In the 1980’s, there were no freely available C compilers (I guess Borland was inexpensive, but not free). The GNU C Compiler was the first such. The project focused on being bootstrappable, reproducibility from source with a fixed dependency chain.
Corporates took advantage of GCC, and continue to, but have also been happy that LLVM came along with its permissive licensing. LLVM was a free lunch for GPU deployment, letting corporates customize it to compile shaders without having to release the sources.
In the LLM era of mostly closed weights, closed and pirated datasets and inaccessible compute requirements, what would, or does, an open alternative look like? Or should something else be done?
How so?
Seriously? Lots of corporate software runs on Linux (or BSD). What are they, or the runtimes of their language platform, compiled using?
That’s not taking advantage, that’s using the product as intended.
The tragedy of the commons seems reasonable to you.
If a corporate saves $$$ by using GCC, they should give atleast $$ back (to GNU/FSF, and to SFC etc. for the other software they use), shouldn’t they? And they don’t. That is taking advantage in a negative sense.
I see what you mean. But anyone using free software would be seen as taking advantage by that logic. While that is just how the license intended.
Just like when Intel used MINIX to create their shadow OS, the IME. MINIX is a BSD licensed project, so they were free to do with it as they pleased without returning anything to the developer or the community. Any opinions to the contrary are just developer regret in choosing the license.
You are saying that the commons is unviable. I think I am saying that that is because of corporate leeches.
No, I’m not saying that. How do you even get to that from what I’ve written?
That is the implication if open licenses can’t deter corporate leeching while positioning for collaboration with volunteers. Unless there is an ideal license unknown to most projects that avoids the tragedy of the commons.
The tragedy of the commons doesn’t apply directly to software like that. If you have GPL code and people use it according to the license and you don’t get paid, that’s not the tragedy of the commons. GPL code is a donation. That is the expected outcome. You are free to choose whatever license, like FUTO has, for instance, a weird mix of source available, open source, and proprietary.
Tragedy of the commons, in open source, would be someone modifying your code and distributing it on a closed source license. They took from the commons, without returning anything. But you have to take developer expectations into account. If someone does not expect this to happen and chooses the MIT license, well, they’re being naïve at best. But you could say the tragedy is in effect. If they are happy with that happening (as the case of Tannenbaum and Intel), then no tragedy happening.
No, you see, private and commercial use are the same. /s
“taking advantage of” something doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation.
it often does when applied to people, but not things.
It was definitely the meaning conveyed by the context though.
How do you know?
I can read.
You are right. For anyone who was doubting this (like I was!), see definition 1 in the Merriam-Webster.