If you are saying that you are making long comments without reading the post

I didn’t say that. I read the post, but did not click through to the other post from December to realize it was part of a pattern.

I’m not really interested in getting into an argument around license choice

That’s fine, you are not beholden to respond to me.

Unfortunately, yes.

Facebook v Power Ventures is probably the strongest anti-scraping ruling, because it held that a simple CAPTCHA is sufficient to qualify as “bypassing technical measures” so as to qualify as hacking under CFAA.

YouTube has a number of technical controls to prevent downloading, and it’s always been considered iffy to mass-download YT vids because all the downloader tools (usually) incorporate some kind of means to bypass their protection schemes.

Perhaps you should have titled the post “AI Code Hollowing Out Copyleft Ecosystem”, then, unless you’re intentionally trying to conflate Open Source with Copyleft (you are, based on your other blog posts). But I remember seeing your post about the “social contract” of OSS last December, and you are in fact exactly who my comment is about:

Copyleft is a reactionary movement from people who turned into the beast they hated in trying to fight it. “Permissive” licenses are FOSS. Copyleft is certainly maybe OSS, but it’s not “Free” (as in either “libre” or “gratis”) if some other person can mandate both that you do something, and what you do. If usage of something is contingent on payment (including payment via feel-good attribution), it’s not free.

I’ll add here: FOSS is also not about some one-sided “covenant” where a creator believes the users of said freely-given software owe them something (money, gratitude, or even just ‘reciprocity’ and attribution). If you’re in OSS for the fuzzy feeling you get when someone forks your repo, or the conviction that OSS contribs are intrinsically good in some nebulous way, it’s no wonder you’re hung up on seeing a transactional return on your labor instead of just knowing it’s out there maybe helping someone, somewhere.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable.

Open source != copyrighted. Public domain source code is also open source.

I hate this trend I see of the FOSS movement retreating from the foundational principle that it started on: Free Sharing of Software.

Not shareware, not ‘libre but not gratis’, not ‘buy me a coffee to get access to the code on my patreon’, not ‘free to look at but not to use as source code’: free period. Libre and gratis.

These non-lawyers traipsing in to make claims about the effect of AI on open source licensing are giving me big “I release my code but only if I can 1) get paid for it and 2) control who and how it’s used” vibes. That’s what’s ‘hollowing-out’ open source.

value leaks out of the project

What value? Value to whom? The value of source code is what it does, i.e. the program it compiles or is interpreted into. That doesn’t change by someone else using it differently than you. Google taking Linux and spinning off Android doesn’t “hurt” Linux. It doesn’t decrease the ‘value’. There’s no universal counter out there that says, “this GPLv2 attribution appears more than someone else’s, so therefore this project is more valuable”, that is being eroded if a company goes and uses it without reprinting the license notice as well. OSS licenses have never prevented that.

I said it before the last time FOSS came up, and I’ll say it again:

FOSS is about propagating software to as many people as possible, to help as many people as possible. It’s not about creating legal barriers to diminish the power of corporations; making tools available to people that are better and cheaper will do that naturally (and you were never going to beat the corpo lawyers anyways trying to enforce licenses).

If your zeal to prevent corporations from ever misusing FOSS leads you to remove some aspect of it (free, open, or source), then you’ve cut off your nose to spite your face.

Damages for what? They’re not making money if it’s free. It’s fine if it’s copied, the only time there would be damages is if they’d lost money or access.

In FOSS, contributing in the open is the principle.

You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.

So the safest bet again is to stay silent, or at least under the radar. Best bet is to not disrupt - succeed at all … ?

Except that ‘success’ in this interpretation seems to assume money, which the big company will beat you at obtaining. Success can just be about a FOSS version of a tool being out there for anyone who wants it, and no company is going to pay the AI costs to build tools they immediate MIT-license (and even if they do, there are then TWO new pieces of FOSS software!), so they may be able to beat you in creating a commodified product, but they aren’t and won’t and arguably intrinsically can’t beat you in bettering someone’s life by having a tool they didn’t before, for free.

We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.

This is a sad reaction to capitalism capitalism-ing. You can’t beat the profit machine by trying to make your profit in the cracks it can’t see, you beat it by giving the thing it wants to profit off of away for free.

The vibrant public ecosystem that created all the innovation and moved it around the world will decline - the forums, the blogs, the “here’s how I built this” will move to local, private spaces.

I highly doubt this. I’ve seen no such shift in any tech space around me. If anything, I actually noticed that every Con I regularly attend has mentioned in their RFP emails that they are being flooded with proposed talks, so people should submit early before they fill up. If private spaces are also growing, that’s great!

I know this is ostensibly an article about Technology, but it’s also an article about Resistance and Praxis, and frankly I think a lot of people run to models of competitive resistance instead of exploring disarming or evasive resistance. You can’t beat Capitalism at commodifying something, but you can prevent Capitalism from commodifying something by removing the characteristics (like cost and scarcity and control) that make something a commodity.

Code is one of the few things that can actually be freely and un-limitedly distributed and re-distributed, which makes it uniquely resistant to commodification, but only if the person making the code is not themself trying to commodify it.

There’s a reason that Linux has only gained ground over time.

I am not Muslim, but my mother and brother are so I grew up in and around Islam. I think the problem with going the route of declaring specific types of software haram would be that whatever criteria you’d set to draw that line would likely eventually get you to a position where using computers is haram; it’s not like there are ethically-sourced microchips, or FOSS replacements for Intel Management Engine (IME) and closed-source firmware, for instance.

There is actually a now-defunct version of Ubuntu called Sabily that my brother used to use, that focused on providing ‘halal’ apps for things like azan notifications.

So I think it’s fine and even good to try at only using FOSS tools as much as possible, but I don’t think it would make sense (or be workable as a strict doctrine) to proscribe non-FOSS software.

IMO the Zip disks, Jaz disks, and MiniDiscs were the last really satisfying physical media formats (UMD was also really cool, but somehow even more niche given it was PSP-specific).

There was something about them that just made you feel like a secret agent using them. Like a prop out of a James Bond movie where the villain keeps their plans.

CDs and DVDs had nothing on them.

The shitty vibe-coded desktop environment/ window manager I made over the past month has a movable taskbar.

The author of that piece would say you protect your code by not open sourcing it (or by using a license that grants no rights to use said source). It’s an incredibly frustrating piece to me, because it presents hampering corporations as more important than not screwing over individual FOSS users.

The reason they blame GPLv3 is because they claim the open sourcing requirements within it are so onerous that corporations just avoid it, making it so that rather than corporations contributing to that software, they often end up supplanting it with their own versions that have alternate licensing, which then not only denies the original author any benefit, but even makes the corporation ‘look good’ to people who don’t realize or care what happened.

It’s so frustrating to me because they’re doing this whole “pragmatism over idealism” claim, while also not acknowledging that FOSS as a movement is the only reason any corporation open sources anything now. They certainly didn’t used to. But the author seemingly would rather people not have any tools made with or by companies, who are benefiting from them financially, than have both corporations and individual users benefit from them. That’s ideology over pragmatism as well.

Capitalism is bad, but it’s bad because it entrenches profit over morality, via the mistaken belief/ false premise that competing interests will average out in the end. It’s not bad because every single output it creates is somehow evil incarnate, which seems to be the author’s gist.

MVV app is super convenient, but I could still use the kiosks without too much added delay. MVVswipe is like 30 seconds to “check out” a ticket, MVV kiosk machine is like 90 seconds. The biggest inconvenience is having to find a kiosk outside of a train station.

Holy hell it’s been a while since I heard that name… I remember putting Cyanogen on my PSP back in the day.

That would be a crazy turnabout given their public banning by Trump from being used by the USFG (mil included).

I’d like to be on a slightly different route around the sun, these days.

There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear “no one can see what I do”, because that’s what snooping is, right?

When I worked at a university IT dept, we’d often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic ‘past’ us.

This absolutely did not kill them. I’ve been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there’s a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn’t make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn’t.

no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain

The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.

Anthropic software just can’t be used to process federal data, but if e.g. Lockheed uses ADP to process internal payroll, and ADP uses a third-party developer to build some software, and that developer uses Claude, that doesn’t snake it’s way back up the chain and invalidate Lockheed’s contracts.

just say ‘doggo’ and ‘w00t’ and ‘roflmao’ a couple times and the AI will peg you as an elder millennial and leave you alone

I’m so mad they’ve switched from their “protect the children” line for Boomers, to “protect the pets” for us Millennials.

we’d better be careful to make sure that we aren’t simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything

You do realize that copyright is solely a function of the federal government, right? There is no state or municipal copyright, it’s already the federal government who decides whether your copyright as a creator is valid or enforceable, or whether to just hand it over to another company/ billionaire.

American == Fascistic == “Make America Great Again”/ Manifest Destiny == Settler Colonialist… viewpoints