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Comment by fsforever | Hacker News Reader

You can still create free software, and use free software, and even charge money for support for free software. The relative success of commercial software and the rise of AI- assisted software doesn't affect the idea and practice of free software. If you don't like that AI companies train on the code, well, the whole point was that you can't really control what people do with the code you send them other than directly copying it without the same license, because that makes it nonfree.

If your problem is that someone you don't like can benefit from your work, well, that was always the case. How many Russian drones run Linux?

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>If you don't like that AI companies train on the code, well, the whole point was that you can't really control what people do with the code you send them other than directly copying it without the same license, because that makes it nonfree.

Which is exactly what they do. LLMs don't respect licenses or attribution. So your assertion that the rise of AI assisted software doesn't affect free software is incorrect - it completely disregards and undermines it.

It also adversely affects the ability of people to exercise freedom over that software. LLMs serve as a proprietary middleman controlling the management, generation and distribution of code and humans are constantly being pushed out of the loop, having no direct access to that code, and being unable to learn from it or edit it without an LLM.

Yes you can still create and use free software but it becomes a problem when everyone is only ever training on your code and no human ever contributes anything back.

Aargh, matey, why be ye entitled to contributions for code ye uploaded freely

But seriously, that's what I mean, and what TFA talks about. A fork doesn't diminish your project at all. You're free to upload or not. Others are free to build on your project, and as long as they don't pretend it's theirs, they don't have to contribute anything from their fork to yours, or even keep it compatible.

LLMs don't copy code, they learn it, the same as you did. You'd better add a copyright notice to every file you write acknowledging the original authors you're paraphrasing, me hearty.

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