Posted by Brajeshwar 10/26/2024
Say you're deciding between two programs (or AI models)[0], you prefer an open source one, a colleague prefers one that just pretends to be open. You say your choice is preferable because it's open, he says the same about his choice. Then you say the dreaded "well, actually" and either you sound like a fundamentalist or an asshole.
[0]: None of those are truly open source because they're all trained on stolen data. And see? Now I sound like a fundamentalist.
Now, with LLMs, anybody can launder my code and use it to build proprietary software for his own benefit without giving anything back. That is a violation of the spirit of AGPL and hopefully the law too.
When CBS lets you watch a show on their web site, even for free and anonymously, they still own the show and did not grant you any right to re-distribute or re-use it.
What AIs do is also not fair use, because that isn't just about the size of a quote but about usage. A discussion is fair use, excerpting simply to pluck a cherry and present it as your own is not.
I shall write a book titled "The wizdom of BKW", and it will contain merely a single sentence plucked from many other famous and deeply insightful authors. Not a discussion or examination of them, and not even credited to any of them. The book will look like you asked me for advice and insights into human nature and philosophy, and all these gems of insight are my direct answer.
No single quote will be more than a sentence or two. A teeny tiny fraction of the 400-page books they came from.
I don't care if any law currently recognizes that as wrong, it is wrong.
What we need is those open source people with integrity to put the smack down on those willfully abusing and destroying the terms.
If you can't do it with trademarks/certifications/licensing/memberships/etc., do it with mainstream journalism. Like might be being done here, except The Register has long had rare insider knowledge, and is relatively niche. You need to get the message out to everyone who's not already in the know, including lawmakers.
(Incidentally, the FSF also has integrity, but, besides prompting open source by being zero-compromise -- which is fine in their case -- they have an additional challenge of seeming to be clinically incapable of advocacy in situations that are aligned.)
But today, such nuance doesn't exist. The commercial ones have gone full commercial and making no qualms about it (thus the title of this post).
If this attitude continues, all commercial interests in FOSS will be seen with high scepticism unless they have a proven track record of being a good actor.
Free software > open source.
Companies like the flexibility in "open source", even companies who release code as GPL rarely talk about "free software", they are open source companies.
Free Software licenses and Open source licenses are essentially the same (apart a few odd examples).
The difference between the free software movement and the open source software movement is essentially philosophical.
Apart from every example of GPL software, which can't be used under the permissive terms of Open Source. The last person I replied to about this used the word "essentially" here, also. Is there a common source slogan for this belief?
Also, somebody should tell all of the people who keep rewriting GPL stuff in order to have an MIT version.
eh, no, but it's a quite common word to express that idea.
Also:
> for this belief?
> Also, somebody should tell all of the people
Would you consider you might be wrong here? We are several people telling you so.
Is freeware free software? It is rather murky term for me.
If it's just free in price, then "freeware" is the correct term.
Or I download something like Irfanview for free from internet. That for consumer is free software to use...
It is clearly bad term when it can be used to mean entirely different thing in regular and common use.
The point here is that that linguistic peculiarity in just one language doesn't make the word 'free software' invalid or unsuitable, as long as 'free software' is a recognizable term (which it is). This is why FSF makes this explicitly clear with an entire article.
It's because, in my experience, the majority of businesses want to take but do not want to feel any obligation to give back or support.
I thought tech startups were started to con people into thinking they might earn money.
No, Open Source and Free Software are two names for essentially the same thing. The Free Software Foundation has a preference for licenses which go beyond its own Free Software Definition [0] and which are also "Copyleft" [1], but does not define Free Software in a way which requires that it also be Copyleft.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html
This is not substantially true, which is why I assume you've added "essentially" in here. Open Source is Free Software, because anybody can take it and make it anything they want as long as they comply with the minimal license terms. Open Source can be proprietary, too, if somebody takes it, complies with the minimal license terms, and makes it proprietary.
No, it is. The OSI Open Source definition and the FSF Free Software definition are framed differently but require substantially the same things, and for virtually every license on which both have expressed an opinion, they have cone to the same conclusion as to whether it meets each organization’s requirements.
Free Software does not require a license that prevents proprietary re-licensing, that is an additional separate concern beyond the Free Software definition (Copyleft); the FSF generally prefers copyleft licenses, but recognizes non-copyleft licenses as Free Software licenses.
You seem to under the mistaken impression that copyleft is a requirement to meet the Free Software definition, but that has never been the case.
The property of being able to keep changes to oneself is the property of permissive licenses, not opensource. Open source software under copyleft licenses cannot be modified and distributed while withholding changes. The inverse is applicable to FS under permissive license too.
The real difference between free software and open source is in how they treat the software. FS camp considers software as something that should give the users total freedom over the computing devices they own. The software shouldn't constrain or exploit the end user in any manner. This of course needs the source to be open.
OSS camp established open source because they realized the advantages of 'open' source, but didn't like the emphasis on freedom. That's more in line with corporate philosophy - take advantage of unaffiliated talent to increase code volume and quality, without making any commitment to user freedom. This is why many companies completely avoid the term free software. It's also easy to find 'open source' code that's very exploitative towards users, despite being open and using FSF-endorsed licenses.
Regardless if – once OSI establishes their definition(s) – Meta will choose path of adherence or not, they still deserve a paragraph of praise for what they're doing.
As a side note OSI should also recognize that in the era of giant cloud providers protection from predatory market participants is also a thing and should exist as clear licensing option. Mongo, Elastic and Redis drama could be avoided in the future if there was a clear option to protect author side sustainability without affecting open source spirit for end users.
ps. I also believe that "Open <something>" should be protected phrase similar to how "Police", "Federal", "Government" or "Organic" is protected to not mislead the public so we don't have things like "OpenAI" nonsense.
But if you accept contributions from the community for years, and ingrain your product in hundreds of thousands of workflows around the world, and only then decide "holy shit, salaries cost money, best yank our license" that should be a case of fraud and you should be civilly liable, in my opinion
OSI readies controversial open-source AI definition (26.10.2024)
https://github.com/thirdweb-dev/engine?tab=readme-ov-file https://portal.thirdweb.com/engine/self-host
It makes me sad becuase I was working on a getting a team together to build a real opensource and free alternative but once they found thirdweb they all got discouraged thinking that no one will understand why our real open product is diffierent
It's absolutely wild to think the deranged BigScience RAIL license, under which the Bloom LLM was released, is open in any way shape or form. It has more user-harming restrictions than basically any other LLM license out there.