You’re conflating open source and free software with public domain. Open source software licenses are completely dependent on software copyright. This means that if software copyright were eliminated, open source licenses would become completely unenforceable. We may be headed in this direction anyway, but I just thought I would make the point.
The GPL gives you the right to access and modify the source code of software you use. A lack of copyrights does not mean that the creators have to share the source code with you. In fact, it means that anyone can take GPL software and turn it into closed source software
Sure but that’s mostly irrelevant in practice now. Gpl was notoriously unenforced so this aspect of “getting source code” almost never yielded to much in practice. FSF did a great job with limited resources it has but as code copyright is basically gone now and reverse engineering is so accessible we can actually empower real free software that is fully transparent and verifiable. If you imply that somehow we’ll start regressing existing tools to proprietary software I don’t see that at all.
That would be cool and all, but people stopped reading their code. At work if I can not explain every line of my PR, it will get rejected. I use it as a powerful tool but a lot of people just output code and think their trash belongs in production.
Llms have been great for finding and fixing bugs and cranking out code, but the systems that allow for generation of code at a direct cost of dollars as opposed to the overhead of managing and employing programmers aren’t under the intense pressure to not redo old work and so are disincentivized from either creating or contributing to open source projects.
Hot take: LLMs is the best thing has happened to open source movement:
We’re literally in the golden age of free software
You’re conflating open source and free software with public domain. Open source software licenses are completely dependent on software copyright. This means that if software copyright were eliminated, open source licenses would become completely unenforceable. We may be headed in this direction anyway, but I just thought I would make the point.
Copyleft exists only because of copyright. If there is no copyright there’s no longer a need for copyleft.
It has been wild to see Linux users hope that the GPL is rendered unenforceable.
Why? The entire purpose of GPL is to counteract copyright. If there is no copyright we no longer need GPL either.
The GPL gives you the right to access and modify the source code of software you use. A lack of copyrights does not mean that the creators have to share the source code with you. In fact, it means that anyone can take GPL software and turn it into closed source software
Sure but that’s mostly irrelevant in practice now. Gpl was notoriously unenforced so this aspect of “getting source code” almost never yielded to much in practice. FSF did a great job with limited resources it has but as code copyright is basically gone now and reverse engineering is so accessible we can actually empower real free software that is fully transparent and verifiable. If you imply that somehow we’ll start regressing existing tools to proprietary software I don’t see that at all.
@fruitcantfly @drmoose Just. Wrong. Clearly ‘Linux boosted’ is a worthless accolade.
What is “Just. Wrong”? And what does the label “Linux boosted” have to do with this?
That would be cool and all, but people stopped reading their code. At work if I can not explain every line of my PR, it will get rejected. I use it as a powerful tool but a lot of people just output code and think their trash belongs in production.
Although I agree with you, I had that issue well before AI was a thing:
“I dunno, I just copied it from this StackOverflow post…”
<cut to me raging that someone would do that>
@drmoose @Grandwolf319 Assuming you place zero value on quality, yeah this is great.
Llms have been great for finding and fixing bugs and cranking out code, but the systems that allow for generation of code at a direct cost of dollars as opposed to the overhead of managing and employing programmers aren’t under the intense pressure to not redo old work and so are disincentivized from either creating or contributing to open source projects.