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The fate of "small" open source

(nolanlawson.com)
295 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Nov 25 19:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ef2k ◴[17 Nov 25 00:42 UTC] No.45949896[source]▶
> I’m still trying to figure out what kinds of open source are worth writing in this new era

Is there any upside to opensourcing anything anymore? Anything published today becomes training data for the next model, with no attribution to the original work.

If the goal is to experiment, share ideas, or let others learn from the work, maybe the better default now is "source available", instead of FOSS in the classic sense. It gives people visibility while setting clearer boundaries on how the work can be used.

I learned most of what I know thanks to FOSS projects so I'm still on the fence on this.

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llbbdd ◴[17 Nov 25 04:52 UTC] No.45950928[source]▶
I keep seeing this attitude and I don't really understand it at all; there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct?

Or is it the attribution? There are many many libraries I have used and continue to use and I don't know the author's internet handle or Christian name. Does that matter? Why?

I have written a lot of code that my name is no longer attached to. I don't care and I don't know why anyone does. If it were valuable I would have made more money off of it in the first place, and I don't have the ego to just care that people know it's my code either.

I want the things I do today to have an upside for people in the future. If that means I write code that gets incorporated into a model that people use to build things N number of years from now, that's great. That's awesome. Why the hell is that apparently so demotivating to some people?

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1. ef2k ◴[17 Nov 25 17:31 UTC] No.45955819[source]▶
> I want the things I do today to have an upside for people in the future.

I think most would agree with this, but the way things work today don't support it. As of now, AI gains are privatized while the losses are socialized. Until that one-sided imbalance is addressed, LLM's "use" of open source is unbounded and nonreciprocal.

Attribution is a big part of the human experience. Your response frames it as ego driven, but it's also what motivates people to maintain code that is not usually compensated, it's also what builds reputation, trust, communities, and even careers.

Until that’s figured out, we can still share, but maybe in ways that are closer to one another, or under distribution models that reflect the reality we’re in rather than the one we used to have.