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by lelanthran 10 days ago
> FOSS has always been about just writing code and putting it out into the world where others can do as they please with it.

That is wrong. How can you write that with a straight face? There are projects that are put into the public domain (one major one comes to mind), but the clear majority of FOSS projects have strings attached which make the intention of the authors absolutely clear.

IOW, if you're not happy with what the cost of the product is, then just don't use it.
1 comments
Gormo 10 days ago
I mean, the most restrictive license, the GPL, was conceived specifically to protect the "four freedoms" and prevent subsequent modifications from violating them. The "copyleft" concept was specifically designed to create an ecosystem that behaved as if copyright didn't apply in the first place.

I don't know how you can imply with a straight face that it did anything else.

I don't know how you can possibly argue that non-redistributive usage of software could ever violate the GPL -- and the other common FOSS licenses don't even have the copyleft provision, and literally are saying "do whatever you want, but I'm not responsible".

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debugnik 10 days ago
> that behaved as if copyright didn't apply in the first place.

If copyright didn't exist then the share-alike and anti-tivoization clauses wouldn't work, FOSS in general wouldn't even protect attribution. Copyleft ecosystems depend on some amount of copyright law to uphold themselves.

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lelanthran 9 days ago
> The "copyleft" concept was specifically designed to create an ecosystem that behaved as if copyright didn't apply in the first place.

And if copyright didn't exist in the first place we wouldn't be having this conversation, because the models created by all the token providers will be open to all for whatever use that anyone wanted.

But it does exist, and within this framework, the creator gets to say how you may redistribute their IP, and "We compressed it very much" isn't an out.

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Gormo 9 days ago
> But it does exist, and within this framework, the creator gets to say how you may redistribute their IP,

Right. And the way the creator gets to exercise that say is by releasing their work under a license. If you release your work under a FOSS license, you're saying "you are free to copy this work and use it for your own purposes".

Complaining that people are using it for purposes you don't like after you've already given permission to them to use it for whatever purposes they please seems a bit disingenuous.

> and "We compressed it very much" isn't an out.

It's not, but I don't think we're discussing that. We're talking about LLMs, not people redistributing zip files containing someone else's work. If you're trying to imply that LLMs are merely a form of compression, that's a position you've got to argue for, because I'm definitely not seeing any similarity between the two.

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