I’ve hated the prevalence of too-permissive licenses in the past 15 years. People need to go fucking brush up on their Stallman writings
I really don’t understand why someone would use a permissive license in the first place. Especially a project this big.
Permissive licenses are what everyone should strive toward. A world where we can share advancements and technologies freely with one another and innovate based on the prior work of others is a world where a shit load of cool stuff gets done. The issue arises when bad faith actors take advantage of it and act against the spirit of collaboration. The problem isn’t caused by the permissive license, but by the bad actor, and the latter is what should be addressed
When we get classless, moneyless, stateless society then sure, we won’t need licenses at all. But as long as we have a world run by lecherous corporate MBA’s, we need to use the current legal system to our advantage and keep our code safe from bad-faith actors who would steal from open source. The problem is not that corporations are greedy (they very well may be) but that the current relationship between the labor of writing code and the financial incentives of selling it is controlled by those bad-faith actors. They’re going to do everything they possibly can to leech off of open source and give nothing back because because it makes financial sense for them to do so, and until you change the rules of that relationship, you honestly can’t really blame them for it.
I agree somewhat with the sentiment of the first half of your reply. Though I don’t think that contradicts what I said. A permissive license may not be the best decision right now because you’re exceedingly likely to be taken advantage of, especially as LLM scrapers trawl the web for any scrap of code they possibly can. But I still think it is what we should be striving toward, revolution included.
As for the latter half, hmm no I think I can blame them for it actually. Obviously the system (see: capitalism) is the root cause but we don’t need to pretend that bad actors don’t carry any blame for their actions.
A world where we can share advancements and technologies freely with one another and innovate based on the prior work of others is a world where a shit load of cool stuff gets done.
And how does a copyleft license get in the way of that? On the contrary, with the GPL, I can be sure that the technology and code will be freely shared. Freely as in freedom, that’s the whole point.
I misunderstood your initial point, I thought you were speaking against permissive/copyleft licenses generally. We agree with one another. Except in the “I can be sure that the technology and code will be freely shared” because just as bad actors can abuse a permissive license, bad actors (see: companies with enough money to just squash the legal case) can simply ignore a copyleft license. I think we 99% agree though and I love copyleft.
because just as bad actors can abuse a permissive license, bad actors
You are right, but with copyleft you at least have legal mechanisms to force the company to comply with the license. With MIT or BSD there aren’t any, because permissive licences don’t enforce any such restrictions.
I think we 99% agree though and I love copyleft.
Yup. And I love copyleft too.
Those legal mechanisms do exist in theory! But, as ever, if its you vs Microsoft, you can probably get fucked :(
Permissive is the opposite of copyleft. Permissive is “here’s my code, do whatever the fuck you want”, copyleft is “here’s my code, you may use it but if your derivative work is available to other people then I dictate how it must be licensed”
In a perfect world we wouldn’t even need licenses, or just use BSD style ones, but alas… And thus moving to a copyleft license is the best move for sure.
AI bubble has shown that if you don’t have billions of dollars for lawyers, your IP will be copied and compressed into an LLM and you won’t be able to do anything about it, regardless of license. But at least Apple won’t be able to profit from Asahi team work and BSDs won’t be able to use drivers from Asahi. So much winning.
Apple is an asshole company, if they wanted community contribution for their drivers, they could’ve made their stuff open, now they can go fuck off, full stop
Given the state of Asahi right now I don’t think Apple would be interested. It’s enough for some enthusiasts willing to sacrifice some things but by the time Asahi approaches function and performance parity that hardware will be commercially irrelevant. What does this even achieve in the age of license laundering with LLMs?
It achieves that someone cannot just do a 1:1 copy and redistribute it as closed source.
People do it with LLMs all the time now. Just tell machine to rewrite it in another language to wash away the license.
Isn’t AI and already rendering those licenses moot? AI data sets don’t care what type of license the code it scraped caries. and probably most AI code being generated for private companies is based on non-permissive licenses. yet nothing can be done about it.
I think the answer is “yes”.
This feels like a token response to a systemic unsolvable problem.
The article says itself talks about having models launder code so it can’t be considered a copy of the source.
to look at it another way: since anything an llm spits out is public domain, whoever commanded it do so is automatically in breach of the gpl unless they can show evidence that there is no copyleft material in the training data at all.
Afaik that’s not exactly so. I recall articles saying that significant input/prompt may influence that. Whether this is true or not I can’t say.
can’t be. if there is gpled code in the training data, all code must be gpl since the model is one work. and since it can’t, that’s a breach.
Yeah, in theory. In practice, good luck proving it.
I hate seeing this kind of doomerism around AI discussions. A future where we have no rights is not inevitable.
We know for a fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc trained on GPL code. They haven’t claimed otherwise, and this isn’t something they’re trying to hide.
We also know what the various open source models were trained on, since they’re open source.
We can pass laws that require LLM providers to disclose their data set in some way, eg through independent audits. Trump is the one who didn’t want AI regulation, and he basically just lost all ability to make that a reality. The final six weeks of the pedophile congress isn’t likely to accomplish anything on that front, and even if they do, the incoming congress can reverse it.
This is the time to energize people, not complain on the internet.
the question is if that theory is enough for a general ruling.
I recall articles saying that significant input/prompt may influence that. Whether this is true or not I can’t say.
That’s not true. Until these issues have run through the courts, we won’t know what is or isn’t legal. The biggest court case I’m familiar with atm is the New York Times’ case that has yet to be resolved, and even then the ruling there will probably be too narrow to decide anything for code licensing. Hell, OpenAI/Microsoft might even settle to avoid a bad ruling, leaving all those questions unanswered.
So the Tl;Dr is that anyone using LLMs to code (in any capacity) is taking a risk, since the legality of it is still uncertain. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that some court will rule that LLMs trained on stolen data are illegal, and the outputs of those models are infringing.
If you can compare the code and it matches you probably have a good case if the AI user can’t demonstrate it’s not coming from you.
There’s different kinds of datasets. Some respect, select and disclose licenses, others do not.
Some model trainers use any data they can, others are selective on what they train on.
It can also be a decision on principle rather than current or future enforcability. If you say “don’t copy this” and someone blatantly does, the morality is clearer than if you didn’t specifically say that.
There’s also a question of how court rulings and law may change the situation of enforcability and usage/ignorance risk.
MIT requires attribution too. GPL is, at the very least, a stronger statement of intention and demand. It can also be seen as protest or indication of a broader move of corporate AI exploitation leading to damage to the whole FOSS ecosystem, with additional restrictions being applied. Corps that would use AI now can’t use the MIT product anymore like before.
If you can compare the code and it matches you probably have a good case if the AI user can’t demonstrate it’s not coming from you.
It’s not necessarily that simple.
Copyright protects creative expression, not underlying ideas or concepts or functionality.
The famous examples are that a phone book or map get limited copyright protection, because the text or image on the page corresponds to a ground truth that can’t be copyrighted. Recipe books also have to deal with that legal reality.
In software, functionality, including documented APIs, are not copyrightable in themselves. There was a phenomenon where AT&T asserted copyright over their Unix executable /bin/true, despite that script doing nothing except exit successfully, but there’s really nothing stopping anyone else from doing the same thing with a file with identical non-comment contents. So copyright doesn’t protect bare functionality.
And the easiest way to prove that you didn’t copy any nonfunctional expression is to have someone take the documentation and reimplement that functionality without ever looking at the original code, aka a “clean room implementation.” Plenty of examples of that happening in the past, surviving challenges in court: Compaq reverse engineering IBM’s BIOS and kicking off the IBM clone PC revolution, Google reimplementing the Java APIs from documentation to free themselves from Oracle’s oppressive contracts in Android, etc.
And because copyLEFT licenses rely on the force of copyright law to work, these types of areas where code doesn’t get copyright protection are also the areas where FOSS code wouldn’t get copyleft protections, either.
Why would it match? There’s thousands of ways to program any feature, the chance that it would be the same is tiny.
Copied code often matches, often look the same.
First, you can’t even compare the code if you don’t have access to it, you don’t have access to google’s or facebook’s code.
Second who can even legally challenge entities with pockets as deep as the ocean.
Third courts will probably classify AI generated code based of non-permissive licenses as fair use, so It’s a lost cause anyway.
Not being able to compare some proprietary is besides my point. Not all code is or remains hidden. I specifically wrote “if you can match” to remain neutral on that aspect.
Nothing is set. Until there’s a challenge in court, all you stated as certainties are just conjectures.
It would be interesting to see whether the BSD community finds a way to keep working with Asahi under the new terms.
They could go GPL too. :)
Asahi dual-licensing would be difficult, because then it’d be out there as MIT or BSD, which they don’t want. The BSD using custom-licensed parts - the BSD projects probably don’t want that.
Based
“Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason… relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of “defending against AI bad actors”, seems entirely disingenuous and misguided.”
“no reason” but there’s reasons anyway and those are “entirely disingenuous and misguided”
Too bad [their] twitter posts don’t go into actual arguments. Why is it supposedly disingenuous? Why misguided? Are there better alternatives? Probably not.
I guess ai prompts in code comments can be… interesting?
Other options? Asking for a friend.This won’t work. If they want to protect from AIs they need new license which probably won’t fit definition of open source by OSI. Also GPLv3 even won’t protect them.
I am not entirely sure why the GPLv2 license wouldn’t work for the BSDs, but either way I doubt that the problem was so big that it really required a license change. Everything in life is a trade-off, and I think the trade-off of not supporting the BSDs to prevent potential bad faith actors from “stealing the code without attribution” is a really bad trade-off.
I am not entirely sure why the GPLv2 license wouldn’t work for the BSDs,
The GPL is a copyleft license. Derivative and combined works must be published under the same license.
You can use BSD with GPL and then publish as GPL, but you can not publish as BSD.
I understand that the licenses are different. What I dont understand is why the BSD operating systems cannot make use of Asahi if it is GPL licensed instead of MIT licensed.
Because, as the comment you’re replying to says, if they include any GPL code, the whole combined work has to be licensed as GPL, and the BSD operating systems don’t want to be GPL.
What if they just do like linux distroes did with closed source drivers for a longtime?
A nice gesture, but let’s be honest, the system is corrupt and won’t care. The real way to fight is to use AI to opensource all proprietary software out there and watch them squeal.
only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
sound familiar?
No. Using fire to fight fire makes more fire. Never use generative AI, for any reason.
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Being more open minded and understanding does not mean we have to agree with everything you say. Like I agree, ai can be a useful tool and can speed up production. But only if you actually know what you’re doing. My husband is a programmer that uses ai with work (not by choice initially), and he said it has actually sped up work. But he spends almost as much time cleaning up what the ai has given him and making sure it actually works.
If you don’t know enough about the thing you’ve asked the ai for to be able to clean it up and make it presentable you will end up with slop.
I am a 3D artist myself. I have seen videos where you can ask chat gpt to write a bunch of python straight into blender and use that to model stuff with blender. Way better than whatever meshy spits out. But it’s still unoptimised and janky. Without knowing how to use blender already, I wouldn’t know how to optimise the models and fix the mistakes. I probably wouldn’t even know that there were mistakes. Reversed normals, n gons etc.
Besides, the modelling is the fun part. Why would I automate the fun part? If I could get an ai to do the uv unwrapping properly I probably would. Because it doesn’t affect the art itself, and it’s tedious work.
Real answer to your question? You work with someone who can do the parts that you cannot, if you really want to create your game properly. Making a game doesn’t even require coding these days with the game engines. And if it does there are assets out there you can use. Free ones even. A lot of people are happy to work on stuff for free too, to build their portfolio or if they really believe in your idea. And to make an entire game you’ll be paying the ai company for tokens, free models won’t cut it. That’s money you could have otherwise given to someone who would appreciate it or bought an asset from a human creator - props, code snippets, maps, etc.
If you make your “dream game” using ai as it is now, it will be unplayable slop.
Any game worth playing will be so complicated that you would either have to spend more time and effort describing exactly how the game should work in English prose for the AI than if you had just written the code yourself OR you give a simpler description of the game and let the AI fill in crucial details you left out, which means it’s not something entirely made by you and is part simulacrum. A computer screen is a large canvas you can repaint 60 times per second; there’s a whole heck of a lot of tiny creative details in those 60 frames per second beyond the textures, models, sounds, and text. And in either case you have the additional problem that the AI will make mistakes (introduce software bugs) which you’ll be unable to detect yourself.
One of the thoughts that’s occurred to me in the current era is the importance of working with other people even on hobby projects. It’s tough working with other people. We want to be the lone wolf and implement our own vision without interference from others. With AI, you can do that. You might want to do the programming but can’t do the art, or you might be able to draw but can’t do the programming. The problems are (1) fewer people want to play your partly AI-generated game over something 100% hand-crafted, and (2) there are loads of passionate people who really want to do the task you can’t do yourself. We just need to find each other and make it happen. We weren’t doing that before and are surely doing it less now, but it’s more important now than ever lest we go down the path of replacing creative people with machines.
define “simply incapable”. you can use a sequencer, a synthesiser, a modelling program, an animation suite, write design docs for entire interconnected worlds, but if you ever accidentally write
print("hello")you explode?deleted by creator
i have friends who have both dyslexia and dyscalculia and who have managed to learn programming. it’s a matter of finding something that works for you. if you don’t gel with c-style, try something functional, or concatenative. people have made programming languages that map directly to how they and nobody else thinks. if all else fails, try mit scratch.
You’re not incapable, you’re choosing not to. There is an initial hurdle you have to get past after which the logic clicks. If you’re unwilling to move past that hurdle, that’s a choice on your part, not an innate shortcoming.
The amount of time it would take to make the 5 apps and 2 blender extensions I made that I now use daily, would be years, I dont care to develop, I dont want to know how, I dont want to spend years learning, I want the result, and the result works great, I’m happier using the result then I would be learning, instead of learning code, I can use the damn apps and extensions for my needs.
5 apps and 2 blender extensions I made that I now use daily
You didn’t make shit.
But yeah comments like these are why I decided to stop sharing them for free on github and will now obscure I used ai and sell them instead.
Isn’t it nice that Blender is licensed GPL, a copyleft license, so that access to Blender’s source code and API will never be taken away from you? Isn’t it nice that the community still exists and proffers code to you even when you’re being selfish and insecure?
Wouldn’t exist without me, I directed is more accurate and what I say on pretty much every comment except that one, either way it still exists, thank you ai, ai made it and it made it just for me. <3
Gladly didn’t make it since making it would’ve wasted years of my life rather than a couple hours a day for a week.
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The former establishment doesn’t want you to be able to realize your dreams unless you pay them. And if you don’t have the money to pay them, they want you to suffer.
But now they can’t stop you anymore, no matter how hard they try to vilify anyone who escapes their grasp.
So now what?
Write a book.
Do carpentry.deleted by creator
What’s keeping you from taking coding courses then?
Go for it!
What about coding when you are simply incapable of learning it?
In what situation would it be literally impossible for you to learn to code, where you would also have access to LLMs? If you have access to LLMs, you have access to a computational device of some kind.
I cannot put it together because [I] cannot code.
You can learn to code.
Should I be banned from ever making my dream game?
No. But if you have an LLM program the game, you have not made it yourself. So in a situation where you use generative AI here, you still have not made the game.
No he shouldnt take 5 years to develop something just becauss you want that, he can take a week for the same results
Content generated by plagiarism machines is worse[1][2] than intelligently designed projects. It is just a stochastic parrot[1].
And there are severe moral and ethical issues with the use of LLMs, both in regard of strip-mining the totality of human knowledge and art to generate soulless slop, and in regard to the damage done to the world[1] and to people[1][2]. And, if you happen to be Catholic, it is also opposed by the Pope (and also by many Christians of denominations other than Roman Catholicism) for being a “Tower of Babel”.
I genuinely don’t care anymore, why should my needs go unfulfiled to make internet strangers feel better
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The answer is one of:
- Overcome your difficulties and do it.
- Work with someone else.
- Surrender morality by using a plagiarism machine to make a game with bad source code that you won’t understand well enough to patch.
This place is loaded with the same morons on reddit
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If you read the article, you’d see…
What the GPL changes is the commercial benefit. Under MIT, someone can take Asahi’s code, close it up, and sell a product, and that’s perfectly legal as long as the notice stays in.
Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can’t legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product’s source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot.
The article explains that the GPL license will enable legal action against future use along those lines - and that WINE did the same thing back in the 90s, and its worked for them.
it’s weird that they just phrase it as “has to release the source code”, it skips over the most important part. they have to release the source to any user who asks for it. if they want to be assholes about it they can request proof of purchase. unless the product is free, but then the question becomes “so what’s the problem again?”.
I deleted my comment a minute later because I didn’t want to discuss it any further.
But since you already replied: with ai rewriting, I don’t think that the switch to gpl changes anything. Even if the bad actors now publish their code, how would it change what they do?
Because it includes the modified code from the GPL licensed code and any derivative works, which in many cases may mean the source code to their entire application including what they may consider sensitive IP has to be provided or readily made available to customers who have paid for the software. Further to this any paying customer who receives this source code can make it all publicly available for free which can effectivelly kill the paid software.
