alt Hacker NewsInteresting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.
On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.
The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.
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I think it's a good thing. In a couple of years we'll have a clear way to measure the true productivity and impact (or lack thereof) of AI on software dev. It's the perfect "natural experiment".
Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.
Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.
> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars
It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?
It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.
The reason for NetBSD rejecting any use of AI is the concern that a future legal case will rule that the output of LLMs trained on GPL code is itself subject to the GPL due to the viral clause in the licence.