Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?
The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.
- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."
- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)
- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."
Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".
It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution.
Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit.
We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it.
But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.
Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.
Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).
I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
Who's pushing an agenda and why?
Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.
GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.
The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.
The major fault I see here is that people didn't forsee that the default GPL should have had AGPL's clauses.
No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.
Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.
We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.
ideas + execution - not really - (Linus Torvalds sharing his work on Linux and that taking off)
Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.
"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.
But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.