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.
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.
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.
That’s just incorrect. “Open source” can mean the licensing as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been associated with the development model since The Cathedral and the Bazaar [1].
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
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 always means the development model.
> 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
By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.
Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?
The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”
From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.
And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.
> In closed-source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing further development plans. This leads to part of the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development.
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me
The 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.
I think we've all been burned by 20+ years of exploitation in the guise of "free product." Google more or less spearheaded that movement. I agree we should all be community-minded and have nice things, but when you look at how the rewards (social and monetary) are shared it's overwhelmingly disproportionate.
yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine.
but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)
and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.
It's not open source, because the definition of open source doesn't allow you to place any restrictions on who can use it or for what purpose. It's why licenses like "Don't use it for evil" or "Everyone except Anish Kapoor" aren't acceptable for a lot of Linux distros.
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
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.
Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception that, while these companies have always profited off of our inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public good, they provided the platform, and profited off that platform.
Now it feels like the public good is being diminished (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob, trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.
The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives less back.
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.
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.
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".
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".
You're right - the reality of the world today is that open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all questions of legality/ethics aside. But this was not the reality of the world that existed when the code was licensed and released. That is why it is easy to empathize with code authors who did not expect their code to be used in this manner.
Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.
Great! So I assume it is now Completely Fine to rip Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / whatever and share it with everyone I know?
Copyright isn't "done", copyright has just been restricted to the rich and powerful. AI has essentially made it legal to steal from anyone who isn't rich enough to sue you - which in the case of the main AI companies means everyone except a handful of giants.
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.)
I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been able to just force through their desired outcome (to the detriment of society), but I don't think they are going to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone once they have the leverage.
Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their 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, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity
That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
If 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.
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.
My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
>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.
This is an edge case in OSS. Even among software packages used by Netflix and Amazon, few of them were attributable to a single maintainer or small group of individuals. They've long since become community developed projects.
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.
it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that.
(edit: the comment i replied to was edited to be more a statement about themselves rather than a question about other developers, so my comment probably makes less sense now)
There is a major difference between open-sourcing a completed product versus being an open source maintainer, and I'm disappointed that Carmack is drawing a false equivalence here.
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!
Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
> but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
Not exactly. You can modify Linux and run it yourself all you want without obligation to share your changes. The sharing requirements are more limited and involve distribution.
Correct! This is the exact reason anyone who wants to use the os itself as a moat uses FreeBSD as a base instead, and add proprietary modifications to it. FreeBSD also being a open source gift, that does not have those requirements that Linux does.
Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
> But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work
This doesn't make sense. You make something and put out there, for free, of your own will. Why do you care if someone takes it and makes a profit? Shouldn't you have taken that profit route yourself before if that's what you wanted?
It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.
If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.
What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"?
Not a community-developed project with a lot of contributors, but a software that would realistically qualify as being mostly attributable to one person?
Redis is an easy example, but the author of that doesn't need to say "Netflix uses my X" because the software is popular by itself. AI being trained on Redis code hasn't done anything to diminish that, as far as I can tell.
That's the point? I agree and roughly it's one of two.
A: you made this as a free gift to anyone including openai
B: you made this to profit yourself in some way
The argument he makes is if you did the second one don't do opensource?
It does kill a ton of opensource companies though and truth is that model of operating now is not going to work in this new age.
Also is sad because it means the whole system will collapse. The processes that made him famous can no longer be followed. Your open source code will be used by countless people and they will never know your name.
It's not called a distruptive tech for nothing. Can't un opensource all that code without lobotomizing every AI model.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
Carmack is the same person comfortable with delaying talks of ethical treatment of a digital being, or what even constitutes one until in his eyes "they demonstrate the capabilities of a two year old" by which point, with the scale we distribute these models at, and the dependence we're pushing the world to adopt on them, we'll be well into the "implicit atrocity zone", and so far down the sunk cost trail, everyone will just decide to skip the ethics talk altogether if we wait that long. This is in spite of being a family man, which raises serious questions to me about how he must treat them. It does not surprise me at all the man has blindspots I could fit a semi-truck in.
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.
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.
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.
> people who open source their code do not care about profit
Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.
I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.
Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
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.
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.
>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.
saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the other hand...
It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a single paid open source tool off the top of my head but could name dozens that you can just use for free.
> 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.
What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.
The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
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.
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.
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, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest character traits.
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".
Doesn’t diminish the fact that he does so from a platform of privilege that his early success provided him. He can be both. It’s ok.
He’s right about both points. It was a gift. A tremendous gift. He’s right about open source. Too many people see it as a reputation builder rather than a utility like it was intended to be.
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.
> 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.
The 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.
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.
I would want to use the license that does not ask for credit; the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to combine it with software having such licenses).
Exactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and eat it too.
> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal project you have certainly democratizes Software.
And even though open source models are a year behind, they address your remaining criticism about the AI being centralized.
> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
Depends 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.
I agree with you. One counterargument is that producing software was never a path to adoption unless you had distribution and the big companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) have distribution on a scale that individuals will not.
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?
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
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.
I think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Well, if Carmack wants to give gifts to AI companies then he's free to do it, but it doesn't mean that other people want it too.
I think this debate is mainly about the value of human labor. I guess when you're a millionaire, it's much easier to be excited about human labor losing value.
There is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar.
I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.
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.
I don't have problem with AI learning from FOSS code bases. I have a big problem with FOSS code bases helping to create non-FOSS code which does not return the favor. AI-washed Windows code for Wine would be fantastic.
I feel similarly to Carmack, and have felt this way since the late 1990s when I was in college.
Open sourcing code is a form of power, power to influence, inspire, and propagate one's worldview on whomever reads that code. Thank you OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, thank you for amplifying the voices of all us open source contributors!
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.
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?
everyone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous
meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class)
'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things
> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift
I 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.
Personally for me I don't see it as gift, he licensed out the engine but didn't want to be in the engine business, after selling enough it feels he just put it out there so it's his stamp forever with the GPL infection. I think he already felt the diminishing returns at the time. He knew about the sharing of floppy discs and hacker scene and eventually someone would've done it and I think he felt cornered and said fuck it might as well put it out there to beat them to it.
Thinking of open source as a gift is such a strange take. It implies that the relationship is merely a transaction where the giftee is the beneficiary and the gifter is a philanthropist. It has subtle financial undertones, and a sense that gifters are somehow morally superior.
It is far healthier to see it as a collaboration. The author publishes the software with freedoms that allow anyone to not only use the software, but crucially to modify it and, hopefully, to publish their changes as well so that the entire community can benefit, not just the original author or those who modify it. It encourages people to not keep software to themselves, which is in great part the problem with proprietary software. Additionally, copyleft licenses ensure that those freedoms are propagated, so that malicious people don't abuse the system, i.e. avoiding the paradox of tolerance.
Far be it from me to question the wisdom of someone like Carmack, but he's not exactly an authority on open source. While id has released many of their games over the years, this is often a few years after the games are commercially relevant. I guess it makes sense that someone sees open source as a "gift" they give to the world after they've extracted the value they needed from it. I have little interest in what he has to say about "AI", as well.
Hey John, where can I find the open source projects released by your "AI" company?
Ah, there's physical_atari[1]. Somehow I doubt this is the next industry breakthrough, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
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.
You hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary reason for his STB libraries.
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 are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.
I don't think we should protect "source-code", we should protect people. Source-code doesn't care, people do.
Should we protect developers and their rights? Surely, and users' rights too definitely. But protecting source-code as such seems a bit abstract to me.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
It’s not open source in the way anyone thinks about the term. He isn’t maintaining free software in the open
That’s just incorrect. “Open source” can mean the licensing as well as the development model [0]. It certainly has been 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
> “Open source” can mean
Keyword 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
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 always means the development model.
> 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
By that logic, “open source licensing” would also imply a different concept than “open source” by itself.
Note that the Wikipedia page for “open-source software” [2] states: “Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite”. That would really only be the case in the context of open-source development.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open Source'?
The “cathedral” model refers to closed-source development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...
Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?
See https://opensource.org/about/history-of-the-open-source-init... under ‘Coining “Open Source”’:
The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”
From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.
And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.
> In closed-source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing further development plans. This leads to part of the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development.
So, in closed source you work on bug reports and feature requests. In open source you work on development. But it's the closed source people working on building a cathedral.
I understand what they're driving at, but this is still the stupidest description of the analogy that I've ever seen.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.
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?
"in accordance with its license" is the key part that's missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.
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.
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.
Copyright is all about gating access, as media rights holders for sports well know.
There is no contradiction. Open source software licenses allow use without conditions. Ad blocker use does not distribute the modified web pages.
I have not seen any evidence that LLMs ‘distribute’ modified software, though they do seem capable of replicating it.
> 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.
In reproducing code that requires the license be reproduced alongside it.
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
Why not? Up until a year or two ago LLM pair programmers weren't even a thing.
The user would know how?
This sounds to me like the "No True Scotsman" argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
I 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.
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.)
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.
What do the people who are deep into open source mean by the term then, in your understanding?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me
The 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.
It has always been like that, except we used to call it demos, sharewhare, beerware, postware,...
The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from it.
I think we've all been burned by 20+ years of exploitation in the guise of "free product." Google more or less spearheaded that movement. I agree we should all be community-minded and have nice things, but when you look at how the rewards (social and monetary) are shared it's overwhelmingly disproportionate.
yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine.
but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)
and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.
Who is stopping you from licensing your code that way then?
It's not open source, because the definition of open source doesn't allow you to place any restrictions on who can use it or for what purpose. It's why licenses like "Don't use it for evil" or "Everyone except Anish Kapoor" aren't acceptable for a lot of Linux distros.
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
The MIT license didn’t require a lot of thought.
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.
Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception that, while these companies have always profited off of our inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public good, they provided the platform, and profited off that platform.
Now it feels like the public good is being diminished (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob, trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.
The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives less back.
Yes, this 100x.
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.
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.
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".
To clarify, GPL is not a free as in "free gift", but it is free as in "freedom".
The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom", not related to whether you profit from it or not.
MIT license requires credit.
So does the BSD license. Copyright must be reproduced
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".
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.
If you want to attach strings which involve restricting access, open source is not the way to go.
You're right - the reality of the world today is that open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all questions of legality/ethics aside. But this was not the reality of the world that existed when the code was licensed and released. That is why it is easy to empathize with code authors who did not expect their code to be used in this manner.
Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.
No one cares. Copyright in general is done, and we are all stronger now. Don't fight AI, fight for open models.
Great! So I assume it is now Completely Fine to rip Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / whatever and share it with everyone I know?
Copyright isn't "done", copyright has just been restricted to the rich and powerful. AI has essentially made it legal to steal from anyone who isn't rich enough to sue you - which in the case of the main AI companies means everyone except a handful of giants.
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.)
> Just ask Disney.
Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI
I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been able to just force through their desired outcome (to the detriment of society), but I don't think they are going to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone once they have the leverage.
Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
there are no open models. none. zero.
there are 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
From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their models.
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, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
> and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful
At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late.
> Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests
The 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.
It's interesting that the "natural reaction" to releasing an open source project, have it be successful, and have some Amazon "steal" it (leave the argument aside, that's how people will feel, big company makes money using the gift) is somehow worse than if you work for Big Company, they pay you, and then later use your code to make billions.
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity
That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
> If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me
My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits
How much do you think people would pay for this patch?
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/1320
If 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.
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.
My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
>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.
>What makes this more objectionable than profiting off open source projects by using it directly?
i can brag if netflix is using my X or facebook runs all their stuff with my Y. that can help me land consulting gigs, solicit donations, etc.
This is an edge case in OSS. Even among software packages used by Netflix and Amazon, few of them were attributable to a single maintainer or small group of individuals. They've long since become community developed projects.
Netflix and Amazon use many packages of all sizes. And contributions to projects with many contributors helped people get jobs.
How would you even know that Netflix or Amazon uses your package?
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.
> There is no recognition
I've never written or contributed to open source code with this being the goal. I never even considered this is why people do it.
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.
it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that.
(edit: the comment i replied to was edited to be more a statement about themselves rather than a question about other developers, so my comment probably makes less sense now)
There is a major difference between open-sourcing a completed product versus being an open source maintainer, and I'm disappointed that Carmack is drawing a false equivalence here.
Plus unless I'm wrong he's talking about products that were released several years ago and milked for money already.
You were not wrong.
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!
Linus T explicitly licensed Linux under a license that allows anyone to run it but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
> but requires people who modify modifications to share those modifications.
Not exactly. You can modify Linux and run it yourself all you want without obligation to share your changes. The sharing requirements are more limited and involve distribution.
Correct! This is the exact reason anyone who wants to use the os itself as a moat uses FreeBSD as a base instead, and add proprietary modifications to it. FreeBSD also being a open source gift, that does not have those requirements that Linux does.
Prominent examples include Sony PlayStation, and Apple OSX.
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.
What seems stranger to me is not acknowledging, that most popular OSS explicitly permitted for profit use. It's essentially what made them popular.
Obviously LLMs are new and nobody knew that they would happen. But the part where most popular OSS willfully committed to broad for profit use is not.
> But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work
This doesn't make sense. You make something and put out there, for free, of your own will. Why do you care if someone takes it and makes a profit? Shouldn't you have taken that profit route yourself before if that's what you wanted?
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.
It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.
If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.
What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It's also odd to release software under a license allowing commercial use if the authors didn't want that.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>How is this different than any company that uses the open source software?
recognition for the authors, which can lead to all sorts of opportunities. "netflix uses my X for their Y, worldwide" opens doors.
Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"?
Not a community-developed project with a lot of contributors, but a software that would realistically qualify as being mostly attributable to one person?
Redis is an easy example, but the author of that doesn't need to say "Netflix uses my X" because the software is popular by itself. AI being trained on Redis code hasn't done anything to diminish that, as far as I can tell.
>Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using [...]
FAANG specifically? no, i am not familiar with their entire tech stacks.
but i have leaned on my single-developer projects (being used in other, not owned by me, software) to help land consulting gigs.
That's the point? I agree and roughly it's one of two.
A: you made this as a free gift to anyone including openai B: you made this to profit yourself in some way
The argument he makes is if you did the second one don't do opensource?
It does kill a ton of opensource companies though and truth is that model of operating now is not going to work in this new age.
Also is sad because it means the whole system will collapse. The processes that made him famous can no longer be followed. Your open source code will be used by countless people and they will never know your name.
It's not called a distruptive tech for nothing. Can't un opensource all that code without lobotomizing every AI model.
>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.
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.
Its a lot less odd when you remember that he's running an AI company himself.
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?
Ah.. So the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”.
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.
if no code is contributed back then why is there an ongoing problem with massive amounts of PRs?
If I come to your potluck, eat 90% of the food, and then vomit in a bowl, would you consider my bowl of vomit a valuable contribution?
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.
Carmack is the same person comfortable with delaying talks of ethical treatment of a digital being, or what even constitutes one until in his eyes "they demonstrate the capabilities of a two year old" by which point, with the scale we distribute these models at, and the dependence we're pushing the world to adopt on them, we'll be well into the "implicit atrocity zone", and so far down the sunk cost trail, everyone will just decide to skip the ethics talk altogether if we wait that long. This is in spite of being a family man, which raises serious questions to me about how he must treat them. It does not surprise me at all the man has blindspots I could fit a semi-truck in.
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.
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.
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.
> people who open source their code do not care about profit
Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.
I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.
Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
> presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit
That'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)
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.
You're forgetting about Red Hat & friends, where the software is 100% open source and the for-profit product is actually the support contract.
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.
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.
>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.
saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the other hand...
Open Sourcing software has _nothing_ to do with 'gratis'. Can't believe this still needs repeating in 2026.
It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a single paid open source tool off the top of my head but could name dozens that you can just use for free.
> 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.
What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.
The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
> 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.
> open source their code do not care about profit.
Ah, how naive. You're not squinting hard enough.
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.
The argument ignores the mans privilege
Go outside and touch grass my man.
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, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
arguments are stronger without insults
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.
> 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.
true/false and insult/not insult are two different axes.
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.
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.
> But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
What an utterly pretentious and rude thing to say.
I mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest character traits.
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".
Doesn’t diminish the fact that he does so from a platform of privilege that his early success provided him. He can be both. It’s ok.
He’s right about both points. It was a gift. A tremendous gift. He’s right about open source. Too many people see it as a reputation builder rather than a utility like it was intended to be.
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.
I'm not aware of any labor efforts that have successfully fought automation long term.
There's been plenty of temporary victories, but even the unions often acknowledge it's temporary.
I guess 25 years of "unions are for under-performers" is finally going to bite us in the ass.
> in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization
what examples are you thinking of?
Most of 19th and early-20th century history, which is very much recent history.
Look up:
- The Haymarket Affair
- The Homestead Strike
- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
- The Ludlow Massacre
- The Battle of Blair Mountain
You could also simply have taken the quote you were responding to and run it through a few LLMs to acquire those examples.
> 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.
I totally agree. I've written about this topic a lot on this site, probably most recently here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115597
The 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.
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.
Carmacks ai company explicitly does not work on LLMs though
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.
I would want to use the license that does not ask for credit; the only requirement is that any further restrictions are not legally effective (except that, for practical reasons, it is allowed to be relicensed by GPL and AGPL (if you are able to follow all of the requirements of those licenses) in order to combine it with software having such licenses).
Exactly like someone else here said, in retrospect he probably just wishes he had chosen a more permissive license now that he has forever received the credit and wants to have his cake and eat it too.
I find it pretty simple:
- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence
- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal project you have certainly democratizes Software.
And even though open source models are a year behind, they address your remaining criticism about the AI being centralized.
> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it
Depends 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.
I agree with you. One counterargument is that producing software was never a path to adoption unless you had distribution and the big companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) have distribution on a scale that individuals will not.
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?
That would imply that there will never be an adequate open weights coding model. That might be true, but seems unlikely.
He threw Quake 3 over the wall after having made tons of money off it. He is now invested in AI and should just shut up.
"AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!"
Si tacuisses ...
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...)
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.
I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah
I think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".
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.
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.
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.
If someone wants just the former they shouldn't make it open source.
How will someone contribute back without the code?
> 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?
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.
Well, if Carmack wants to give gifts to AI companies then he's free to do it, but it doesn't mean that other people want it too.
I think this debate is mainly about the value of human labor. I guess when you're a millionaire, it's much easier to be excited about human labor losing value.
There's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software.
https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889
I find him speaking really soothing.
Im convinced a lot of open source proponents dont really like open source based on all the complaints about how the software is used.
IMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft license.
There is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar.
I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.
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.
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
> edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected
Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.
"BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa 2026" is arguably attribution enough.
This would be useless. And false. It could not be argued in good faith. And open source licenses require the original copyright notice specifically.
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?
I don't have problem with AI learning from FOSS code bases. I have a big problem with FOSS code bases helping to create non-FOSS code which does not return the favor. AI-washed Windows code for Wine would be fantastic.
It's both, although the latter is more prominent.
I feel similarly to Carmack, and have felt this way since the late 1990s when I was in college.
Open sourcing code is a form of power, power to influence, inspire, and propagate one's worldview on whomever reads that code. Thank you OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, thank you for amplifying the voices of all us open source contributors!
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
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?
Try it with unreal engine first.
everyone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous
meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class)
'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things
Keep in mind, Carmack heads an AI company now. His opinion should be viewed with that context.
Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.
> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift
I 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.
Personally for me I don't see it as gift, he licensed out the engine but didn't want to be in the engine business, after selling enough it feels he just put it out there so it's his stamp forever with the GPL infection. I think he already felt the diminishing returns at the time. He knew about the sharing of floppy discs and hacker scene and eventually someone would've done it and I think he felt cornered and said fuck it might as well put it out there to beat them to it.
This fellow Shawnee Mission East alum gets it.
Thinking of open source as a gift is such a strange take. It implies that the relationship is merely a transaction where the giftee is the beneficiary and the gifter is a philanthropist. It has subtle financial undertones, and a sense that gifters are somehow morally superior.
It is far healthier to see it as a collaboration. The author publishes the software with freedoms that allow anyone to not only use the software, but crucially to modify it and, hopefully, to publish their changes as well so that the entire community can benefit, not just the original author or those who modify it. It encourages people to not keep software to themselves, which is in great part the problem with proprietary software. Additionally, copyleft licenses ensure that those freedoms are propagated, so that malicious people don't abuse the system, i.e. avoiding the paradox of tolerance.
Far be it from me to question the wisdom of someone like Carmack, but he's not exactly an authority on open source. While id has released many of their games over the years, this is often a few years after the games are commercially relevant. I guess it makes sense that someone sees open source as a "gift" they give to the world after they've extracted the value they needed from it. I have little interest in what he has to say about "AI", as well.
Hey John, where can I find the open source projects released by your "AI" company?
Ah, there's physical_atari[1]. Somehow I doubt this is the next industry breakthrough, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
[1]: https://github.com/Keen-Technologies/physical_atari
https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2032460578669691171
Added above. Thanks!
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.
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.
You hit the nail on the head. It's the same with employees who work for their employer but also want to reuse that code when they go work for other people and don't want to rewrite the exact same thing again. Even though everyone else can benefit from it too, Sean "nothings" Barrett said that's the primary reason for his STB libraries.
https://github.com/nothings/stb
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 are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.
I don't think we should protect "source-code", we should protect people. Source-code doesn't care, people do.
Should we protect developers and their rights? Surely, and users' rights too definitely. But protecting source-code as such seems a bit abstract to me.
John Carmack seems to think isomorphic plagiarism and piracy bleed though is good for FOSS.
This is demonstrably incorrect given how LLM are built, and he should retire instead of trolling people that still care about workmanship. =3
"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ