Same. Started to adopt AGPLv3 for every new project. With AI sucking up all the CV-driven contributors, it’s time to take back open source as a joyful hobby for nerds that enjoy programming and sharing their creations with one another, instead of being corpo stans that do free support for shareholder driven enterprises.
Do you think AGPL is going to stop a crawler from incorporating your work into their training set? I don’t. There are zero meaningful consequences atm.
That being said, I’m with you in spirit and in action, but realistically it’s pointless outside of living in accordance with your values.
Edit: Re-reading that, i just told you that your principles are pointless, and thats fucked up and wrong. I’m going to live in accordance with mine and not delete this, but apologies.
I don’t really care that the things I make will invariably be scooped up and ingested into the training data.
It’s rather that I think we all ought to stop making software that is primarily useful to businesses, because there is no more joy in that with AI-written PRs driving maintainers into burnout.
Big tech finally has no more excuses as to why they don’t maintain all the bedrock libraries themselves. So I say, let them do that.
And on the other hand, since anyone can vibe code something now, the value of GitHub projects as CV material has gone down significantly, so I’d expect less people to do that. Good! Open Source as a community, as a movement, doesn’t need these people.
> the value of GitHub projects as CV material has gone down significantly,
this might be true but the effect doesn't seem to translate, if you go by github difficulties to accomodate growth this past year, people are putting those vibe coded repos onto github, even if the signal vs noise ratio is much greater now, that only means you get more shitty repos vs non shitty now
> Do you think AGPL is going to stop a crawler from incorporating your work into their training set?
No, but i propose we ostracize anyone who uses LLMs for the wrong reasons (i.e. not accessibility), and i hope you do too. The reasons are mostly not related to licenses, though, but it upholds licensing as a nice-to-have consequence.
Yeah, let’s go back to 1930 because if we cry wolf loud enough the wolf will disappear…? That it?
Doesn’t work like that. Better adapt and see how you can turn the tool to do your bidding rather than try to piss against the wind in the hope the wind changes direction the next 5 seconds. It won’t.
We can and should ban technologies whose cons outweigh the pros. For example, in the past century, we successfully banned leaded pipes and paints, uranium glass, asbestos, CFC refrigerants (etc).
Most of those struggles had intense lobbying from the industry with more or less the same discourse you have. I don't care if AI can do my bidding if it destroys the planet and the livelihood of my loved ones with it, just like i don't care if lead pipes can bring water to my home if they bring saturnism to my entire community.
Thanks for leaving it up! I'm on the perimeter of the HN community generally, but one observation is that what you said is present in a lot of discussions here. Kind of an "insistent powerless". I wonder if sentiment analysis over the years would show this is on the rise at HN. As a long time reader it seems like it is to me, but it could certainly be my own bias etc.
I work on climate solutions and find it in a lot of the threads here. It generally sounds like "Not only am I powerless, you are also powerless too", and it comes up in all sorts of ways.
I don't bother so much with licenses, but learned to reply with "that would be 1k bucks" instead of "you are welcome" where someone wants my library to do something it didn't before.
