I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it.
What does bother me is when the projects pivot to claiming that users now have a moral obligation to financially support the project. There is a kind of dishonesty in this move.
It's not that a successful project "should be free", it's that its success depended on it being free. If they had said all along that they'd eventually ask users to pay, that would be honest... but then they wouldn't have seen much of that adoption in the first place.
In my case, I never intended on my open source project becoming popular, it just did and I had to either abandon it or make it my job. I'm not sure where that falls in your judgement.
It's your project, to the extent that you own the copyright. You are free to switch the license on your project, etc. If anyone tries to shame you for this, you should pay no mind. (Edited to add that you are also free to abandon it, and you could do that with a clear conscience.)
Likewise, users are free to continue using open source software without payment or donation, to fork the project, etc. If anyone tries to shame them for this, they should pay no mind.
Why would you have to abandon it instead of just keeping on in your preferred pace? If anybody wants more rapid development they can fork it, not your problem.
Some people also have tried the paid new feature prioritization where it later lands for everyone. I think it worked in some projects but project must have been really good otherwise.
I mean: who doesn't want to work full time on their passion project? Especially when I'd just been made redundant, I feel most people would do the same.
> I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it
It only bothers me when they try to claim their new license is open source or use misleading language when it isn't. Which seems to be what 90% companies doing that do.
People can do whatever they want with their intellectual property as long as they aren't lying about it.
That would be a completely insane thing to do. I suppose it's possible, but I really doubt it.
"Let's widely publicize a tort/crime that our computer systems did, and then cross our fingers that nobody ever sues us or does even the most basic investigation that would immediately uncover our criminal conspiracy."
In the insane corporate crimes you read about (maybe FTX, or the eBay stalking scandal), they were trying to cover things up, not heap public attention on it for months.
Huh? It's extremely common for businesses to decide that breaking the law is a cost of doing business and just do it because they figure they'll end up net positive from it, or even just to cash out in the short term.
Uber made no attempt to cover up that they were operating without licenses, and just ate it and fought it betting they'd get established before the law could catch up, and they won that bet, paying some fines and stuff but ultimately taking the market.
These LLMs are literally trained by these companies pirating literally every bit of media humanity has ever made, they made very little attempt to cover it up.
Of course they'd be willing to break the law for some PR? With a thin layer of plausible deniability "oh no, we didn't mean for it to hack stuff!" they know they'll get a slap on the wrists at worst, all while generating hype to prop up the AI bubble further by presenting the models as hypercapable.
The mindset is probably: either a) the models become capable of what we are claiming and so the companies become so huge and valuable the cost is irrelevant and we'll be to big to punish meaningfully, or b) it's a bubble and might as well push it up as big as it can go while I can make money, then by the time consequences come around I'll be long gone and who cares.
> The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech.
> The Left have always been a bit more 'censory'
Not "always", and not even now. It's always contingent and situational. Same goes for nearly every clause in the Bill of Rights.
At various points the left has been associated with the fights against obscenity laws, against Cold War loyalty oaths, against blacklisting, against bans of books.
At various points the right has been associated with the fights against desecration of the American flag, against the teaching of human evolution in schools, against depictions of sex in media, against anti-war demonstrations.
Lots of people are saying agentic cyberattacks are a marketing hoax. The argument is that either AI is not capable enough to carry out these attacks, or that it would not carrying out these attacks without nudging from the labs, or even that somebody told it to do cyberattacks and the companies are baldly lying. My question is: what evidence would cause you to change your mind about this?
I'm not even saying it's an incorrect position. But to take the claim seriously and act accordingly, it needs to be falsifiable.
AI boosters and detractors alike often hedge their claims so that whatever ends up actually happening, they can say they were right all along. When that happens, the discussion boils down to people saying "yay AI" and "boo AI" at each other without exchanging any substantive information.
I don't particularly believe this (I'm not an expert in anything computer-y, let alone security, so the only thing I know is that people who seem respected here (like simonw) point out that the sandbox from OpenAI was at least very badly designed, but who knows why that is), but here's one piece of possible evidence: if something similar causes so much damage that it ends up obviously hurting the company responsible. This could be something like targeting a big bank and causing so much disruption that the law wakes up and immediately intervenes, or it could be major damage to the company's own systems.
Of course, if that happens, this whole discussion becomes moot, and good luck to us all...
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