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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Also, all this reminds me of drama in the Skyrim and Minecraft modding scenes, when devs publish stuff under Apache or MIT or whatever.
Then the devs find out they don’t like what others are doing with their code. Drama ensues.
…That’s kinda the deal with permissive licenses. Or posting publicly, like here on Lemmy. People will do things you don’t like with your code or content.
Eh, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to contribute to a commons and then get mad when someone comes along and tries to use the commons to undermine the commons.
Like yes, the commons is there to be used… but not to kill the commons.
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
It's kind of a tragedy if you think about it
Really? In front of my Elinor Ostrom poster?
The most important thing is to protect the people's right to use open source / weight AI models without licensing. Because the AI companies permanently monopolizing AI models and collecting rent forever on the commons, that would be a tragedy. It would forever shift the balance of power to use advanced technology.
I'm not using AI.
Well truly profitable applications for LLMs are pretty limited so far, but they will come. Lets say you can replace a tax advisor / accountant with a specialized LLM agent (one that doesn't hallucinate tax code lol). Imagine oyu have an open source project that uses a coding AI agent to frequently update and retrain the tax LLM with the new regulations and laws and unit tests all this. So it's ultimately easy to use, you just talk to the tax AI agent. Or alternatively, because they managed to make open weight LLMs illegal because they are piracy because they use books and posts without permission to train and can't afford to pay the license fees. Now everybody has to use a commercial AI tax service. At the same price at what it cost previously to hire a real human.
As AI models get better they replace human labor. This is a problem under capitalism, otherwise we could just all just be working less and chill. But it gets even worse if "we" (like the 99%) can't make use of open source models. Then the plutocrats get to own this newly replaced labor as free labor and collect rent.
This is why I believe the IP argument of anti-AI is so dangerous. They can afford to pay license fees, we / open source can't. See patents, or see healthcare insurance purposefully making healthcare costs go up.
That's all well and good, but AI makes me want to die, so I'm not using it.
LLMs training on data don't prevent anyone from themselves learning on that data, so I don't see how the commons is going to be killed here.
It heavily dampens the feedback loops which lead to new contributors joining. If more people feel encouraged to just let an LLM hack something for them then fewer things are learned by fewer people, less knowledge is developed and propagated, etc...
And more of that which was shared is worse because there's no quality control in those sharing pipelines, and ironically more ego behind it when the sharer has done less (see: that person in the group project who did nothing useful and took all credit)
Nah if you're a massive AI company and you scrape without contribution, you're a huge piece of shit.
It's just stealing plain and simple like anything else.
They're not a small user getting open source software, they're scraping what is already done to try and make you obsolete.
There are permissive licenses, and then there are copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses go in the direction of "do whatever the fuck you want". Copyleft licenses are more like "use it for whatever the fuck you want but if you change it give it back to everyone else with the same conditions". The people who have projects with copyleft licenses are the ones who are (rightfully) pissed about their projects being used to train AI.
Huggingface isn’t violating copyleft licenses here, I don’t think. And research projects that use it, with citations and documentation, wouldn’t either.
Now, if some business comes along and tries to make proprietary code derived from the dataset, that’s where things get hairy. But the people doing that are responsible for the potential violation, not Huggingface.
They're violating proprietary licenses at the very least
On the other hand, totally did not see this particular shit coming. I wonder if we'll see a rash of "permissive, except LLMs can fuck right off" licenses.
Permissive licences should be the ones to fuck off entirely. GPL or death
I will use whatever the fuck license I want to for my projects
I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is a place for permissive licenses. A great example is reference code for open standards, eg. TCP/IP.
Permissive licences are useful compared to copyleft ones only for unfree actors, which we should fight integrally at every step of the way
No, libraries should remain permissive IMO. Applications can be restrictive if they want to. I just don't see any point in a copyleft library or framework.
No unfree application should ideally be allowed ever again
World runs on them though. I don't mean business to consumer shit, all that can rot in hell. I mean business to business. There's shit out there that's incredibly niche, takes a ton of effort to develop, and there's no way it would ever be achieved without a huge financial incentive (because it's just so niche and it turns out paying tens or hundreds of people takes money). And someone's gotta pay the people writing all your open source code so most of them need day jobs anyway, which will be difficult to have without any commercial software existing. Sometimes the "all our code is GPL, but you can pay us to host it for you" model works, but a lot of the time it doesn't.
Right, I mean I literally published my code openly, so idc lol
"Look, I wrote this neat highly advanced machine vision thing to help people with accessibility needs communicate with loved ones! ❤️. MIT licensed I guess! Let's make the world better!"
Raytheon, Northropp, Boeing, Microsoft, three-letter-agencies suddenly fork it as a base for their own "projects."
😐
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-quits-google-warns-dangers-of-machine-learning
https://medium.com/syncedreview/yolo-creator-says-he-stopped-cv-research-due-to-ethical-concerns-b55a291ebb29
There's some stuff I also would like to work on adjacent to these things but the risk outweigh the good for as long as these psychotic people are in charge (and some things will just generally always be risky).
Institutions with monopoly on violence or companies that they deal with don't care whether software is released as MIT or AGPL, they just take it and build on it. (Maybe that's exactly what you mean though, I'm not sure.)
Hehe yeah I guess that's what I meant. Just making a statement on how software has become I guess, and maybe a bit about how highly permissive licenses might have unintended consequences.
The open source spirit is one of the shining jewels of the human race, but it really sucks that I don't think any of those "You aren't allowed to use my code to make the world a worse place" clauses would actually hold up. =\