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Comment by shepardrtc | Hacker News Reader

People creating free software for everyone to use, only to pull it away when suddenly there's a technology that can instantly let everyone use it at the drop of a hat, is not something I quite understand. If you're doing it so you show people, hey I made this, then you can still do that. If you're doing it to help the world, then that's very much happening. Of if you're doing it just for fun, that's possible too, though I totally understand how much less fun it is when AI can rip it out in a few minutes.

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People have multiple motivations at the same time. Many OSS contributors have moved on after LLM’s and that’s completely consistent with their motivations.

Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else.

You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here.

First of you're framing the conversation here by assuming we're talking about "free software" (according to whichever definition).

There's people saying they'd rather talk to an LLM than to me.

I dunno how else to say it to you, but when somebody happily announces that they'd rather talk to a computer than to you, and they are happy this is the future.

That carries certain connotations beyond "external validation".

The person in the top of this thread was claiming "nobody has been robbed".

There's people in these communities that I will never have an intelligent conversation with, again.

I'm not talking about being able to pay bills or anything, I'm just talking about being replaced by a computer program, in a social sense.

Some of it might be loss of external validation, no more stars in github. Some of it might be an aversion to a non-consensual contribution to the end of their chosen profession as a means to make a good living.

Much of it might be because their license (MIT, BSD etc) was ignored completely.

> is not something I quite understand

I can only speak for myself, but right now working on open-source is even more thankless and shitty. Now any douche-knuckle comes to your repo and starts spamming you with bad PRs or issues as if their favourite LLM du jour has some fantastical insight they have to share with you, when it has already been explained ad nauseam that what they want is out of scope, or isn’t technically possible, or has tradeoffs XYZ.

You had lazy people before, sure, but those interactions were less frequent, shorter, and for each person I used to craft a careful response that would explain everything in detail and teach those I interacted with. But why would I waste my time crafting a reply that the person on the other side is just going to shove into their LLM and learn nothing?

Regarding open-source, LLMs make people more disrespectful of the people doing the work. And if you’re sharing your expertise for free to be disrespected, why bother?

People were always able to "instantly use it at the drop of a hat" (paraphrased). What people are objecting to, is instant use without any acknowledgement or attribution (the minimum courtesy). They also object to being mistreated by people who have never actually had to type characters of code into a text-editor, or figure out how to use a build-system and version-control-system. And finally, they object to having their _free_ and _generous_ labor turn millionaires into billionaires (and billionaires into trillionaires), while they themselves still have to pay that one mortgage they have, and medical bills, and tuition, and so on.

They object to the systematized devaluing of their work. They object to becoming a class of invisible laborers (who only become visible when there is need to blame someone).

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