I'm a cybersecurity 'expert' and my 40 person team and I make our money by providing GPL software to the world that I wrote.
You have the same incentive you had to share your work as before, and that is to get attention, and customers, assuming that's your game. Open code means no vendor lockin for a lot of customers, so they can pay you but also trust you to not extort them. And if you're hit by a bus your product lives on, and someone else can adopt it.
Supply chain risks and vulnerabilities existed before LLMs came along. They're easier to handle now that we have LLMs helping us. In our org the tsunami of updates we need to do weekly is far more easy to handle with LLMs.
Open code has always been easier to find vulns in vs closed. AI didn't change that.
Yeah the slopfest is real, but easier to deal with thanks to agents/LLMs so it kind of offsets itself.
Your licenses are still enforceable in court. Agreed that not being able to reverse the fact that AI trained on your code and is selling that capability kind of sucks. But humans were doing that before AI.
Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due. But on the flip side, we get AI! Which I frikkin love. I feel like a kid in a candy store. It's training on my code too and it's training on my content. And when people ask about what the best product is for our space, the AI tells them its our product. Woohoo!
Regarding the future: We have some really really big problems that need solving - stuff that creates a massive amount of misery in dark stuffy hospital rooms with crying relatives saying goodbye to their 9 year old child. I've been in those spaces and I'd give up the previous generation of open source ethics in a heartbeat to make just an ounce of that misery stop. The training that my code provides AI is a tiny little part of that solution, and I'm proud of that. Whatever I can do to push our capabilities to the point where we can make the major breakthroughs this species needs, I'm happy to provide.
And frankly, I think most of the source of outrage is this:
> Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due.
Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.
LLMs just shone a light onto it. People who had betterment of others on their minds, don't have a reason to consider LLMs training on their output as taking anything from them. On the contrary, their outputs now contribute to a general-purpose problem solving tool that will (and already does) help humanity with way more problems that anyone imagined.
I personally am more than happy to know LLMs may have trained on my content. I don't begrudge the companies the $0.000001/year they probably owe me for my relative contributions. I get orders of magnitude more value for myself from LLMs every day, in my personal life alone.
There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it. The OSS subset of those, just paint themselves as being grifters all along.
You have no proof that the world will be a better place because of this stuff but there is plenty of proof already that it will be worse, possibly significantly worse but the jury is still out on that.
"AI" -- as in agentic workflows -- have been around for a little over a year. it doesn't seem like enough time to "prove" anything conclusively to me, what makes you so confident?
mmaunder · · focus · HN ↗
You have the same incentive you had to share your work as before, and that is to get attention, and customers, assuming that's your game. Open code means no vendor lockin for a lot of customers, so they can pay you but also trust you to not extort them. And if you're hit by a bus your product lives on, and someone else can adopt it.
Supply chain risks and vulnerabilities existed before LLMs came along. They're easier to handle now that we have LLMs helping us. In our org the tsunami of updates we need to do weekly is far more easy to handle with LLMs.
Open code has always been easier to find vulns in vs closed. AI didn't change that.
Yeah the slopfest is real, but easier to deal with thanks to agents/LLMs so it kind of offsets itself.
Your licenses are still enforceable in court. Agreed that not being able to reverse the fact that AI trained on your code and is selling that capability kind of sucks. But humans were doing that before AI.
Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due. But on the flip side, we get AI! Which I frikkin love. I feel like a kid in a candy store. It's training on my code too and it's training on my content. And when people ask about what the best product is for our space, the AI tells them its our product. Woohoo!
Regarding the future: We have some really really big problems that need solving - stuff that creates a massive amount of misery in dark stuffy hospital rooms with crying relatives saying goodbye to their 9 year old child. I've been in those spaces and I'd give up the previous generation of open source ethics in a heartbeat to make just an ounce of that misery stop. The training that my code provides AI is a tiny little part of that solution, and I'm proud of that. Whatever I can do to push our capabilities to the point where we can make the major breakthroughs this species needs, I'm happy to provide.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
And frankly, I think most of the source of outrage is this:
> Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due.
Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.
LLMs just shone a light onto it. People who had betterment of others on their minds, don't have a reason to consider LLMs training on their output as taking anything from them. On the contrary, their outputs now contribute to a general-purpose problem solving tool that will (and already does) help humanity with way more problems that anyone imagined.
I personally am more than happy to know LLMs may have trained on my content. I don't begrudge the companies the $0.000001/year they probably owe me for my relative contributions. I get orders of magnitude more value for myself from LLMs every day, in my personal life alone.
There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it. The OSS subset of those, just paint themselves as being grifters all along.
jminnl · · focus · HN ↗
milkshakes · · focus · HN ↗