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volkercraig | on: Astral to Join OpenAI
It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.
palmotea | parent | next
> If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.

2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

goku12 | root | parent | next
> If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

Isn't that the same for the obligations under BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a different one from the problem of AI copyright washing. It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while debunking another point.

shimman | root | parent | next
"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having the entire corpus of knowledge for humanity and how LLMs work, how can you honestly argue in court that this is purely clean room implementation?

This is right up there with Meta lawyers claiming that when they torrent it's totally legal but when a single person torrents it's copyright infringement.

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islandfox100 | root | parent | next
Maybe I'm reading wrong here, but what's the implication of the clean room re-implementations? Someone else is cloning with a changed license, but if I'm still on the GPL licensed tool, how am I "not protected"?
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worldsayshi | root | parent
If clean-room re-implementations are allowed to bypass copyright/licenses (software) copyright is dead in general?
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dirkc | parent | next
While the license is important, it's the community that plays the key role for me. VC funder open source is not the same as community developed open source. The first can very quickly disappear because of something like a aquihire, the second has more resilience and tends to either survive and evolve, or peter out as the context changes.

I'm careful to not rely too heavily on VC funded open source whenever I can avoid it.

munk-a | parent | next
A GPL license helps but if support for a dependency is pulled you'll likely end up needing to divert more resources to maintain it anyways. There really isn't any guarantee against this cost - you either pay someone else to maintain it and hope they do a good job, build it in house and become an "also that thing" company, or follow a popular project without financially supporting it and just hope other people pick up your slack.

Preferring GPL licensed software means that you're immune to a sudden cut off of access so it's always advisable - but it's really important to stay on top of dependencies and be willing to pay the cost if support is withdrawn. So GPL helps but it isn't a full salve.

petcat | parent
The biggest scam the mega-clouds and the Githubs ever pulled was convincing open source developers that the GPL was somehow out of vogue and BSD/MIT/Apache was better.

All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.

kjksf | root | parent | next
I don't remember GitHub or Amazon advocating MIT over GPL.

Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's minds.

The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments. Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.

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xorcist | root | parent | next
The big cloud providers are perfectly happy to use GPL'd stuff (see: Elastic, MySQL). They don't need to use embrace-and-extend, they're content with hosting.

The ones pushing for permissive licenses are rather companies like Apple, Android (and to some extent other parts of Google), Microsoft, Oracle. They want to push their proprietary stuff and one way to do that in the face of open source competition is by proprietary extensions.

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leetrout | root | parent | next
I remember a somewhat prominent dev in the DC area putting on Twitter around 2012 or so something like "I do plenty of open source coding and I don't put a fucking license on it" and it stuck with me for all these years that it was a weird stance to take.
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benterix | root | parent | next
You probably mean AGPL. Companies hated GPL from the start and nothing has changed to this day. But the cloud is specifically against AGPL.
eru | root | parent
Huh? When you deploy something in the cloud, you don't have to share your GPL'ed stuff either. Google doesn't.