| ▲ | skybrian 9 hours ago |
| If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place. Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences. |
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| ▲ | lunar_mycroft 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| People do not have perfect foresight, and the ways open source software is used has significantly shifted in recent years. As a result, people reevaluating whether or not they want to participate. |
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| ▲ | Barrin92 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values. Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery. |
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| ▲ | skybrian 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Open source software is published to the world and used far beyond any single community where certain norms might apply. If you care about what people do with your code, you should put it in the license. To the extent that unwritten norms exist, it's unfair to expect strangers in different parts of the world to know what they are, and it's likely unenforceable. This recently came up for the GPLv2 license, where Linus Torvalds and the Software Freedom Conservancy disagree about how it should be interpreted, and there's apparently a judge that agrees with Linus: https://mastodon.social/@torvalds@social.kernel.org/11577678... | |
| ▲ | jama211 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Inside open source communities maybe. In the corporate world? Absolutely not. Ever. They will take your open source code and do what they want with it, always have. | | |
| ▲ | skybrian 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This varies. The lawyers for risk-adverse companies will make sure they follow the licenses. There are auditing tools to make sure you're not pulling in code you shouldn't. An example is Google's go-licenses command [1]. But you can be sure that even the risk-adverse companies are going to go by what the license says, rather than "community norms." Other companies are more careless. [1] https://github.com/google/go-licenses |
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| ▲ | conradfr 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's not really people, and they don't really use the software. |
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| ▲ | skybrian 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | People training LLM's on source code is sort of like using newspaper for wrapping fish. It's not the expected use, but people are still using it for something. As they say, "reduce, reuse, recycle." Your words are getting composted. | | |
| ▲ | Vegenoid 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nothing says reduce and reuse like building huge quantities of GPUs and massive data centers to run AI models. It’s like composting! |
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