Discussion

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emiliobumachar: 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.

OSaMaBiNLoGiN: 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.

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

nkassis: 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...)

tadfisher: 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?

IshKebab: 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.

3rodents: 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

moogly: 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.

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

elteto: 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.

28304283409234: Open Sourcing software has _nothing_ to do with 'gratis'. Can't believe this still needs repeating in 2026.

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

gensym: I find it pretty simple:- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

dysoco: > AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize itDepends on how you see it.I know many people building oss, local alternatives to enterprise software for specific industries that cost thousands of dollars all thanks to AI.If everyone can produce software now and at a much complex and bigger scale, it's much easier to create decentralized and free alternatives to long-standing closed projects.

contagiousflow: 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?

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

barrowclift: 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?

bombcar: 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.

gruez: >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.

truncate: 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.

nomel: > There is no recognitionI've never written out contributed to open source code with this being the goal. I never even considered this is why people do it.

liuliu: 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). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.

CrossVR: 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.

jraph: > presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profitThat'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)

bombcar: > 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.

SirensOfTitan: 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.

jhatemyjob: > those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the giftI 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.

Aurornis: > 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.

jcmfernandes: > 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?

throwaway2027: 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.

Findecanor: 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 developers are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies practice.

Isognoviastoma: 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.

PaulKeeble: 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.

pie_flavor: 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.

sobiolite: 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.

pseudalopex: > 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.

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

toast0: 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.

johnmaguire: 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.

q3k: > 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.

ryandvm: 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.

sublinear: It's not even the profit, but that there is often no new code being contributed.AI provides an offramp for people to disengage from social coding. People don't see the point because they still don't understand the difference between barely getting something to work and meaningfully improving that thing with new ideas.

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

sumeno: > 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.

charcircuit: 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.

CamperBob2: No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all stronger now. Don't fight AI, fight for open models.

GeoAtreides: there are no opne models. none. zero.there are some 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

CamperBob2: 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, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful.

skeledrew: 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

pibaker: 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.

supern0va: >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.

doctorpangloss: 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.

SlinkyOnStairs: > 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.

lelanthran: 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.

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

anonymousab: > and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpfulAt that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late.> Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interestsThe 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.

johnmaguire: 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.)

skeledrew: > But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their workThis doesn't make sense. You make something and put out there, for free, of your own will. Why do you care of someone takes it and makes a profit? Shouldn't you have taken that profit route yourself before if that's what you wanted?

lelanthran: 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.

skeledrew: If you want to attach strings which involve restricting access, open source is not the way to go.

amarant: 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!

lelanthran: 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.

leni536: 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.

Isognoviastoma: 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?

wotTH: The argument ignores the mans privilege

skrebbel: 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.

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

js2: This is just the divide between capital and labor though, isn't it? See also: everything is a remix; great artists steal.I'm on both sides. I've contributed to open source. I use AI both in my personal projects now and to make money for my employer.I'm still not sure how I feel about any of it, but to me the bigger problem is the division between capital and labor and the growing wealth inequality divide.

alpaca128: > 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.

bluefirebrand: > If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt meMy opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits

mjr00: > 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.

bigstrat2003: > 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.

layer8: That’s just incorrect. “Open source” can mean the licensing as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been strongly 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

sublinear: 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.

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

beastman82: 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?

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

dartharva: > 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.

pseudalopex: The user would know how?

elteto: Go outside and touch grass my man.

arjie: 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.

logicchains: 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.

dminik: 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.

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

leni536: Try it with unreal engine first.

sumeno: 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

dartharva: Why not? Up until a year or two ago LLM pair programmers weren't even a thing.

hamdingers: > Just ask Disney.Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI

nickff: Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open Source'?

patagurbon: In reproducing code that requires the license be reproduced alongside it.

SirensOfTitan: I totally agree. I've written about this topic a lot on this site, probably most recently here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115597The 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.

Aurornis: > “Open source” can meanKeyword 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

layer8: 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 must mean the development model.

pseudalopex: > edit: I’m assuming licenses were respectedLicenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.

emiliobumachar: "BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa 2026" is arguably attribution enough.

overfeed: 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.

Aurornis: > 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.

adiabatichottub: 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.

agentultra: 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.

pseudalopex: This would be useless. And false. It could not be argued in good faith. And open source licenses require the original copyright notice specifically.

truncate: 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.

jltsiren: 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.

nickff: 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.

technothrasher: 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.

Jare: 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".

pseudalopex: MIT license requires credit.

Jare: 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".

throwerofways67: Carmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though

MrScruff: That would imply that there will never be an adequate open weights coding model. That might be true, but seems unlikely.

yunnpp: 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.

crote: > I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off meThe 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.

poszlem: 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".

daemonologist: 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.)

bloblaw: 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.

toast0: How much do you think people would pay for this patch?https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320If 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.

acuozzo: > 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.

stock_toaster: 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?

losvedir: > 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.

rurp: 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.

adiabatichottub: 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

socalgal2: 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.

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

nitwit005: How will someone contribute back without the code?

wotTH: Posts the user clinging to a 15 year old HN login.Meanwhile I only use social media throwaways, correctly understanding this is all ephemeral gibberish that will be effectively rm -Rf'd when the next generations accept there is no knowledge of value to them stored in the database that backs this site.Just the vanity of a whole lot of Millennials, GenXers, a few Boomers, who latched onto an economic meme of the day; software engineering!

malfist: 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.

elteto: 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.

crote: You're forgetting about Red Hat & friends, where the software is 100% open source and the for-profit product is actually the support contract.

rurp: 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.

socalgal2: 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.

pseudalopex: There is no contradiction. Open source software licenses allow use without conditions. Ad blocker use does not distribute the modified web pages.

nickff: I have not seen any evidence that LLMs ‘distribute’ modified software, though they do seem capable of replicating it.

lavela: I fail to see how mass scale reproduction of copyrighted code isn't a form of distribution.

jjj123: “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.

indemnity: 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!

torginus: 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 yet 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.

eqvinox: 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

hsbauauvhabzb: 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.

charcircuit: 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.

nickjj: 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.

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

john_strinlai: arguments are stronger without insults

moogly: 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.

tavavex: > 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.

moogly: 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.

skrebbel: 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".