alt Hacker NewsI agree with the thrust of this article, that norms and what we perceive as good or desirable extend considerably beyond the minimum established by law.
But a point that was not made strongly, which highlights this even more, is that this goes in every direction.
If this kind of reimplementation is legal, then I can take any permissive OSS and rebuild it as proprietary. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as permissive. I can take any proprietary software and rebuild it as my own proprietary software.
Either the law needs to catch up and prevent this kind of behavior, or we're going to enter an effectively post-copyright world with respect to software. Which ISN'T GOOD, because that will disincentivize any sort of open license at all, and companies will start protecting/obfuscating their APIs like trade secrets.
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I've been thinking this for over two years, that's why I stopped contributing to open source at that time - my work was only gonna be exploited to make rich people richer regardless of the license.
Crazy that only now we're seeing a bunch of articles coming to the same conclusion now.
I think copyright should still apply, but if it doesn't, we need new laws - ones which protect all human work, creative or not. Laws should serve and protect people, not algorithms and not corporations "owning" those algorithms.
I put owning in quotes because ownership should go to the people who did the work.
Buying/selling ownership of both companies and people's work should be illegal just like buying/selling whole humans is. Even if it took thousands of years to get here.
Money should not buy certain things because this is the root cause of inequality. Rich people are not getting richer at a faster rate by being more productive than everyone else but by "owning" other people's work and using it as leverage to extract even more from others.
Maybe LLM and mass unemployment of white collar workers will be the wakeup call needed for a reform. Or revolution.
Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution and that's how communism got popular. We should do better this time because this is the last revolution which might be possible.
It goes in one direction only.
Companies can take open-source software and make a proprietary reimplementation. You can't take a proprietary software and make an open source GPL version.
I am absolutely certain that if you tried you would be sued to oblivion. But big company screwing up open source is not even news anymore. In fact I (still) believe that the fact that even though LLMs were trained on tons of GPL and AGPL or even unlicensed software it's considered ok to use LLM code in proprietary projects is example of just that.