Ask HN: Do you think differently about working on open source these days?

I am bothered that I was able to reproduce code from my blog through an LLM (suggesting exact same default values). That was not licensed for permissive use.

I still contribute to open source because I still use a lot of it. In my mind I owe it to the community to contribute back, and if nobody did the same my workflow would be a lot worse.

That said, capital has always been squeezing open source. Whether it was the Embrace; Extend; Extinguish mantra of Microsoft, Amazon's hosting of Open Source in AWS to control the market for it, or Oracle's litigiousness about trademarks and patents. To say nothing of all the companies who profit from it and give nothing back in return.

LLMs being trained on Open Source software is nothing new with respect to capital attempting to consume it and profit from it but not giving anything back in exchange.

So no, I'm not worried, I'm not going to change anything. I expect maybe we see a license that says you cannot use it as AI training material at some point in the future, and the lawyers will fight over that for a decade or two.

Are people open sourcing their works in hopes to make money and that's their concern? I've never heard of that from people involved in open source.

I always licensed my projects under GPL variants. That contract was broken by LLM vendors. So now I'm taking my toys and going home.

All my new projects are hosted on Sourcehut. I trust Drew when he says they are not letting LLM bots have at it.

Its not just the dev either. I'm no longer posting any content on blogs. Almost all of my other online interactions have moved to private channels and closed forums. I'm no longer giving my work away for free, unless you've passed the entry tests.

Whether that process is intermediated by a LLM or not is not really relevant.

As mentioned in the comment, private on GH has no bearing, it is still in full sight of the AI.

From what I can tell, OSS submissions are on the rise as people embrace AI to work on things they could not previously.

However, it is quite fun to remove the boring part in programming with AI, so any hobby code I write I won't be making them public.

Currently I'm working on a way to use models trained from MIT-licensed code (eg. Comma) by using normal commercial model to supervise it. I believe this make the output code only be tainted with permissive code, and so I can now slowly use AI to write open source code again.

I think that open source libraries (but maybe not applications) may be even more relevant now than ever. More application code will be written, and there is still a need for correct and reliable components.

Now that we have LLMs I can make them tell off the people harassing me and generate features that do the opposite of what they asked for

Personally, I would select only training material for open models. Pandora's box is already open, but if we are going to have LLMs, I want them to be available to everyone and not gated by a small number of companies. Since open models generally have less of a benefit of scale in terms of GPUs, I want them to have the benefit of more available/higher quality training data.

"A little copying is better than a little dependency" becomes much easier to fulfil with AI, in a literal sense, and I support a lot of "little dependencies"

I mean I am fucking shocked that people don't get this, our whole fucking modern world, all the parts that make stuff work, every last bit of it is built on top of or dependent on OSS.

There isn't a single lab, company, person or country that doesn't use and benefit from open source. Whether they know it or not.

It is what has supported widespread fractal improvement starting at the individual level. It's the greatest grassroots story movement ever and it's still driven by grassroot adoption.

It's like programatic peer review writ large with no gate keeping journals and its changed humanity forever, if we ever deflect that asteroid headed towards earth or if we make it to the stars, or if we figure out how to avoid the heat death, it's because open source got us there.

I'm currently working on a new project(my first big one from scratch using LLM coding), and using a few open source library. 9x under MIT. 2x BSD 3 clause, and 1 apache 2.0.

None of them are copyleft? I didnt do that intentionally. I dont know what i plan to license it; I typically go gpl. It's private until I decide i guess.

My big 'think differently' is that i gain a bunch of responsibility for the project. Do I want that? Am i ready for this long term commitment?

Put simply… Too much drama, too little technical joy.

I had my best technical achievement writing proprietary software at one faang, if i have to be honest.

I don't love the idea of my work training an ai without compensation either.

> privately on github

So Microsoft and their AI will have access to your code but people won't.