Essay gains traction on Hacker News
1 Sep 20 6:07 AM · 6d ago · 1 article · 3 posts · 3 sources · development 1 of 1
The article reaches Hacker News front page on September 20, accumulating 55 points and sparking discussion about the implications of AI training on open-source communities.
“The modern internet and cloud could not exist without free and open software. Every cloud service and the very backbone of the internet itself are derivative works standing on the shoulders of the previous generation's giants.”
Chester Wisniewski, Security researcher · mastodon ↗Chester Wisniewski Security researcher and author
The whole story articlesposts the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 1 claim were published in its stretch
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first by HN Best, 6d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 28 · verbatim
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"We all have our own set of ethical and moral guidelines, which are also lost once having been absorbed into the colossus. While existing licenses and agreements are imperfect, they have been shown to be enforceable in a court of law allowing me, the creator, power over my own creation."This touches on the tension between artistic integrity vs…
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I had a few weekend thoughts on generative AI, LLMs, and how they are destroying our Creative Commons. Would love to hear your thoughts, here are mine: https://www. chesterwisniewski.com/post/202 6-09-13-ai-is-destroying-the-creative-commons/ # NoAI # GenAI # openness
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I'm a cybersecurity 'expert' and my 40 person team and I make our money by providing GPL software to the world that I wrote.You have the same incentive you had to share your work as before, and that is to get attention, and customers, assuming that's your game. Open code means no vendor lockin for a lot of customers, so they can pay you but also…
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> Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.It is not how I roll and it never has been. I don't and won't make things that are responsible for putting people out of work; I make things that make their jobs less shit. I won't make choices that make…
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> …since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.> Creation is now easy and commodified.> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if…
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> The past 35 years of openness have created nearly everything we benefit from online, which has transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way.> We are entering a digital dark age...It's interesting (and a bit disheartening) that it took modern AI for so many technologists to wake up to the fact that technology does not always help…
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I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the…
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I try to keep an open mind to both sides of the issue, but I confess that I, personally, am finding AI liberating for both software development (and my electronics hobby).Regarding software, I am clearly in the camp of developers for whom the coding is the necessary evil to get the tool/product that I had in my mind before I began. Obviously, LLMs…
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Yeah, small city I grew up in there are no longer taxis. Used to be a semi full time position for 1-2 people, so any night you could get a taxi if you arrived by train or needed to get home from somewhere. Most nights operated of course on a loss, but made up for on the volume during some weekends or periods of the year (like winter holidays). But…
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The reality is that no one was gatekeeping you or anyone else from doing whatever you wanted with free software. The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The premise here is that you can accomplish what you couldn’t before without actually understanding the concepts or putting in the…
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> and to date there seems to be no appetite for legal enforcement of these obligations.Three paragraphs earlier, the virtues of openly sharing code were being sung.> while if I keep my code closed it is far more difficult to find those same mistakesI doubt that is significant for frontier models. They can disassemble and won't need readable code…
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Wow, this is a pessimistic (but accurate!) view.I was the second featured Creative Commoner decades ago and I have published all my books using Creative Commons share and share alike, no commercial reuse for the last few decades.I haven’t been considering AI training use to violate my use of this license, but I suppose it does. When I have some…
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Yup, I imagine within a year or two OpenAI and Anthropic will have in-house versions of pretty much everything anyone would ever use, with in-house agents hardening and improving it at a torrid pace that the human/code-review/github cycle could never keep up with. Their models will default to using these in-house versions, and be trained in all…
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Somewhere at the very beginning of my career, the second year I think, I was part of the team that visited a location of the company we were selling our SaaS solution to, in a branch that was back then still dependent on Excel sheets.The owner of the company lead us to a large open office with about 30 people working in there, mostly women, and…
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We’re sharing a world with cultures that do not respect or enforce patents. The internet has helped us stay competitive by making information a lot cheaper to share. AI is the same thing but more potent. It will help us stay competitive even longer.There were some hidden downsides to the internet and they are worse with AI. Upsides are better, and…
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The two reasons the author lists for not sharing their source code now were both true pre-AI. Open sourcing allowed others to review your software for their own nefarious purposes and (as anyone who has ever maintained a reasonably popular repo knows) results in a lot of PRs that may be of low quality.I contribute to open source because open…
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There are both good and aspects of the AI "revolution". Yes, it's easier than ever to create free software.But wrote just yesterday on a related impact of AI agents on open source repos:
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>If I make my code available, AI can be used to more easily discover vulnerabilities to abuse my coding errors,Keeping your source code private doesn't save you. These LLMs are really good at decompilation efforts. I've seen an insane number of clean room ports of games the last few weeks (just saw a Zelda 2 PC port this morning). Even with that…
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> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend.Exactly this. I've been very confused by the free software advocates that seemed to hate AI until I realized their reasons for releasing software under an open source license were very…
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I'd say this social contract which got "broken" never existed in the first place.Even before AI we heard lots of complaints like "I made a popular open source library which is now used by corps with trillion-dollar market cap and I don't get anything out of it; halp". There was always some kind of a conflict, now the nature of the conflict just…
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Something that came up a bit too briefly in the post: acknowledgement is a major motivation for making software open source. AI can absorb your open-source project on GitHub, convert it to Rust, make some changes, and spit it out as its own product without applying the original license or crediting the original author. My former open-source…
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If we come together to create a new digital renaissance, they’ll just feed that into the machine as well.We are not entering a new dark age so much as we are being pushed, by specific actors who make no secret of their actions, and are identifiable and locatable.
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None of your arguments hold any water if big-corpo AI restricts open-weight models - which they very clearly want to do. AI is NOT “the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world” if our only option is to pay a select few companies to use it.
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AI created, as of currently, a big creative commons to make use of unlike ever beforeAlso not mentioned as much is the public domain (it would be nice if everything was in the public domain or IP was gotten rid of)
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