logoalt Hacker News

FooBarWidget • yesterday at 4:58 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

To the people who demanded completely open source licensed software, or that complained about "they shove Wayland/systemd down our throats", I've said many times that this is a supply/demand problem. Open source licensed software exists because there is a lot of excess software production capacity, e.g. there are many volunteers. Non-systemd distros are rare because such production capacity is low, e.g., there are few volunteers willing to do this work. To those people I've said: stop complaining about others not doing it for you, if you so want your non-systemd distro or FOSS-licensed whatever, you gotta do it yourself and contribute to the community, or fund an effort.

I got super angry reactions.

Now, the same thing is happening with open weights models, but in on a much more extreme scale. They exist because of excess capacity for whatever reason, and they will cease to exist when this excess capacity reduces. There is no use complaining about something not being open weights. What is productive is funding an effort.

Unfortunately, most complainers want others to do things for them, for free.


Replies

autoexec • yesterday at 11:04 PM

That's a strange take when it comes to AI companies who stole their training data in the first place. The AI companies sure wanted others to do things for them for free. What would "funding an effort" look like here? Bribing companies to share what they got from their stolen goods? Funding an effort to steal everyone's work too and then use it to train a truly open model ourselves?