Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

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> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

Unfortunately, the license allows this. It’s also a social issue - why shouldn’t a faster mover be able to slop a feature faster than the project owners? Who cares if it’s disruptive to them?

I’ve seen this happen on other projects and beyond rejecting the changes, I’m not sure what to do. It’s damaging morale when someone has worked weeks or months on a feature, worked with countless individuals on planning and implementation, and then someone releases a vibe coded slop fork with the last 5-10% and then takes credit as if they’re some genius doing something useful or helpful.

Ultimately the issue is manners, but when there is opportunity and generosity, the generous are going to be taken advantage of.

> Unfortunately, the license allows this.

No, it's unfortunate that the authors didn't understand the license they used. It is not unfortunate that the license allows this use since that's the entire purpose of its existence, and is one of the most advantageous to users.

Framing adherence to the license as "bad actors" is just ridiculous emotional bias. Use a more restrictive license if you want to restrict the use of your code.

LLM haters are the worst type of toxic; they will not stop until everyone else stops using it, too.

Punitively changing a license with an intent to further restrict what someone does with the code is childish. If the concern is "someone will feed it into an LLM to obfuscate it" — what stops them from doing that with GPL code?

GPL code is, by the way, ripped off on a daily basis and routinely ignored because it's bordering on impossible to enforce.

People who oppose the use of LLMs have the right to do what they want with their software just like anyone else does. It’s not “childish” or “toxic” for them to express their opinion by changing the license on their own software or writing about it on their own blog.

Furthermore, if the GPL is really as unenforceable as you say, then there’s no reason why their license change is “punitive”. Either the GPL works, in which case the Asahi Linux maintainers have the right to restrict use of their software, or it doesn’t and there’s no reason why anyone should be upset by a gesture of free speech.

The Asahi Linux maintainers have the opinion that LLMs are harming their ecosystem, and if they want to prevent people from using LLMs on their software, then they should be able to do so without being unfairly attacked.

> if they want to prevent people from using LLMs on their software, then they should be able to do so without being unfairly attacked

They are of course free to wish whatever they like, but also rightfully deserve — and have earned — steadfast mockery.

It's like the space program banning computers and going back to chalk and black ladies doing long division because programmers might make mistakes.

It's not that I am against LLM because I'm using them, but I get sick of reading that mentality of AI-must-learn-from-everything-and-if-you're-against-you're-against-progress.

It's an incredible yet immature technology, and (too much IMO) people want to use it for everything without asking themselves any question. There was and still is a whole world of technology and knowledge before AI/LLM that left us teachings, laws, technologies that we must live with. Some of these things are here for good and maybe others for bad reasons.

In any case you should take your time to understand why something is there before blindly disagreeing with it. That's what moves discussion forward.

You got a really thoughtful comment, and you reply with the most bizarre case of false equivalence I've read in a couple of days...

In some cases LLMs are a legal issue. In other cases they point to low effort contributions. Those changes require the same amount of effort to review, but are no effort to produce. When there is no mechanism to control a resource sink, everyone suffers.

Tragedy of the commons where the resource being depleted is our time and attention. The typical solutions don’t work on that resource!

"lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin" is the only mention of LLM in this article, and I see nothing in there that qualify as "LLM hate".

I suggest you take a deep breath and ask yourself where this outburst of anger was really comming from. Was it triggered by the mention of the GPL?

Maybe they're hoping that GPL scares off the larger commercial players. Works in my case.

> the larger commercial players

Who are these large commercial players worried about Asahi Fucking Linux of all things?

Oracle? HP?

Is EMC building a SAN out of recycled MacBooks?

Not to discredit any of the work they've done but this is at its core a hobby project, and no large commercial player is touching this with a 10m pole.

GPL will possibly scare off serious, risk averse companies with lawyers. It's not going to scare of Chad the AI Bro who wants to move fast and break things, crush it in the market, ride the VC rocket, and has no qualms about monetizing the work of others.

Oh right, because serious, risk averse companies are going to be using a linux distribution that does not even currently run on an M6 Mac.

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