People sometimes miss that copyleft is powered by copyright. Copyleft (which means Linux, Blender, and plenty of other goodness) needs the ability to impose some rules on what users do with your work, presumably in the interest of common good. Such ability implies IP ownership.
This does not mean that powerful interests abusing copyright with ever increasing terms and enforcement overreach is fair game. It harms common interest.
However, it does mean that abusing copyright from the other side and denouncing the core ideas of IP ownership—which is now sort of in the interest of certain companies (and capital heavily invested in certain fashionable but not yet profitable startups) based around IP expropriation—harms common interest just as well.
> People sometimes miss that copyleft is powered by copyright.
That is legally true, but it is also true that copyleft is necessary because of copyright. Without copyright (or if copyright did not apply to software) there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce proprietary software. What was produced could be reverse engineered, or used a binary blobs, and compatible replacements produced.
Where the only choice was keeping the source code a trade secret and obfuscating the distributed form or keep source open the latter would easily dominate.
If copyright law were to be removed, there will still be DRM, SaaSS, trade secret software and publicly released binary-only software without source code, and companies will have the same incentives to use those protection mechanisms as they have now.
IP ownership is important for people to want to create original work. You protect people’s right to own things and benefit from them and this makes them inclined to create more new things. Alternatively, no one owns anything and people create things because they are told to. I think there is strong evidence which system is more powerful.
You are leaving out people creating things because they want to or are paid to (e.g. patrons). People did create things before copyright law, and the quality of creations for those motives is generally higher.
The very widespread use of open source software (and the world's dependence on it) refutes your point.
> Without copyright (or if copyright did not apply to software) there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce proprietary software.
However, what I am saying is that the full truth looks like this:
> Without IP ownership laws, there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce any new software, or any original work at all.
The concept of intellectual property is the motive that gave us the technological process so far, from transistors to transformers.
> People did create things before copyright law, and the quality of creations for those motives is generally higher.
In the same vein you could say that before civilization people did not kill each other, steal from each other, etc. all the time and so we should remove the laws that prosecute murder and theft.
Not at all. Just like the values of personal property or human life, IP ownership laws are a continuation for what naturally existed since before civilization. In a small society, if you did something new and cool and good for community, you gained prestige and respect. Once society grows in numbers and moves towards less trust and evolves from tribal personal conflict resolution towards dedicated legal system, these things become codified in laws.
So not only the concept of IP implicitly existed before civilization, it probably is what gave us civilization. Recognition, prestige, social standing are things that compel each of us individually to drive progress. They exist automatically in a small high trust human society; in a large global low trust society they would be lost if not for legal mechanisms to compensate for it.
> The very widespread use of open source software (and the world's dependence on it) refutes your point.
I am not sure how closely you are following this thread but just in case, you are replying to a thesis that FOSS was made possible by copyleft, and therefore by copyright. As far as I’m concerned, you are yet to present a convincing counter-argument.
> You are leaving out people creating things because they want to or are paid to (e.g. patrons).
Many famous FOSS projects were started by and mostly contributed to by people who had dayjobs and wanted to play with fun stuff in spare time. However, 1) many of these jobs might be threatened because certain corporations use that IP, without licensing it appropriately, to train systems intended to replace them, and 2) the promise to those people was that their work will remain for public benefit—thanks to copyleft and GPL, which are now being eroded, as those voluntary contributors increasingly turn into unpaid programmers for middlemen corporations reselling their work to highest bidders. If you believe that this does not affect the motivations behind FOSS, you do you, I have nothing to say.
While this is a generally true statement (and has echoes in other areas like sovereign citizens), GenAI may make copyright (and copyleft) economically redundant.
While the AI we have now is not good enough to make an entire operating system when asked*, if/when they can, the benefits of all the current licensing models evaporate, and it doesn't matter if that model is proprietary with no source, or GPL, or MIT, because by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code.
But as we're not there yet, I agree with @benlivengood that (most**) OSS projects must treat GenAI code as if it's unusable.
* At least, not a modern OS. I've not tried getting any model to output a tiny OS that would fit in a C64, and while I doubt they can currently do this, it is a bet I might lose, whereas I am confident all models would currently fail at e.g. reproducing Windows XP.
** I think MIT licensed projects can probably use GenAI code, they're not trying to require derivatives to follow the same licence, but I'm not a lawyer and this is just my barely informed opinion from reading the licenses.
I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part:
> by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code.
Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them?
Do you think it would mean they essentially sell GPL’ed code for proprietary use? Would it not affect FOSS, which has been till now partially powered by the promise to contributors that their (often voluntary) work would remain for public benefit?
Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?
> Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable
New techniques are coming, new hardware processes are being developed, and the incremental unit cost is low. Once they fill up the labs, they'll start selling to consumers till the price becomes the cost of a bucket of sand and the cost to power a light-bulb.
> Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them?
When considering current models, it's not in their power to prevent it:
DeepSeek demonstrated big models could be trained very easily for a modest budget, and inference is mostly constrained by memory access rather than compute, so if we had smartphones with a terabyte of RAM with a very high bandwidth to something like a current generation Apple NPU, things like DeepSeek R1 would run locally at (back-of-the-envelope calculation) about real-time — and drain the battery in half an hour if you used that model continuously.
But current models are not good enough, so the real question is: "who will hold what power when such models hypothetically are created?", and I have absolutely no idea.
> Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?
Consider it differently: how much would it cost to use an LLM to reproduce all of Linux?
I previously rough-estimated that at $230/megatoken of (useful final product) output, an AI would be energy-competitive vs. humans consuming calories to live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304186
As I don't have specifics, I need to Fermi-estimate this:
I'm not actually sure how big any OS (with or without apps) is, but I hear a lot of numbers in the range of 10-50 million. Let's say 50 Mloc.
I don't know the tokens per line, I'm going to guess 10.
There's no fundamental reason for $230/megatoken beyond that's when the AI is economically preferable to feeding a human who is doing it for free and you just need to stop them from starving to death, even if you have figured out how to directly metabolise electricity which is much cheaper than food: on the one hand $230, this is on the very expensive end of current models; on the second hand, see previous point about running DeepSeek R1 on phone processor with more RAM and bandwidth to match; on the third hand*, see other previous point that current models just aren't good enough to bother.
So it's current not available at any price, but when the quality is good, even charging a rate that's currently expensive makes all humans unemployable.
* Insert your own joke about about off-by-one-errors
> DeepSeek demonstrated big models could be trained very easily for a modest budget
It might require an ability to train on other commercial model output (which they certainly will erect barriers to), and based on what I heard from people using LLMs for programming DS is substantially worse.
> Consider it differently: how much would it cost to use an LLM to reproduce all of Linux?
I’d stop you there. The point I raised is about something qualitatively very novel, not reproducing an already existing thing.
> AI is economically preferable to feeding a human who is doing it for free
As FOSS shows, humans would do it for free, for enjoyment/credit/recognition/self actualization/common good; but this presumes that those humans have jobs that otherwise pay the bills (arguably threatened by the technology we are discussing, as you note yourself), and some guarantees that it will be for common good rather than unpaid ghost labour for corporations.
Note that so far it worked OK because what companies in “AI” space have done is a blitzkrieg attack: not bothering to slow down to ask for consent and clear licensing (which would have made more people aware of what’s going on), armed from get go with massive scraping capabilities and billions of USD in GPU power. If the consequences I foresee kick in—people having been burned cease publishing original work of high quality for the models to be trained on, more and more barriers are erected to curb bot traffic (the number of captchas I see has skyrocketed in the past couple of years), etc.—the end result will be 1) degrading models and 2) permanently eroded FOSS. This might suit some commercial interests who see copyleft as some sort of virus, but I just struggle to see how it plays out well for public interest beyond short term.
This does not mean that powerful interests abusing copyright with ever increasing terms and enforcement overreach is fair game. It harms common interest.
However, it does mean that abusing copyright from the other side and denouncing the core ideas of IP ownership—which is now sort of in the interest of certain companies (and capital heavily invested in certain fashionable but not yet profitable startups) based around IP expropriation—harms common interest just as well.