> OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.
This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. Who needs attribution when people are actually _using_ something you made; you saved someone a good deal of time trying to write a solution themselves, perhaps.
And if that's your goal, then you release your code under one of the more permissive licenses (MIT, CC0, etc). As the developer and copyright holder, that's totally your right and privilege, and that's how you exercise it. When your license explicitly states that there's terms of use attached, then copyright law ensures that violation of those terms invalidate your rights to use the code. If we're gonna say that copyright law doesn't apply to open source licenses then we have to go ahead and in all fairness state that copyright law no longer applies to proprietary software licenses either, because it's the same laws that protect both. Making something open source doesn't mean you're just giving people the right to do anything they please with the code unless you explicitly state that you're doing so by choosing a properly permissive license for your code.
> This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer.
That's fine if your project says that. But there are a very many of projects which specifically say otherwise.
Right I'm just saying your argument only holds for licenses like GPL, not in general as you suggested.
edit:
Not implying you're wrong, just moreso that there's a large chunk of people who aren't going to be motivated to fight on your behalf. I understand there are some useful areas such as hardware drivers for GPL, but it's simply not an IP constraint that sounds at all fun to work on as a volunteer.
That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me).
I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice as well without having seen any of it.
People are seeing the big picture. That's all the more reason to make sure that, as new tools get developed, they treat it as a requirement to actually respect Open Source (licensing, credit, provenance, copyleft, patent non-aggression, and all the other reasons people use such licenses), rather than just abusing it as an input.
Perhaps I should have said idealistic. I mean I've seen several people make demands like they're somehow already in a courtroom with Microsoft. No mention made of the fact that this is likely covered under fair use. If it isn't, then basically every deep neural net trained on a web dataset is in violation. This means open works like from University at Heidelberg (Latent Diffusion, VQGAN) or EleutherAI (GPT-J) would be impossible.
Like, maybe you could all get together and learn how machine learning works and train your own clean model? That feels far more positive and in the spirit of progress to me. I guess from my point of view it's clear - no laws will save you from the next wave of large language models. The weights are trivially distributed meaning once it's trained it's more just a fact of life we all have to deal with. So making demands when you have basically zero leverage rather than admitting defeat and working within the new constraints of progress.
I just feel like it's an inherently philosophical position and people are acting like code theft hasn't been common practice for the history of all software.
This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. Who needs attribution when people are actually _using_ something you made; you saved someone a good deal of time trying to write a solution themselves, perhaps.