I think I can help you find a good answer to this but I don't have enough data (one sentence statement is not enough). If you want to have a call and dive into this, feel free to email me: theo@torchandzen.com
In general, the direction I would explore is: it's not about AI, it's about something in the way your perceive AI. For example, maybe you value (some part of) the process. AI is about short-circuiting the (creative) process, so that may make making things feel pointless.
This is just one assumption, there are probably many more dimensions and variables at play. Maybe you read some perspectives about AI (and/or AI safety) that triggered something in your values about the creative process. Or maybe you want to create via a specific way of collaboration, which is no longer viable. As I said, we (and you) would need more to understand.
Have you ever thought about making your values explicit? Here's a PDF that has a list of values to assess between important and not important:
And yes, I don't think nvUltra will ever come, but I have zero interest for it now. I never wanted all the new features anyway. Just wanted an nvALT that works great and is kept up to date with the macOS SDKs.
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Free software is about freedom. Restricting it from anyone means it's not free. There is no requirement that we must create free software but if it's called free I think it should always have the basic qualities of freedom; not only when it fits our purposes and our values.
There are already so many ways (and reasons) not to do free or open source software. People who find them convincing are using them. People who don't generally are not.
It seems like the author of the post is just potentially having a change of mind from one side to the other, which barely even seems noteworthy.
> There are already so many ways (and reasons) not to do free or open source software. People who find them convincing are using them.
To be honest, I don't think the space between GPL/MIT and commercial closed source is explored enough. I'm aware there's a few examples of things in between, but they are not common knowledge and they don't satisfy everyone. It is not a space that is easy to search online for established wisdom and comparisons in.
Basically every argument has been made before, but there's still 10,000 people a day who are just finding out about it for the first time (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
Clearly this sparked enough discussion and upvotes to make it to the front page of Hacker News, so people found it valuable.
> Point the author makes is precisely that they don't want to do free software, and they'd like to convince you not to do free software
Sure, but they are not suggesting any practical alternative by issuing a license that essentially boils down to "Please don't use this if you are evil".
Saying that the author has an almost childlike understanding of what the word "evil" means is something of a slur against actual children - I've got a 6 year old who understands subjective morals better than this author does.
It's a choice for the authors to make based on what type of free they believe in. I think free under MIT and GPL are two different philosophies on how you see "free".
MIT: free for anyone, do whatever you want
GPL: free if you also make your software free
AGPL: GPL but SaaS can't circumvent the requirement to make your software free
I see why principled open source proponents would select GPL or AGPL. They don't just want their code to be used freely by others, they also believe more software should be free and using GPL helps with that.
GPL restrictions don't make software under the GPL not "free" as in freedom. Just a different philosophy.
I like the GPL and think its "virality" is both clever and a worthwhile social goal, but I think it's misleading to call it "free". It directly restricts possible usage of the software in question -- yes, in a way that's designed to increase another kind of freedom, but it restricts nonetheless.
FWIW I have the same quarrel with people who talk about a country being "free". To my mind, a truly free country would have no laws. It would be a horrible place, because the restrictions that laws place on us tend to make things better for everyone (we may disagree on this law or that law, but some laws, like "Don't kill someone without a very good reason", would have >99% popular support anywhere in the world).
"More free" does not necessarily imply "better"; it could be better or worse. I'd like to shift usage of the words "free" and "freedom" in this direction, but think it's probably a lost cause as the words are too emotionally charged with connotations of "good".
> The biggest limitation is that there's no support for arbitrary entrypoints to the graph, because pylock.toml includes a fixed marker for each package entry rather than recording a graph of dependencies.
In general, the direction I would explore is: it's not about AI, it's about something in the way your perceive AI. For example, maybe you value (some part of) the process. AI is about short-circuiting the (creative) process, so that may make making things feel pointless.
This is just one assumption, there are probably many more dimensions and variables at play. Maybe you read some perspectives about AI (and/or AI safety) that triggered something in your values about the creative process. Or maybe you want to create via a specific way of collaboration, which is no longer viable. As I said, we (and you) would need more to understand.
Have you ever thought about making your values explicit? Here's a PDF that has a list of values to assess between important and not important:
https://www.motivationalinterviewing.org/sites/default/files...
(I like this PDF because it includes definitions.)
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