with their hardware.
If you want to make money, use a proper license.
To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither. Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing. I don't even think it's his fault per se. I'm fairly sure he would actually agree with the assessment. His raw intelligence is sky-high.
And that is a big reason why he's making this post, is what I'm saying. It doesn't excuse him, but it's not surprising in the least.
> Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing.
Can you give some examples, outside of this post? I only know about Carmack by the things he'd worked on, but not anything personal like this. This would help me get a more complete picture of him.
I'd read Masters of Doom (the psych eval/juvie story and the cat story stand out). You might think "oh he was so young back then", and it's true, but keep in mind that book details id Software up to and including Doom 3 development, and he was in his early 30s there. I'm sure you can find excerpts if you don't want to read the whole thing. It's an interesting book though; great glimpse into trenches of 90s game development.
I've (unoriginally) always been impressed by his technical ability and work ethic, and while I used to religiously read his .plan updates (you might not know what that is, because I'm an old, OK? It's the precursor to blogs) and also follow the old Armadillo Aerospace development blogs, and watch the very long QuakeCon talks, I haven't kept up much as I got older, just come across things here and there (like this Twitter post), and I have not picked up a big change in demeanor or humility in regards to labor, political and societal issues from back then, and those are things he's written about. It's very much objectivism, the criticism of which is beyond this topic, but suffice it to say it's not a philosophy conducive to empathy. I seem to recall he made a bunch of libertarian rants on Facebook when he worked there too, but I'm not going to give Zuck the traffic. I'm sure you can find some.
If people need money they should seriously considering charging money for the software they make instead of giving it away for free and hoping it somehow becomes profitable.
Oldheads are not the exclusive group of people who have ever meant actual altruism by their open-source licenses. You can't just pick an attribute to dismiss an opinion based on. Creative control over the lineage of a line of code is just not something the open source world is very concerned with in aggregate.
Anti-AI sentiment comes primarily from slop PRs (and slop projects) along with the water use hoax; copyright concerns originate almost entirely from the art sphere, crossing over into the open source sphere by osmosis and only representing a small minority of opinion-havers therein.
I mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest character traits.
Except him being wealthy could just as well be used to support the argument for using GPL instead of gifting. "He does not have to make real money off of it, he is privileged".
Doesn’t diminish the fact that he does so from a platform of privilege that his early success provided him. He can be both. It’s ok.
He’s right about both points. It was a gift. A tremendous gift. He’s right about open source. Too many people see it as a reputation builder rather than a utility like it was intended to be.
> 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.
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?
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.
> - 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
>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!?
>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?)
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".
“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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The open source vs closed AI debate often misses what practitioners actually care about: can I use it, can I inspect it when things go wrong, and can I run it on my own infrastructure if I need to.
People who call themselves anti-AI activists are largely reacting to the opacity of large models and legitimate concerns about concentration of power. That is a reasonable thing to worry about. The answer to that is not to stop building AI. It is to build it more openly.
Carmack has been consistent on this. He builds things. He wants the tools to be available. Hard to argue with that position from a craft perspective.
I feel similarly to Carmack, and have felt this way since the late 1990s when I was in college.
Open sourcing code is a form of power, power to influence, inspire, and propagate one's worldview on whomever reads that code. Thank you OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, thank you for amplifying the voices of all us open source contributors!
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Code can still be published and merge requests can still be handled even if the code isn't under an open source license. As a prime example check out Unreal Engine. One of the most popular game engines that powers many AAA games and cinema today. They are not open source, but they actively take outside contributions on GitHub. Though unlike what the parent comment is saying Epic can afford to pay people to work on the project instead of having all of the work done for free.
They let people contribute by making the source open, which also lets the AI companies use it as training data. The question was how would you take contributions without letting the training happen.
Epic makes you agree to a legal agreement before getting access to the source so you could attempt to restrict the source via contract law. The issue is if it does escape to the public, contract law can't save you and copyright law allows for training on it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> “Open source” can mean
Keyword being "can"
The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
You and Bigstrat2003 are arguing a technicality, and you're technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point. Skrebbel and Layer8 are focused on the cultural associations of "open source" development, and this mismatch is causing everyone to talk past each other.
The original post in this thread was:
> 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.
Skrebbel probably shouldn't have said that Carmack "doesn't really do OSS", but what they clearly meant was, Carmack doesn't participate in the sort of community development as the Linux kernel or Apache or whatever.
More succinctly, Carmack only contributes his code to OSS, but not his time, and shouldn't impose his values on the wider community that contribute both.
> technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point
Talking past people to argue on semantics and pedantry is a HN pastime. It may even be it's primary function.
its*
Code gifted absolutely includes the time taken to write it.
case in point
This. ^^^
>“Primary” function
If that was the intent don’t you think it would be stated somewhere, or in the faq?
>“Talking” past
It’s only text, there’s no talking past. You can’t talk past someone when the conversation isn’t spoken. At best, you might ignore what they write and go on and on and on at some length on your own point instead, ever meandering further from the words you didn’t read, widening the scope of the original point to include the closest topic that isn’t completely orthogonal to the one at hand, like the current tendency to look for the newest pattern of LLM output in everyone’s’ comments in an attempt to root out all potential AI generated responses. And eventually exhaust all of their rhetoric and perhaps, just maybe, in the very end, get to the
I lol'd.
I’m saying that “open source” can mean both things. The parent was arguing that it only means the licensing. I’m not arguing that it always means the development model.
> The Wikipedia page you linked to refers to "Open-source software development (OSSD)" which implies that it's a different concept than "open source" by itself
By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
> By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
It does
It looks like we’re in agreement then.
Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open Source'?
The “cathedral” model refers to closed-source development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...
"The cathedral" was originally GNU and GCC. (raymond's site is super slow.)
Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?
See https://opensource.org/about/history-of-the-open-source-init... under ‘Coining “Open Source”’:
The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”
From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.
And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.
I think you have confused RMS (Richard Stallman) and ESR (Eric S. Raymond). It was ESR that coined and popularized the cathedral and bazaar development analogy and terminology. It was also ESR who was at the conference your comment is discussing. RMS is “free software”, copyleft, and GNU. ESR is “open source” and the author of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
Of course, I could have misunderstood your comment, if so, mea culpa and feel free to ignore.
The 'bazaar' system is a wonderful methodology, but there is a place for the 'cathedral', and it is no less open source.
I was arguing against this statement: "Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community." It is simply false that it has never meant that.
While you can have a cathedral-like development and publish it under an open-source license, that's not what RMS was talking about in his essay.
I'm also not arguing about what is good or bad, but about what was meant by the term "open source" when it was introduced, and how it is still understood by many people since then.
SQLite being a prime example of cathedral-style development that few would argue isn’t open source.
Ok, I'll bite.
SQLite is not Open Source, it is Public Domain. Which, I'd argue alas, is "better" than Open Source.
It is fair to say that the distinction to most people is inconsequential. Nevertheless they are different legal paradigms.
Free Software, and to a lesser extent, Open Source, impose restrictions which are not present in Pubic Domain software.
> In closed-source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing further development plans. This leads to part of the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development.
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
The "development model" of open source is that one person code dumps, another takes, changes it then dumps it, another picks up the copy with the changes, changes it again, and so on. Sometimes it finds it's way back.
A bazaar is a chaotic market with a million vendors, not anything remotely cooperative. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is meant to convey the idea that OSS code develops without central organization, through endless forking and cloning.
The bazaar model definitely isn't the cooperation and vibes model that the HN crowd thinks it is...
Have you read the essay? http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
In it, the bazaar is a metaphor for how Linux was being developed.
Yes. Here's a relevant excerpt:
> No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here — rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, which would take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.
I always think about this section when I consider making my personal programming language public. I think if language development was, in 2026, happing the way ESR describes Linux here I might be more persuaded to release. But as it stands now, almost all modern language development is done in the rigid, semi-planned, hierarchical, and “cathedral”-esque development style.
The expectations for language developers is currently huge burden and a massive undertaking, even for small languages that look to publicize at nearly any level. The amount of users that seem to insist on participation in the language’s progress, semantics, or implementation is the vast majority of any online/vocal user base and those same voices seem to view languages with different development models as inherently toys.
I’m sure this is where I am expected to reference Rich Hickey’s comments/post about Clojure development, but I don’t have the link on mobile. But the discussions are legion and legendary at this point.
"Open source" means the source code is open to the public for reading and copying. Licenses have complicated the idealistic definition to restrict copying, but that is only within the context of taking credit (ie implicit relicensure). The only winning move is not to play the game at all.
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
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".
It’s not open source in the way anyone thinks about the term. He isn’t maintaining free software in the open
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.
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.
I think your idealized list of attributes of “open source” is admirable. However, the apprenticeship, comradery, and support are a specific and often sought out feature of some development ‘communities’ for specific software. I’d also say that the ‘loss’ when fixes, updates, optimizations of open source software is not up-streamed is real, but this has very little to do with adopting or promoting the externalities (no matter how laudable) you want to see in certain software’s development.
I personally don’t care about the community, its composition, or its internal structure for a lot of software I use. Even when I’m compiling from source and customizing smaller applications for personal efficiency, I’m not usually interested in being a part of some distributed community centered on that software. Some times I am engaged in the community and appreciate it and the work required to maintain that community. But in either case, the software is “open source”.
> 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.
No there is not. That’s what you impose on it. My code is open, free, and unencumbered. If I don’t want you using it you don’t see it at all. The licenses are there to make people happy.
That's all great, but to me the primary point is rms' original grievance with that printer driver. If the source is open, anyone can improve it. Multiple anyones can improve it! They can even collaborate on message boards and make a nice community, but this is certainly not a requirement.
> 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.
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.
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.
Of course now everything is like that. Partially that's because of computers and software, but there's lots of other technologies that have contributed too.
There's an old tweet I can't find that was something like "We turned away from God when we invented the integrated circuit" that's always really spoken to the luddite in me.
Indeed. Maybe it's just a function of passed time, but it feels like people surrounded by hustlers - including themselves - look at this and think "what's the hustle behind this?" because they can't imagine anyone doing this for any other reason. I get it, but it's quite sad.
It's a function of the economy going in the shitter, with food and housing prices tripling or quadrupling while wages go up 5 or 10%. People want to be paid for their work because they can't afford to pay rent giving gifts away, and hustling is the way to survive because there aren't enough jobs or even if they have a job it's not enough.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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".
It’s a pretty nasty form of No True Scotsman.
“I do open source. Oh, that guy? He doesn’t do real open source.”
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?
"in accordance with its license" is the key part that's missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.
It seems to be a common view on HN that licenses and conditional access to websites should be ignored (i.e. WRT ad-blockers), but also that licenses on Open-Source Software repositories should be respected (i.e. WRT LLM training). I believe that holding these contradictory views is common, but the conflict would need to be resolved to come to a conclusion on how to proceed with LLM training.
There is no contradiction. Open source software licenses allow use without conditions. Ad blocker use does not distribute the modified web pages.
I have not seen any evidence that LLMs ‘distribute’ modified software, though they do seem capable of replicating it.
I fail to see how mass scale reproduction of copyrighted code isn't a form of distribution.
Replication is not the same as reproduction; I can replicate an API without violating someone's license or copyright (which I would by reproducing their work).
Reproduce is a definition of replicate. And LLMs reproduced code.
The view LLMs should respect open source software licenses is not for replication alone. Models and generated code are derived from training data.
Developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
> Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.
> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
How?
> Open source software licenses allow use without conditions.
Don't a number of open source licenses notably involve restrictions?
You seem to be conflating copyright with access rights. Two very different things. Regardless of your feelings on either, there is no contradiction in holding different views on them.
Copyright is all about gating access, as media rights holders for sports well know.
Well no, it’s about legally gating the ability to copy so the original author doesn’t have to compete in the same market to sell his own book with every other bloke with a printing press and a copy of the book. Everything else is an addendum.
No, it's to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
The current implementation has recently become obsolete.
Don’t confuse the social justification with the actual purpose of copyright law just because it’s written into the US Constitution that way. America didn’t invent copyright law.
That may be the reason copyright came to be, but it's much more expansive now.
That is still the meat and potatoes of copyright law.
> The licenses are completely ignored.
Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.
In reproducing code that requires the license be reproduced alongside it.
Are you doing a full search of every GPL licensed repository every time you use an LLM to ensure that it isn't giving you GPL licensed code? That doesn't seem reasonable
This is what GitHub promised years ago. Showing repositories where similar code is present so you can guess the license and use appropriate outputs.
I’m not sure whether this is implemented or not since I don’t use generative AI for coding.
Why not? Up until a year or two ago LLM pair programmers weren't even a thing.
The user would know how?
That's because licenses are an abstract complexity tacked on to a simple material reality in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Just like many cultural rules, they keep growing in complexity until they reach a phase change where they become ignored because they have become too complicated.
OSS licenses haven't grown in complexity all that much in the past forty or so years. They're being ignored more now because it's become easier to ignore them, not because it's become harder to abide by them.
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://kiankyars.github.io/machine_learning/2026/02/12/sqli...
https://blog.katanaquant.com/p/your-llm-doesnt-write-correct...
It can generate plausible code because the examples are already in the training set, the documentation, the how-to-write-a-database, other databases, etc.
But unless you could write SQLite yourself it will be hard to specify a good one and to get the generator to produce a correct implementation.
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.
Carmack was a shareware/proprietary software guy way before he was a open source person if ever.
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.
Megatexture was also subpar and overcomplicated
> 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
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”.
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/
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.
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.)
That framing makes more sense to me.
I agree there's a difference between publishing code under an OSS license and actively maintaining a project while fielding the flood of low-quality AI issues and PRs. Someone in the latter category is obviously closer to that pain.
I still wouldn't go so far as to dismiss Carmack's view on that basis alone, though. It just means his experience is less representative of maintainers dealing with that specific problem every day.
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.
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.
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 [...]"
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...
Quake III Arena is OSS
He doesn’t need to keep maintaining it
What do the people who are deep into open source mean by the term then, in your understanding?
>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.
>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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
... There's a highlighting feature?
I just have a Chrome extension. It's not a HN-native feature. Link in profile if you're curious.
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.
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.
Yeah, and you made a fix for both yourself, and presumably other people as well. Additionally, some people submit fixes for recognition, too.
It's not free. The cost is the information about where you are and what you're looking for basically at all time.
> 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.
> 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.
> because computers and the internet became available
Because of Bell Labs (inventors of the transistor & Unix & UUCP & so much more) which was so well-funded by the post-WW2 US economic situation.
The Internet? DARPA!
DARPA? Post-WW2 US M.I.C.-driven economy.
The list goes on and on and on. F/OSS owes so much to The Marshall Plan.
Is this a sweeping, reductionist PeterZeihan-esque argument? Sure, but I think it's valid.
> This seems like rewriting history. Tech salaries today are higher than they were back then.
So? Does the future look bright to you? Most of the SWEs I know wouldn't say so.
How bright you think the future will be has a direct impact on your long-term planning and, for many, results in prioritizing hedonistic activities in the short term, not F/OSS.
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.
> 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.
The amount of value Google Maps has given me is far beyond what I'd be willing to pay in actual dollars.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
Who is stopping you from licensing your code that way then?
It's not open source, because the definition of open source doesn't allow you to place any restrictions on who can use it or for what purpose. It's why licenses like "Don't use it for evil" or "Everyone except Anish Kapoor" aren't acceptable for a lot of Linux distros.
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
some people are working on that, among others there is bruce perens: https://web.archive.org/web/20251206160538/https://perens.co... (sadly his site seems broken, the static files still work however: https://perens.com/static/DEVELOPMENT_LICENSE.txt )
FUTO is also exploring this space: https://sourcefirst.com/
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.
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.
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.
Yes, this 100x.
The MIT license didn’t require a lot of thought.
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.
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.
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".
To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom".
The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom", not related to whether you profit from it or not.
> To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom
To clarify further: "freedom" for the end user, and not the developer leveraging GPL code in their software product.
MIT license requires credit.
So does the BSD license. Copyright must be reproduced
Most licenses do.
Ahhhh yes that's one that lawyers might have fun with. MIT says:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
The point was to separate MIT and GPL was wrong.
> My personal thought on that: it's going to be almost guaranteed that, if an LLM is producing stuff it clearly derived from a certain piece of code XYZ, it will also be capable of producing the correct answer to the question "what's the license for XYZ?" And lawyers will successfully argue that this counts as "included".
The MIT license terms are not say the name the license if asked. They are The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
And this would be improbable for many reasons I think.
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.
If you want to attach strings which involve restricting access, open source is not the way to go.
You're right - the reality of the world today is that open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all questions of legality/ethics aside. But this was not the reality of the world that existed when the code was licensed and released. That is why it is easy to empathize with code authors who did not expect their code to be used in this manner.
Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.
By far the most popular strings involve restricting restricting access. That is, viral licenses which require derived works to also be open source.
No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all stronger now. Don't fight AI, fight for open models.
Great! So I assume it is now Completely Fine to rip Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / whatever and share it with everyone I know?
Copyright isn't "done", copyright has just been restricted to the rich and powerful. AI has essentially made it legal to steal from anyone who isn't rich enough to sue you - which in the case of the main AI companies means everyone except a handful of giants.
TIL I'm "rich and powerful." It doesn't feel any different, I've got to say.
The thing is, copyright is not done. The legal framework still exists and is enforced so I am not sure how to read your reply as anything other than a strongly worded opinion. Just ask Disney.
I use AI every day in my dev workflows, yet I am still easily able to empathize with those who did not intend for their code to be laundered through AI to remove their attribution (or whatever other caveats applied in their licensing.)
> Just ask Disney.
Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI
If they saw the wind they wouldn't have chosen OpenAI
The thing is, nobody in China gives a rat's patoot about copyright. If we do, they win.
A compromise might have been possible, based on treaties engineered by the people who brought us the TPP, but nobody in the current US government is capable of negotiating anything like that or inclined to try. And it wouldn't exactly leave the rest of us better off if they did.
As a result, copyright is a zero-sum game from a US perspective, which matters because that's where the majority of leading research happens on the majority of available compute. Every inch of ground gained by Big IP comes at America's expense.
So they must lose, decisively and soon. Yes, the GPL will be lost as collateral damage. I'm OK with that. You will be, too.
I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been able to just force through their desired outcome (to the detriment of society), but I don't think they are going to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone once they have the leverage.
Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
there are no open models. none. zero.
there are binary files that some companies are allowing you to download, for now. it was called shareware in the old days.
one day the tap will close and we'll see then what open models really means
From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their models.
Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models .
For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.
At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
> and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful
At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late.
> Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests
The companies training big models are actively respecting copyright from anyone big enough to actually fight back, and soaking everyone else.
They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.
They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.
China: lol
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.
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.
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity
That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.
Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
Seems pretty understandable to me. In the former, you work on something hoping that real people will find it useful. In the latter, you're explicitly doing work for a paycheck.
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.
Most open source licenses have strings attached, the terms of the licence say what those “strings” are. Like requiring attribution.
> 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
Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's milages vary.
My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd like to use my work to deny end users the rights to control their computing.
That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose.
LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
So, definitely not just for corporations to make insanely massive profits off?
How much do you think people would pay for this patch?
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320
If you had to pay for it seperately, would you include it in anything?
And yet, including it everywhere helps people with clients that can't be upgraded. Maybe less now, rsa_dhe is not deployed so much and hopefully windows 8 is also not deployed so much.
> 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?
>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.
>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.
This is an edge case in OSS. Even among software packages used by Netflix and Amazon, few of them were attributable to a single maintainer or small group of individuals. They've long since become community developed projects.
Netflix and Amazon use many packages of all sizes. And contributions to projects with many contributors helped people get jobs.
How would you even know that Netflix or Amazon uses your package?
Their open source software depended on or derived from your package. They included your copyright notice with software they distributed. Someone contributed code. Someone reported a bug. Someone requested a feature. Someone mentioned it at a conference. I could continue.
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.
> There is no recognition
I've never written or contributed to open source code with this being the goal. I never even considered this is why people do it.
it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that.
(edit: the comment i replied to was edited to be more a statement about themselves rather than a question about other developers, so my comment probably makes less sense now)
I worked on several open source projects both voluntarily or for work. The recognition doesn't really need to be financial. If people out there are using what you are building, contributing back, appreciating it -- it gives you motivation to continue working. Its human nature. One of the reason why there are so many abandoned projects out there.
I don't dispute your own personal motives, but if it's never been a goal for most people, then CC0 would be more popular than the BSD or MIT license - it's simpler and much more legally straightforward to apply.
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.
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.
Plus unless I'm wrong he's talking about products that were released several years ago and milked for money already.
You were not wrong.
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!
Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
> but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
Not exactly. You can modify Linux and run it yourself all you want without obligation to share your changes. The sharing requirements are more limited and involve distribution.
Correct! This is the exact reason anyone who wants to use the os itself as a moat uses FreeBSD as a base instead, and add proprietary modifications to it. FreeBSD also being a open source gift, that does not have those requirements that Linux does.
Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
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.
I do know what it is, I've even read the licence in full!
What specific paragraph in the GPL prohibits training of AI on it? I guess it might be a matter of interpretation, but by my reading, it is allowed.
Ps. In the future, try to refrain from using demeaning rethorical questions like the one this comment starts with, it only serves to foster toxicity. Please and thank you Ds.
IP as a concept has always been equal parts dystopian and farcical, and efforts to enforce it have become increasingly strained over time. Property requires scarcity. Ideas aren’t scarce. My consumption of an idea is affected by your consumption of an idea.
AI has simply increased the intensity of this friction between IP and reality to a degree that it can’t be ignored or patched over any longer.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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!
It's also odd to release software under a license allowing commercial use if the authors didn't want that.
> 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.
>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.
Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"?
Not a community-developed project with a lot of contributors, but a software that would realistically qualify as being mostly attributable to one person?
Redis is an easy example, but the author of that doesn't need to say "Netflix uses my X" because the software is popular by itself. AI being trained on Redis code hasn't done anything to diminish that, as far as I can tell.
>Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using [...]
FAANG specifically? no, i am not familiar with their entire tech stacks.
but i have leaned on my single-developer projects (being used in other, not owned by me, software) to help land consulting gigs.
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.
> 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.
Its a lot less odd when you remember that he's running an AI company himself.
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?
Because whether there is a conflict of interest or not, the argument can and should be examined on its own merits.
Ah.. So the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.
Yes, but likely in the exact inverse than what is implied here. Carmack has generational wealth, he is likely fine financially regardless of how AI pans out. The many individuals who feel they should be financially compensated for code they open sourced are likely far more invested financially in that particular outcome.
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.
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.
if no code is contributed back then why is there an ongoing problem with massive amounts of PRs?
I didn't say slop. I said code.
The whole point of contributing to open source is to make decisions and the code is the medium.
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.
I haven't given a cent to openai or anthropic but they have given me many thousands of tokens for free.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is finally going to bite us in the ass.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
lol this got downvoted - sorry that I studied history!
> You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.
Wasn't me, but probably because this was unnecessary and rude. An example, or a link, when a claim is made, is always nice, turns a hollow claim into something informative. Better signal to noise is nice.
That’s funny.
I find it pretty rude to ask a question on a fairly well-documented historical topic that you could also very easily have found out with a simple Google search. Back in the day, we used to reply to people, “Let me Google that for you,” when someone asked such a low-effort question.
Your original reply strongly indicated that you were skeptical and questioning the user’s claim. There is a very large body of historical research documenting all of these things.
nomel couldn't have downvoted you (HN constraint), stop the attack. LMGTFY has a terrible rep on HN (I'd link a search, but you can easily find).
I think my definition and your definition of what constitutes an attack are fairly different. I’m offering feedback, not an attack.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It's just so depressing. You see Microsoft and Google's CEOs being completely reckless with investment & the economy. And it's just ... HAVE THEY NOT LOOKED INTO A MIRROR? DO THEY NOT REALIZE THEY ARE THE FALL GUYS?!
Nevermind how the vast majority of major CEOs can't even run a business anymore. An old boys club of morons running the entire economy.
> And they could ensure through that advocacy for labor that we see the happiest ending with respect to rolling out LLMs.
It's just more of the same old "Software dev doesn't need unions". The top 1% always think they're pointless because they made it without unions.
> Unfortunately I don't really believe labor has much teeth anymore, and tech will wake up too late to do anything about it.
Amusingly, I hold the opposite sentiment.
Labor isn't going anywhere. These executives and managers can barely tie their own shoelaces. Big Tech and the current startup scene are laughably dysfunctional.
The moment the economic recession really starts to set in, everyone's gonna try to cut down their SaaS spending. Then, the days of being able to shit out some (AI or not) slop and charge double price will be well and truly over.
Once software firms have to compete on quality again, labor is going to be more important than ever.
AI may not even be meaningfully involved in software dev. To break even at the API prices would require charging on the order of 1-2 thousand dollars, per month, per seat. Factoring in long term training costs will will make that several times worse.
... Before we consider that we're probably heading into an oil crisis making energy and computer hardware much more expensive.
I doubt employers are going to pay the $10,000/month/seat required to make AI profitable for everyone in the supply chain. Certainly not during the worst recession this side of WWII.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Carmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though
Practically every major company in the LLM space claims to have a core mission of pursuing AGI, just like Keen.
I think it’s more than that. He is always pro performance, pro technology, and maybe libertarian, too.
There's no maybe about it, he has openly identified as such.
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.
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.
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).
> and this is the problem
Why? The software is still there and you can still go choose to use it.
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.
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.
> 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.
That highlights the importance of open models keeping up with the state of the art.
I think if you've been set for life since the late 90s/early 2000s and didn't really have to work another day in your life if you didn't want to, it's a lot easier to be cavalier about giving away some of your output from way back when.
He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.
But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
Attack the argument not the man. Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.
> people who open source their code do not care about profit
Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.
I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.
Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
> presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit
That's not true. There are business models around open source, and many companies making money from open source work.
(I'm only reacting to this specific part of your comment)
I think you are splitting hairs. Yes those models “exist”, if by exist you mean they have dual-licensing setups with different tiers (community, professional, etc).
The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
I'm not splitting hairs, it's a crucial aspect and a common misconception that it would be quite helpful to get rid of (hence my reaction). And no, it's not necessarily dual licensing (why not though) or different tiers, or fauxpensource or whatever, there are many projects which are completely open source. See for instance Nextcloud, XWiki, PostgreSQL, Linux...
Again, as I said, I was only reacting to that specific part of your comment, because it is obviously wrong.
(and thus the rest can't follow since you use it to draw a conclusion -- which doesn't mean you can't fix this, I don't know, actually I didn't get your point and I don't see how it counters what you replied to -- but I'm not really concerned about this part)
You're forgetting about Red Hat & friends, where the software is 100% open source and the for-profit product is actually the support contract.
Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom decades ago may have different priorities than present and future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
>Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom decades ago may have different priorities than present and future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the other hand...
Says who?
GPL is transactional. The author's profit is in the up streaming of enhancements.
Those who release under GPL absolutely do care about profit, it's just that the profit is measured in contributions.
Open Sourcing software has _nothing_ to do with 'gratis'. Can't believe this still needs repeating in 2026.
It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a single paid open source tool off the top of my head but could name dozens that you can just use for free.
> Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.
What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.
The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
> Attack the argument not the man.
But the man's argument is that since he sees something a given way then it's the truth. What people are doing in return is showing that he can only do so because of who he is.
> open source their code do not care about profit.
Ah, how naive. You're not squinting hard enough.
No please, for the love of god, he's been an asshole for decades. He has set back gaming everywhere he's been in charge. The guy makes 1 kind of experience. He's the opposite of a good leader.
Elaborate on your points
How has he set back gaming?
1 kind of experience?
The argument ignores the mans privilege
Go outside and touch grass my man.
Privilege does matter, obviously, because your perspective and biases influence your opinion. When someone says something, we can't just analyze what they are saying, but why they are saying it. What is their motivation? What are their incentives? If they're right, who wins? Who loses? How much do they lose?
This is why politicians are able to lie through their teeth. There's enough people out there who refuse to, or can't, deeply analyze people's words. "Well, the government hasn't yet announced their plans to abuse X Y and Z, so obviously it's not gonna happen!"
Such an argument seems painfully poor, but, believe it or not, it's, like, the primary argument when these things come up.
At the end of the day, you and me have a lot to lose from AI. Carmack has less, perhaps he even stands to gain. Hm, that colors things, no?
GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to have freedom with their hardware.
If you want to make money, use a proper license.
To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither. Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
arguments are stronger without insults
Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing. I don't even think it's his fault per se. I'm fairly sure he would actually agree with the assessment. His raw intelligence is sky-high.
And that is a big reason why he's making this post, is what I'm saying. It doesn't excuse him, but it's not surprising in the least.
> Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing.
Can you give some examples, outside of this post? I only know about Carmack by the things he'd worked on, but not anything personal like this. This would help me get a more complete picture of him.
I'd read Masters of Doom (the psych eval/juvie story and the cat story stand out). You might think "oh he was so young back then", and it's true, but keep in mind that book details id Software up to and including Doom 3 development, and he was in his early 30s there. I'm sure you can find excerpts if you don't want to read the whole thing. It's an interesting book though; great glimpse into trenches of 90s game development.
I've (unoriginally) always been impressed by his technical ability and work ethic, and while I used to religiously read his .plan updates (you might not know what that is, because I'm an old, OK? It's the precursor to blogs) and also follow the old Armadillo Aerospace development blogs, and watch the very long QuakeCon talks, I haven't kept up much as I got older, just come across things here and there (like this Twitter post), and I have not picked up a big change in demeanor or humility in regards to labor, political and societal issues from back then, and those are things he's written about. It's very much objectivism, the criticism of which is beyond this topic, but suffice it to say it's not a philosophy conducive to empathy. I seem to recall he made a bunch of libertarian rants on Facebook when he worked there too, but I'm not going to give Zuck the traffic. I'm sure you can find some.
true/false and insult/not insult are two different axes.
If people need money they should seriously considering charging money for the software they make instead of giving it away for free and hoping it somehow becomes profitable.
Oldheads are not the exclusive group of people who have ever meant actual altruism by their open-source licenses. You can't just pick an attribute to dismiss an opinion based on. Creative control over the lineage of a line of code is just not something the open source world is very concerned with in aggregate.
Anti-AI sentiment comes primarily from slop PRs (and slop projects) along with the water use hoax; copyright concerns originate almost entirely from the art sphere, crossing over into the open source sphere by osmosis and only representing a small minority of opinion-havers therein.
> But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.
I mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest character traits.
Except him being wealthy could just as well be used to support the argument for using GPL instead of gifting. "He does not have to make real money off of it, he is privileged".
Doesn’t diminish the fact that he does so from a platform of privilege that his early success provided him. He can be both. It’s ok.
He’s right about both points. It was a gift. A tremendous gift. He’s right about open source. Too many people see it as a reputation builder rather than a utility like it was intended to be.
I find it pretty simple:
- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence
- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
> 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.
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?
That would imply that there will never be an adequate open weights coding model. That might be true, but seems unlikely.
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.
> - 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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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?
I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah
>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!?
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.
>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?)
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".
“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.
> 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.
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.
Even if not an explicit gift, isn't all OSS implicitly a gift? I'm having trouble understanding the practical difference.
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.
The open source vs closed AI debate often misses what practitioners actually care about: can I use it, can I inspect it when things go wrong, and can I run it on my own infrastructure if I need to.
People who call themselves anti-AI activists are largely reacting to the opacity of large models and legitimate concerns about concentration of power. That is a reasonable thing to worry about. The answer to that is not to stop building AI. It is to build it more openly.
Carmack has been consistent on this. He builds things. He wants the tools to be available. Hard to argue with that position from a craft perspective.
I feel similarly to Carmack, and have felt this way since the late 1990s when I was in college.
Open sourcing code is a form of power, power to influence, inspire, and propagate one's worldview on whomever reads that code. Thank you OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, thank you for amplifying the voices of all us open source contributors!
> 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?
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.
John Carmack already had his bag and reputation when he did the code dumps.
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.
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.
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.
IMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft license.
Im convinced a lot of open source proponents dont really like open source based on all the complaints about how the software is used.
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.
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.
Carmack can afford to gift his labor
> 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.
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.
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.
If someone wants just the former they shouldn't make it open source.
How will someone contribute back without the code?
Code can still be published and merge requests can still be handled even if the code isn't under an open source license. As a prime example check out Unreal Engine. One of the most popular game engines that powers many AAA games and cinema today. They are not open source, but they actively take outside contributions on GitHub. Though unlike what the parent comment is saying Epic can afford to pay people to work on the project instead of having all of the work done for free.
They let people contribute by making the source open, which also lets the AI companies use it as training data. The question was how would you take contributions without letting the training happen.
Edit: typo
Epic makes you agree to a legal agreement before getting access to the source so you could attempt to restrict the source via contract law. The issue is if it does escape to the public, contract law can't save you and copyright law allows for training on it.
Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.
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
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?
Try it with unreal engine first.
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.
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.
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.
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
> edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected
Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.
"BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa 2026" is arguably attribution enough.
This would be useless. And false. It could not be argued in good faith. And open source licenses require the original copyright notice specifically.
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?
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.
It's both, although the latter is more prominent.
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
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.
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 ...
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.
Pulling out the ol' "activist" dog whistle. Cope.
> 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.
Corporate lawyers for id wanted GPL iirc
that's more or less what carmack said in the tweet in the OP, no?
the grift that keeps on grifting
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.
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.
Millionaire tells millionaire wannabes what to do and not to do.
> 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.
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
It was certainly a gift to anyone who was able to fork those games and continue their maintenance
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.
https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171
Added above. Thanks!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This fellow Shawnee Mission East alum gets it.
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
Keep in mind, Carmack heads an AI company now. His opinion should be viewed with that context.