[throwfaraway135]

I agree that communities should try to protect themselves from malicious actors.

But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical:

IMO FOSS is a gift to humanity and as such:

"A gift should be given freely, without obligation or expectation, as a true expression of love and kindness"

[Palmik]

Nothing wrong with a GPL-like viral license for the AI era.

Training on my code / media / other data? No worries, just make sure the weights and other derived artifacts are released under similarly permissive license.

[m4rtink]

Well, I would say it should be like that already & no new license is needed. Basically if a LLM was ever based on GPL code, its output should be also GPL licensed. As simple as that.

[BlarfMcFlarf]

Licenses like GPL are built on top of an enforcement mechanism like copyright. Without an enforced legal framework preventing usage unless a license is agreed to, a license is just a polite request.

[rubymamis]

We need countries to start legally enforce that. Nothing will change otherwise. I stopped open sourcing my code and LLMs are one of the big reason.

[breezykoi]

Wouldn't you want the code generated by those models be released under those permissive licenses as well? Is that what you mean by other derived artifacts?

[teekert]

It really should be like that indeed. Where is RMS? Is he working on GPLv4?

[maelito]

Interesting. Is there a license that acts this already ?

[grumbel]

That is a complete fools errand. If it ever passes it would just mean the death of Open Source AI models. All the big companies would just continue to collect whatever data they like, license it if necessary or pay the fine if illegal (see Antropic paying $1.5 billion for books). While every Open Source model would be starved for training data within its self enforced rules and easy to be shut down if ever a incorrectly licenses bit slips into the models.

The only way forward is the abolishment of copyright.

[gentooflux]

AI is not humanity. Also many open source licenses have attribution clauses, which AI does not honor when it regurgitates.

[pipo234]

I think the attribution is a very good point!

Essentially LLMs are recontextualizing their training data. So on one hand, one might argue that training is like a human reading books and then inference is like writing something novel, (partially) based on the reading experience. But the contract between humans considers it plagiarism when we recite some studied text and then claim it as your own. So for example, books attribute citations with footnotes.

With source code we used to either re-used a library as-is, in which case the license terms would apply OR write our own implementation from scratch. While this LLM recontextualization purports to be like the latter, it is sometimes evident that the original license or at least some attribution, comment or footnote should apply. If only to help with future legibility maintenance.

[poszlem]

I think this mixes up the 'how' with the 'why.' FOSS isn't the end in itself, I think that for most people it's just the tool that lets us work together, share what we've built, and get something back from the community.

If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.

[Applejinx]

If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do.

If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded.

And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior.

These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.

[breezykoi]

For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.

[dannersy]

I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc.

It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith.

My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.

[throwfaraway135]

I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic.

For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGBT people -> a lot of LGBT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians.

Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?

[wazoox]

"Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté"

Saint-Just

[fweirdo]

> But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical

I agree with you.

Imagine a parallel Earth where there was a free OS that the majority in the world used called GNU/Felix.

Felix (it/its), who wrote GNU/Felix and who was the project’s strong but kind leader, one day had a head injury that somehow decreased its empathy but raised its IQ.

Subordinates of Felix on the council of leadership noticed that it was adding features that would track all user data to use in some nefarious plan.

In this case, most would agree that for both the freedom and good of all, Felix should no longer lead this effort.

However, they would want to be sure that even the Will Bates’ great company Bikerosoft didn’t lead the project either, because despite its wonderful and ubiquitous Bikerosoft Office apps and Ezure cloud tools and infrastructure, it was a profit-based company.