> If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides.
Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control.
The implications will not end up being anti-large-corporation or pro-sharing. If you can prevent someone from re-implementing a spec or building a client that speaks your API or building a work-a-like, it will be the large corporations that exersize this power as usual.
We should be removing IP law entirely, not strengthening it to cover entire classes of problem even when implemented entirely differently. Same for anyone trying to claim "colorful monster creatures" as innately Pokemon IP. Just because someone climbed a mountain first doesn't mean they own it forever. Nobody should be honouring any of these claims.
Nor should we be treating AI models themselves as respected IP. They're built on everyone else's data. Throw away this whole class of law, it's irrelevant in this new world.
Well we could try fixing the forever part. Copyright is out of control. I’d like to see a world with much less power given to IP. Sometimes I even say I want it eradicated entirely. But realistically we should start by cutting things back. Maybe give software an especially short copyright period.
Reset it back to 20 years and make that a hard limit for both patents and copyright. No renewals. Zero exceptions. Let the market sort the rest out.
There's always going to be downsides and edgecases when granting any party a monopoly over anything. At least if it's limited to 2 decades any unintended consequences, philosophical objections, and etc are hopefully kept within reason.
That would be insane for aerospace software, where you might spend most of that time getting the code certified (required to break the $0 revenue threshold), let alone paying back your costs and then making an actual profit.
Meanwhile, there are cases where copyright of more than 2 years is overkill.
I don't know what, but it seems like we need some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed.
Is copyright meaningful for aerospace software? I'm largely unfamiliar with that domain but I have trouble imagining that (for example) Boeing cares much about people redistributing or hacking on the control software for a 777. How would that impact their bottom line?
I could understand for medical devices maybe but even then it seems like the software is a tiny part of the overall cost of a given design. A competitor could already do a clean room reimplementation in that case.
But I guess it wouldn't be all that bad if there were a carefully crafted extension for government certified software that was explicitly tied to the length of the certification process.
The only problem with this certified software exception is I foresee they'll write the law as "expiration timer starts when software has finished certification" then some lobby group will get the regulatory departments to adopt a new process of partial certification where said software is usable in devices but the 'finished certification' never gets reached so the copyright gets dragged out forever.
Nope, it falls more under trade secrets than copyright.
If you do something that requires stealing the code (publishing it, selling it, etc) the company can legally fuck you up.
Now, once it's in tbe wind, it becomes almost impossible to pursue from a practical point of view, as any implementer can claim trade secrets to avoid showing you the code.
If certification is the actual cost, you don't need copyright, at all. SQLite is in the public domain. Your moat is the certification itself, not the code.
I can't use SQLite for aviation even though it was certified.
I can't even claim FIPS compliance for my software without going through an expensive process, even though I only use FIPS approved primitives.
Building on certified/compliant libraries helps, but their vendors can certainly contractually make me pay for it.
All OSS libraries have a warranty disclaimer; using them according to even those licenses automatically excludes "fitness for a particular purpose."
Why would public domain software be any different?
The moat is the certification process, not the code itself. "I copied this from somewhere after it was already certified" might fast track something, but it's not gonna fly with "certification was good, done."
Wait for the great new times when an AI will certify aerospace, automotive and medical SW. Waiting for that. It will be 1000x better and faster than the existing processes
Have you seen the quality of regular software though? And the failure rate of regular physical items? The only reason I trust aircraft is because of the process.
Consider if you will that if some guy were to fly a drone the size of a car that he knocked together in his garage over a residential area people would not accept that. Yet private pilots in cessnas fly over neighborhoods constantly.
Not quite in my opinion. The output of an LLM from a simple prompt falls into the public domain, but if you also give a copyrighted work as input, the mechanistic transformation performed will not alter the original license (same as encoding a video does not change its license).
But we also know from other research that LLMs don't actually do mechanistic translations. Even when they are asked to and say that they did, they're basically rewriting the code from their training data
It would be interesting to see a court ruling that the output of LLMs trained on copyleft code are licensed under the GPL ... and all other viral licenses simultaneously
It's new, fast-moving technology, and the courts are slow and expensive.
It would take two stubborn businesses with a lot of money deciding that it is better to battle it out than focus on their business. Something like IBM v SCO or Oracle v Google.
No, the copyright is the colour of the bits, and red bits with a comment saying "these bits are blue" are not blue bits, but you may be prosecuted for fraud.
If the LLM reproduces a human's copyrighted work, then that copyright still stands. This is, in effect, the same as photocopying someone else's writing. The LLM was trained on the copyrighted work, is incapable of producing new copyrightable work, so if it duplicates the original work then the original author's copyright still stands.
If that occurs and it’s a substantial enough body of output that it is itself copyrightable and not covered by fair use. Confluence of those conditions is intentionally rare.
There was a recent case that everyone has been describing as "LLM output can't be copyrighted" but what it actually said was you can't register the AI as the author.
This is not true, and I'd love to see some actual citation here.
The courts have repeatedly said that copyright only applies to human creativity. The Supreme Court explicitly said this when they refused to hear the appeal:
> "We affirm our decision to refuse registration for the Work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to be eligible for copyright protection."
So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright.
The related case about patents is more supportive of the narrative that AIs cannot be authors (see https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...), specifically: "Here, there is no ambiguity: the Patent Act
requires that inventors must be natural persons; that is,
human beings."
The patent situation is that the Act says that inventor must be an individual, which the courts are interpreting to mean a human, so the LLM cannot be named as the inventor. So, in this case, yes, this is just saying that an LLM cannot be named as the inventor of a patent. That's not the same thing as the courts are saying with copyrights.
> So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright.
They're saying that the LLM can't be the author.
Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt that contains human creativity, it performs a deterministic mathematical transformation on the prompt to produce a derivative text, and you want to copyright that, claiming yourself as the author. What happens then?
If you think the answer is that you can't, how do you distinguish that from what happens when someone writes source code and has a compiler turn it into a binary computer program? Or do you think that e.g. Windows binaries can't be copyrighted because they were compiled by a machine?
The part that the human created, the prompt, can be copyrighted.
The part that the LLM created, cannot be.
Copyright in code works exactly the same way: the source code is copyrighted. The binary code is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. This is well-established.
IMO the bigger question is how would you even tell if a work was generated by an LLM? There's a ton of code being written out there; the folks who generated it are going to claim they authored it for copyright purposes, and those who want to use it are going to claim it was LLM-generated. So what happens?
The alleged author, when bringing a copyright infringement suit, will submit testimony claiming they wrote it. Parties to the suit will have a chance to present arguments and evidence. Then, the claim will be adjudicated by a judge and/or jury.
That code isn't going to be open source. And if you use someone else's closed source code you are violating laws that have nothing to do with copyright.
I'm not sure I understand. I'm not talking about stolen/leaked code here. I'm saying: imagine you claim you're the author of some piece of code. You may or may not have written it with an LLM, but even if so, assume you have the full rights to all the inputs. You post it publicly on GitHub. You don't attach a license, or perhaps you attach a restrictive license that doesn't permit much beyond viewing. Someone comes across your code, finds it brilliant, and wants to use it. If that code was non-copyrightable (such as generated via an LLM), then they're fine doing it without your permission, no? But if that code was copyrightable, then they're not permitted to do so, correct?
So now consider two questions:
1. You actually didn't use an LLM, but they believe & claim you did. Who has the burden of proof to show that you actually own the copyright, and how do they do so?
2. They write new code that you feel is based on yours. They claim they washed it through an LLM, but you don't believe so. Who has the burden of proof here and how do they do so?
1. You copy their code. They bring a copyright claim (let's assume this isn't a DMCA thing and they're actually bringing a claim to court). Your defence is "the LLM wrote it so no copyright attaches". Since they're asserting their copyright claim, they would have to provide evidence for that claim (same as in any other copyright case), including providing evidence that a human wrote it (which is new, and required to defeat your defence).
2. They copy your code. You bring a copyright case. Their defence is "I used an LLM to wash the code without copying". Since they're not disputing your copyright claim to the original code, you don't have to defend or prove your copyright. But you do have to prove that their code infringes on your copyright, which would mean proving that the LLM copied your code when creating the new code. This has been done before by demonstrating similarity.
> What makes the leak illegal other than copyright? The occasional piece of software might be a trade secret, but a person downloading a preexisting leak isn't affected by those laws.
That's completely false as far as I'm aware. Where did you see this? A simple web search shows numerous sources to the contrary. Are you confusing them with patents by any chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
I think it can be copyrighted or is a very complex legal issue. Coding support is used in commercial apps where copyrights are fully reserved. I cannot be feasibly determined if any output is purely LLM or not.
I would be okay with just keeping it but limiting it severely. If you release music and you can't sell enough albums in 20 years, that's not societies problem. A lot of artists release albums every 1 - 3 years anyway, so they're always selling some records, or were before streaming became the way to "own" music. Most make their money off of concerts anyway.
For movies and shows, charge and increasing fee to renew the copyright. Eventually studios will give up certain movies. The older the movie the more you pay.
We could also just have some of the rights go away after X amount of years.
Maybe after so much time it's still not legal to copy the original work, but it is legal to make a cover song, or a derivative work using the same character.
At another point maybe it's no longer to illegal to copy for free, but it is still illegal to sell without permission.
I personally think we should have shorter limits for non-creator owners of copyright, and for creators it should be like 20 years or death whichever comes last. I also think compulsory licensing should exist for everything.
The problem here is that large companies can do whatever they want and regular people cannot. Don't worry, they won't be allowing you the same rights as these companies.
Yeah, I really don't think we want APIs to be protected by IP. But in this case it isn't just the API, there were also tests involved. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that if you used a test suite to get an agent to implement some code, the code is a derivative product of the test code.
What exactly is the difference between "a machine-readable contract for what the output has to be" and "source code"?
What is the difference between an "agent" and a "compiler"?
For that matter, what is the difference between "I got an agent to provide a high level description" and a decompiler?
What is the difference between ["decompiling" a binary, editing the resulting source, recompiling, and redistributing] and [analyzing the behavior of a binary, feeding that description into an LLM, generating source code that replicates that behavior, editing that, recompiling and redistributing]?
Takeaway: we are now in a world where software tools can climb up and down the abstraction stack willy nilly and independently of human effort. Legal tools that attempt to track the "provenance" of "source code" were already shaky but are now crumbling entirely.
And the whole Adobe pdf thing and the whole Microsoft word thing. And the whole ibm pc thing. Imagine if we were forced to keep using ibm from when they lost their way until now simply because anti-ai luddites were able to scare monger
I would wager that the vast majority of people commenting here about the pitfalls of AI, especially as it relates to governance and laws, are heavy users of AI, recognize the import and value it brings, and find ways to utilize it more themselves, so not sure using an ad-hominem dismissal of very valid objections are going to be effective.
(side bar: the phrase "anti-<whatever> luddites" is way, way overused, especially here. Let's get more creative, people!)
And yet the term luddite seems to fit the anti-ai crowd perfectly. They are largely concerned about employment (and more generally economic stability) and to that end seek measures intended to protect workers.
There's also some environmentalist concerns which the term luddite again fits perfectly. You just have to generalize, transferring laterally from economic wellbeing to environmental wellbeing.
So I don't think GP qualified as an ad hominem dismissal but rather an accurate description of the situation. Take what's being discussed (restrictions on specifications and interoperability), project it backwards in history, and imagine what an alternate present day would look like. I think it would be pretty bad.
>They are largely concerned about employment (and more generally economic stability) and to that end seek measures intended to protect workers.
Pffft no. Most of us think that AI is being used as a political trick - like firing unionized workers "to replace them with AI" and then hiring new un-unionized workers to replace them, 2 weeks later. Replace the AI with an empty cardboard box labeled "AI" in black marker, and nothing changes.
See also: using AI to launder pirated material, for big businesses.
>a political trick - like firing unionized workers
1. Since when have companies needed trillions of dollars of AI to do that? In the US they've been able to get away with getting rid of unions for decades now.
2. Since when has HN given a shit about unions. Posting about unions, at least till recently has been a great way of getting your comment downvoted to [dead] in one easy step. For longer than LLMs have existed the HN answer to unions was "They are just there to keep me as an SWE from making as much money as I can". Only now do we see a little bit of pushback now that their heads may be next on the chopping block.
It'd be interesting (earnestly!) to see someone make a solid case for AI reimplementation being bad but that the original (afaik) "clean room" project, Compaq's reimplementation of IBM's PC BIOS (something most people seem to see as a righteous move toward openness and freedom), was good.
Our foreparents of FOSS (e.g. RMS) fought to destroy copyright. Copyleft was a subversive mechanism to "neutralize" copyright using the laws of copyright against itself.
Hypothetically, I think this trail of suggestion of treating specs as intellectual property would simply destroy copyright for software, which is what we (the people who believe in FOSS) want. There is already case law protecting specs (e.g. Java)
Copyright has always benefited those with power, down to the very first instance: Albrecht Durer bullying little children who wanted to make inferior copies of his prints so that their familities could enjoy the art. Durer insisted the art was only for nobles. Ab initio
It is not aout throwing the right to implement things away. As long as it is done according to the license of the works modified or copied, one can do that. What this is against is, that people wash away a license, that is meant to keep things open, transparent and free. It enables businesses to go back to completely proprietary systems, which will impact your rights.
I am for keeping the licenses in place, as long as there is any copyright at all on software. If we get rid of that, then we can get rid of copyleft licenses and all others too. But of course businesses and greedy people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want copyleft to disappear, but _their_ software, oh no, no one may copy that! Double standards at their best.
You're asking for exactly the same cake. You want for the GPL to pass through this process, but not the proprietary licenses that the original GNU tools were washing away.
(the paradox of copyleft is that it does tend to push free software advocates in a direction of copyright maximalism)
What if there was a special exemption for using a specification if you open source (or open hardware) the result for some definition roughly (or exacactly) equivalent to the OSI definition of open source, or FSFs definition of free software?
Although I think the chance of that happening is effectively zero.
>Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it
Our "foreparents" weren't competing with corporations with unlimited access to generative AI trained on their work. The times, they're-a-changin'.
You're rehashing the argument made in one of the articles which this piece criticizes and directly addresses, while ignoring the entirety of what was written before the conclusion that you quoted.
If anyone finds themselves agreeing with the comment I'm responding to, please, do yourself a favor and read the linked article.
I would do no justice to it by reiterating its points here.
I believe the GP post is saying that if we react to the new AI-enabled environment by arbitrarily strengthening IP controls for IP owners, the greatest benefactors will almost certainly be lawyer-laden corporations, not communities, artists, or open source projects. That seems like a reasonable argument.
It seems like the answer is to adjust IP owner rights very carefully, if that's possible. It sounds very hard, though.
The article makes the same point; the quote was taken out of context.
The point the author was making was that the intent of GPL is to shift the balance of power from wealthy corporations to the commons, and that the spirit is to make contributing to the commons an activity where you feel safe in knowing that your contributions won't be exploited.
The corporations today have the resources to purchase AI compute to produce AI-laundered work, which wouldn't be possible without the commons the AI it got its training data from, and give nothing back to the commons.
This state of things disincentivizes contributing to the FOSS ecosystem, as your work will be taken advantage of while the commons gets nothing.
Share-alike clause of the GPL was the price that was set for benefitting from the commons.
Using LLMs trained on GPL code to x "reimplement" it creates a legal (but not a moral!) workaround to circumvent GPL and avoid paying the price for participation.
This means that the current iteration of GPL isn't doing its intended job.
GPL had to grow and evolve. The Internet services using GPL code to provide access to software without, technically, distributing it was a similar legal (but not moral) workaround which was addressed with an update in GPL.
The author argues that we have reached another such point. They don't argue what exactly needs to be updated, or how.
They bring up a suggestion to make copyrightable the input to the LLM which is sufficient to create a piece of software, because in the current legal landscape, creating the prompt is deemed equivalent to creating the output.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
A vibe-coded API implementation created by an LLM trained on open source, GPL licensed code can only be considered one of two things:
— Derivative work, and therefore, subject to the requirement to be shared under the GPL license (something the legal system disagrees with)
— An original work of the person who entered the prompt into the LLM, which is a transformative fair use of the training set (the current position of the legal system).
In the later case, the input to the LLM (which must include a reference to the API) is effectively deemed to be equivalent to the output.
The vibe-coded app, the reasoning goes, isn't a photocopy of the training data, but a rendition of the prompt (even though the transformativeness came entirely from the machine and not the "author").
Personally, I don't see a difference between making a photocopy by scanning and printing, and by "reimplementing" API by vibe coding. A photocopy looks different under a microscope too, and is clearly distinguishable from the original. It can be made better by turning the contrast up, and by shuffling the colors around. It can be printed on glossy paper.
But the courts see it differently.
Consequently, the legal system currently decided that writing the prompt is where all the originality and creative value is.
Consequently, de facto, the API is the only part of an open source program that has can be protected by copyright.
The author argues that perhaps it should be — to start a conversation.
As for who the benefactors are from a change like that — that, too, is not clear-cut.
The entities that benefit the most from LLM use are the corporations which can afford the compute.
It isn't that cheap.
What has changed since the first days of GPL is precisely this: the cost of implementing an API has gone down asymmetrically.
The importance of having an open-source compiler was that it put corporations and contributors the commons on equal footing when it came to implementation.
It would take an engineer the same amount of time to implement an API whether they do it for their employer or themselves. And whether they write a piece of code for work or for an open-source project, the expenses are the same.
Without an open compiler, that's not possible. The engineer having access to the compiler at work would have an infinite advantage over an engineer who doesn't have it at home.
The LLM-driven AI today takes the same spot. It's become the tool that software engineers can and do use to produce work.
And the LLMs are neither open nor cheap. Both creating them as well as using them at scale is a privilege that only wealthy corporations can afford.
So we're back to the days before the GNU C compiler toolchain was written: the tools aren't free, and the corporations have effectively unlimited access to them compared to enthusiasts.
Consequently, locking down the implementation of public APIs will asymmetrically hurt the corporations more than it does the commons.
This asymmetry is at the core of GPL: being forced to share something for free doesn't at all hurt the developer who's doing it willingly in the first place.
Finally, looking back at the old days ignores the reality. Back in the day, the proprietary software established the APIs, and the commons grew by reimplementing them to produce viable substitutes.
The commons did not even have its own APIs worth talking about in the early 1990s. But the commons grew way, way past that point since then.
And the value of the open source software is currently not in the fact that you can hot-swap UNIX components with open source equivalents, but in the entire interoperable ecosystem existing.
The APIs of open source programs are where the design of this enormous ecosystem is encoded.
We can talk about possible negative outcomes from pricing it.
Meanwhile, the already happening outcome is that a large corporation like Microsoft can throw a billion dollars of compute on "creating" MSLinux and refabricating the entire FOSS ecosystem under a proprietary license, enacting the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy they never quite abandoned.
It simply didn't make sense for a large corporation to do that earlier, because it's very hard to compete with free labor of open source contributors on cost. It would not be a justifiable expenditure.
What GPL had accomplished in the past was ensuring that Embracing the commons led to Extending it without Extinguishing, by a Midas touch clause. Once you embrace open source, you are it.
The author of the article asks us to think about how GPL needs to be modified so that today, embracing and extending open-source solutions wouldn't lead to commons being extinguished.
Which is exactly what happened in the case of the formerly-GPL library in question.
I think the article in fact reaches the exact opposite conclusion it should. I'm not really sure how useful it is to talk about sharing and commons and morals when the point raised was about what is possible. The prescription includes copyleft APIs. These are not possible under Oracle v Google. And you could point it out if I'm wrong but the article doesn't discuss what would happen if Congress acted to reverse Oracle v Google (IMO a cosmically bad idea).
Adding even more intellectual property nonsense isn't going to work. The real solution is to force AI companies to open up their models to all. We need free as in freedom LLMs that we can run locally on our own computers.
I agree. But IMHO that ship has sailed. This should have been stop it when OpenAI went for-profit.
If you want to build a new world with out this, we can't do it while we are supporting the very companies that are creating the problem. The more power you give them, the strong they get and the weaker we become.
I think focus needs to shift completely off of for-profit companies. Although, not sure how that is going to happen..lol
From the fact that copyright infringement is trivial and done at massive scales by pretty much everyone on a daily basis without people even realizing it. You infringe copyright every time you download a picture off of a website. You infringe copyright every time you share it with a friend. Everybody does stuff like this every single day. Nobody cares. It is natural.
> GPL itself was precisely the "intellectual property nonsense"
Yes. In response to copyright protection being extended towards software. It's a legal hack, nothing more. The ideal situation would have been to have no copyright to begin with. The corporation can copy your code but you can copy theirs too. Fair.
> Pray tell how you would do that without some "intellectual property nonsense".
Intellectual property is irrelevant to AI companies.
Intellectual property is built on top of a fundamental delusion: the idea that you can publish information and simultaneously control what people do with it. It's quite simply delusional to believe you can control what people do with information once it's out there and circulating. The tyranny required to implement this amounts to totalitarian dictatorships.
If you want to control information, then your only hope is to not publish it. Like cryptographic keys, the ideal situation is the one where only a single copy of the information exists in the entire universe.
AI companies are not publishing any information. They are keeping their models secret, under lock and key. They need exactly zero intellectual property protection. In fact such protections have negative value to them since it restricts the training of their models.
> We don't exactly get to hold Sam Altman at gunpoint to dictate our terms.
Sure you do. The whole point of government is to do just that. Literally pass some kind of law that forces the corporations to publish the model weights. And if the government refuses to do it, people can always rise up.
> Even if all models were open, we're not at the point where it would create an equal playing field.
Why don't they, there have been lawsuits over just these behaviors in the past. Hell, even the multiple representations of the picture in computer memory have had to have allowances.
Copyright is a gigantic fucking mess that the US has forced over a large chunk of the world.
It depends if you count the ones that were settled behind NDAs with large companies with unknown amounts being paid out that are ticking time bombs waiting to go off in the future.
let's just count the ones we know about? you sound evasive;)
Remember the original poster said that any time my browser downloads a picture on any website (which is a technical requirement to show it) I am infringing on those rights. If that is US court opinioon that would be absolutely stupid.
Of course if you reshare some work that actually is somebody's property you can be totally infringing. Which makes total sense. Except when big tech does the same to us (LLM and diffusion training) it's suddenly ok and that's insane
Copyright is the right to make copies. The creator of a work has a government granted monopoly on that right.
When I download a picture from a website and save it to my machine, I am making a copy of it. If the photographer has not given me explicit permission to do so, then I have infringed on their rights by making an unauthorized copy of their work.
The mere existence of licenses like the creative commons refutes your argument. They would not be necessary if you could just download whatever without infringing copyrights.
You might be thinking of fair use, but that's an affirmative defence. Every time someone has copied someone elses artwork and modified it into a meme, that's copyright infringement and remains so even if is eventually ruled as fair use. If you make a fair use claim, you don't deny infringement, you make the claim that you were allowed to infringe.
So... People are going to rise up? What makes you think most of them have enough slack in their finances to pack up and haul off to D.C.? Only the Elites do, and they pay full time lobbyists to do exactly that to make sure laws like you mention never pass. Not saying it can't work. Just saying it the game is rigged against the very people you want to rise up and in favor of the ones who'd rather you stayed in bed.
If people don't rise up they will become soylent green. Over the long term, AI threatens to replace all human labor. It cannot remain locked away in corporate servers. This is an existential issue. The ultimate logic of capitalism is that unproductive people need not be kept alive since they add nothing but cost. So either we free AI, collapse the very idea of having an economy and transcend capitalism into a post-scarcity society, or we will be enslaved and genocided by those who control the AIs.
Hence why we see more and more pushes control communication on the internet. Going to be hard to free AI when a panopicon is turned against us to prevent exactly that.
I mean. Yeah. GPL's genius was that it used Copyright, which proprietary enterprise wouldn't dare dismantle, to secure for the public a permanent public good.
Pretty sure no one, (but me anyway) saw overt theft of IP by ignoring IP law through redefinition coming. Admittedly I couldn't articulate for you capital would skill transfer and commoditize it in the form of pay to play data centers, but give me a break, I was a teenager/twenty something at the time.
I agree with the comment and find the linked article motivated reasoning at best. It's easy to find something "morally good" when it aligns with what you wanted. But plenty of people at Oracle, at IBM, at Microsoft, at Nintendo, at Sony and plenty of other companies whose moats have been commoditized by open source knockoffs don't find such happenings to be "morally good". And even if in general you think that "more freedom" justifies these sorts of unauthorized clones, then Oracle V. Google was at best a lateral move, as Java was hardly a closed ecosystem. One also wonders how far the idea of "more freedom" = "good" goes. How does (did if Qualcom's recent acquisition changes the position) the author feel about the various chinese knockoff clones of the Arduino boards and systems? Undeniably they were a financial good for hobbyists and the maker world alike, and they were well within the "legal" limits, and certainly they "opened" the ecosystem more. But were they "good"? Was the fact that they competed and undersold Arduino's work without contributing anything back and making it harder financially for Arduino to continue their work a "moral good"?
If "more freedom" is your goal, then this rewrite is inherently in that direction. It didn't "close" the old library down. The LGPL version remains under its license, for anyone to use and redistribute exactly as it always has. There is just now also an alternative that one can exercise different rights with. And that doesn't even get into the fact that "increased freedom" was never a condition of being allowed to clone a system from its interfaces in the first place. It might have been a fig leaf, but some major events in the legal landscape of all this came from closed reimplementations. Sony v. Connectix is arguably the defining case for dealing with cloning from public interfaces and behavior as it applies to emulators of all kinds, and Connectix Virtual Gamestation was very much NOT an open source or free product.
But to go a step further, the larger idea of AI assisted re-writes being "good", even if the human developers may have seen the original code seems to broadly increase freedoms overall. Imagine how much faster WINE development can go now that everyone that has seen any Microsoft source code can just direct Claude to implement an API. Retro gaming and the emulation scene is sure to see a boost from people pointing AIs at ay tests in source leaks and letting them go to town. No our "foreparents" weren't competing with corporations with unlimited access to AI trained on their work, they were competing with corporations with unlimited access to the real hardware and schematics and specifications. The playing field has always been un-level which was why fighting for the right to re-implement what you can see with your own eyes and measure with your own instruments was so important. And with the right AI tools, scrappy and small teams of developers can compete on that playing field in a way that previous developers could only dream of.
So no, I agree with the comment that you're responding to. The incredible mad dash to suddenly find strong IP rights very very important now that it's the open source community's turn to see their work commoditized and used in ways they don't approve of is off-putting and in my opinion a dangerous road to tread that will hand back years of hard fought battles in an attempt to stop the tides. In the end it will leave all of us in a weaker position while solidifying the hold large corporations have on IP in ways we will regret in the years to come.
Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?
Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on.
Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.
I think they moved chardet from GPL to MIT? If the maintainer made future versions proprietery, they'd surely be forked and then kicked out of the python package repo?
Nobody that is not already writing (L)GPL licensed software wants to pull LGPL licensed libraries into his software. I'm not a lawyer. If you have it in separate object artefacts that you can dynamically link to, you should be fine. Everything else may be more difficult.
Anthropic wanted to put those restrictions in the contract. OpenAI said they'll just trust their own "guardrails" in the training, they don't need it in the contract. (I'm not sure I believe "guardrails" can prevent mass surveillance of civilians?)
Very gracious of OpenAI to say Anthropic should not be designated a supply chain risk after sniping their $200 million contract by being willing to contractually let the government do whatever they like without restrictions.
It cannot really oversee this. If you can decompose a problem into individual steps that are not, in themselves, against the agent's alignment, it's certainly possible to have the aggregate do so.
How confident are we, with OpenAI's recent very large contribution to Trump's PAC, that OpenAI wasn't working to get Anthropic designated a supply chain risk behind the scenes? I don't want to be too paranoid here but given Sam's reputation and cui bono I don't think we can really rule this out either.
>(I'm not sure I believe "guardrails" can prevent mass surveillance of civilians?)
Right, wouldn't they need a moderation layer that could, for example, fire if it analyzed & labeled too many banal English conversations?
They really gave training credit for guardtrails? I mean, it could perhaps reject prompts about designing social credit systems sometimes, but I can't imagine realistic mitigations to mass domestic surveillance generally.
I’ve been using it for 18 years. It’s significantly worse than it used to be in terms of basic reliability. I was already debating a move, but didn’t really want to. This price hike, in the context of all the investors they took on, just seals the deal.
The email I got with individual plan went from $35.88 USD / year to $47.88 USD
The new price then is $4/month. From $3/month. (So still 33% increase, similar to family plan in OP].
I found it very cheap before, which is part of what encouraged me to get it in the first place, vs trying to do something free. Would I have signed up for it originally at this price? I don't know. But it's not enough to make me switch to a competitor now, or try to find a way to do password management for free -- so they predicted succesfully for me that they'd keep me as a customer. Even though annoyed.
Definitely can't go back to having no password management. (I also use it for TOTP and passkey).
If I was on all Apple/iOS, I'd probably just use iCloud. But I need multi-OS-vendor support.
What one actually needs these days is not something one can get a reasonable UX for free for. (unless you only need apple OS's maybe? Or only chrome?). There's really no alternative. I think they realized that, and that they were leaving money on the table. I got 1Passowrd originaly when I needed TOTP, and wanted something that was multi-device and secure, and certainly didn't want to host it myself. I don't know what else I'd use.
Sync requires a server, however server does not see any secret data, it is only used to relay encrypted hash-chained ops log between devices. It's intended to be self-hosting friendly - server is single binary backed by SQLite.
It's project is early-alfa, CLI app, Keepass import and sever/sync work for the most part, there is MacOS app in progress and plans for a iOS app and a browser extension.
Not ready for production and it's not audited.
I'm currently using KeepassXC/Keepasium with Syncting, but I want a better solution - something that supports trouble-free sync natively and allows me to own the system
I do not want to self host either, for exactly the same reasons.
However, I do want to have full control of my secret data beyond the secrets themselves, ideally w/out self hosting, i.e. I want to have crypto-proven control over whom I'm sharing secrets with, I want to have have cryto-level assurance that the service cannot use recovery/escrow mechanism to unlock my secrets data stored on the cloud w/out my consent.
Apple Passwords comes closest to what I want, but it's not cross platform.
I'm going to follow your project, it looks good. It's "alpha" btw. I wouldn't usually correct but as you're posting about something you want people to look at you might be interested in a correction.
Have you tried StrongBox? It uses standard KeePass vaults and covers the Apple platforms, sync the file with whatever you like and use any KeePass client for Android, Windows, and others. Strongbox is $25/year, but has a trial. If I remember correctly, the Windows and Android clients I chose are both free (of cost).
Note: no affiliation with the developer, I just discovered it from a post similar to this, having never heard of it, and thought your needs sounded similar to mine.
> After you set up iCloud for Windows, you can use iCloud Passwords to access your passwords in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Firefox using a browser extension. You can also manage your passwords in the iCloud Passwords app.
I haven’t use this on Windows, but the Apple Passwords extension on Chromium browsers (maybe all non-Safari browsers) is rather annoying. Every time I launch the browser I need to type in a random 6 digit code to link the session to the extension. As a result, I never actually close my browser and get annoyed when I see there is an update that wants me to restart the app.
similar, keepass synced with google drive. sure it's on some platform, but if my master file is stolen I feel like it taking ~1s and 128MB per guess it's unfeasible for my file to be cracked.
I don't knowingly have any live cameras or microphones in my home other than my laptop and phone (I know those are big "buts", but still), and I plan to keep it that way.
I remind myself of this no matter how much convenience I may be missing out on. (Getting a TV without em is kinda hard!)
Planning in advance, same for any AR stuff, not in my life, I'm sticking to it.
I've just accepted that Microsoft, Google, and Meta all have a constant wiretap in my office (on account of my Windows PC, Android smartphone, and Meta VR headset).
It's rather dystopian to just know and accept this, but there's really no alternative if you want to participate in modern society at a normal capacity (sans the VR headset, that really isn't a necessity).
Something something, keep your enemies closer, right?
Unless you watch actual TV theres no reason to buy an actual TV in my opinion. You can get nicely large monitors and displays for pretty cheap, and a minipc or even a stick pc and youre good to go.
Both of my 'TV's are big monitors with some lenovo minipcs running debian. Hardwired, but i could wifi them if i want.
If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.
It's only a short term solution, as all countries around the world (even those third-world ones, with current fertility rate above 4.0) are experiencing lower birthrates every year. See the movie birthgap
As long as people from those countries want to come to the USA, it would be a problem for those countries and not the USA.
However, "those third-world ones with current fertility rates above 4.0" probably have a ways to drop before it actually becomes a problem for them, couple few generations or so. In that time, the context for all of this could change (50 years ago, people were more worried about too much reproduction? Who knows in another 50).
In fact, for whatever reasons, the most predictable trend seems to be that fertility rates are inversely correlated with standard of living. As standard of living goes up, fertility goes down and vice versa. if those "third world ones" actually drop their fertility to "first world" levels, it would probably mean that their standard of living is such that immigration to the USA won't be so appealing either.
At that point, it seems the global social political context is changed enough that we will have an entirely different set of problems and solutions that are hard to predict now.
I have been using GitHub since 2011 and it's undeniable that the performance of the website have been getting worse. The new features that are constantly being added are certainly a factor, but I think the switch to client-side rendering that obviously shifted the load from their server to our browsers and also tend to produce ridiculously large and inefficient DOMs[1] is the main cause.
If you want a practical example, here you go. I'm a Nixpkgs commiter and every time I make a pull request that backports some change to the stable branch, GitHub unprompted starts comparing my PR against master. If I'm not fast enough to switch the target branch within a couple of seconds it literally freezes the browser tab and I may have to force quit it. Yes, the diff is large, but this is not acceptable, and more importantly, it didn't happen a few years ago.
I was confused what OP is talking about, becuase in all the screenshots I don't see any unlabelled icons, I just see icons next to words.
I was wondering... is OP in fact saying it should be just words, without the icons next to them? Which is an opinion you could have, I think it's not entirely unreasonable (although as you say Nielson contradicts), but I wasn't entirely confident it is the point OP is making... or are they just talking about unlabelled icons (few if any? I'm not sure?) in those screenshots?
OP is talking about the third example image, where there are these "stars" icons in the title row of the table. It does look like what people are using to mean AI-something, but indeed.. AI what?
What is the first image supposed to demonstrate? Very confusing post to me.
Other people in the thread I see are arguing the OP is saying the icons next to text would be better off as just text without icons, the icons still make things messy and increase cognitive load. (which again, I think is worth considering at least, sure!) But you don't think it is?
I think I'm just going to put this away concluding it's a very unsuccesful article at whatever it's trying to do.
It doesn't matter if the icon is ever so slightly ambigious compared to other systems, the label text next to it removes any ambiguity and makes the message perfectly clear, as long as it is consistent within a product.
To any newcomer to a new system, most icons don't make sense, so the text next to it is an invaluable hidden tutorial.
OP didn't stop to see that the circled checkmarks look like clocks, so it just highly opinionated.
Our foreparents fought for the right to implement works-a-like to corporate software packages, even if the so-called owners did not like it. We're ready to throw it all away, and let intellectual property owners get so much more control.
The implications will not end up being anti-large-corporation or pro-sharing. If you can prevent someone from re-implementing a spec or building a client that speaks your API or building a work-a-like, it will be the large corporations that exersize this power as usual.
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