They should be called OpenAI with (not open) in small print.
I argue a lot over “open source” software with non-OSI license and sometimes worry if I’m too pedantic. But I think it’s important to use terms accurately and not to confuse reality more than it already is by calling stuff that’s not one thing by that thing’s name.
I wonder if google and openai truly started out with these ideals and were just corrupted and overpowered by standard organizational greed. Or it was always bullshit.
[1] The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
I think the problem is that if you restrict corporate use then you’re not open. And there’s lots of complexity that comes from being non-open, like what’s commercial? Do governments and NGOs and universities count? Do you have to be a 501c3 charity (or international equivalent)? Do you have revenue thresholds? Profit thresholds? Etc etc
I think at that point, as a user, I’d rather just have a clear license I can pay for along with a copy of the source to see. But as a contributor, I don’t want to do unpaid labor for companies. I think it’s actually exploitative to accept contribs from users without compensation and then turn around and sell. So what’s the point of showing code if people can’t contribute to it.
It’s already possible to do this given a standard copyright. Just publish your code with no license and a copyright and issue some statement how you won’t prosecute small firms or something. So then students can use it, but no companies.
“Open core” and whatnot is silly marketing blarg to try to be cool like open source people while still selling licenses. RedHat came up with a decent model decades ago while using and supporting GPL and I think they were honest and improved the community.
With Google Eric Schmidt explained how it came: quite often when they were breainstorming about product launches, and something looked like it can grow the company, but is immoral to do, some person interrupted: ,,that would be evil''.
As Eric was trying to organize the company, he just added ,,don't be evil'' to company values. Still, he kept it all the way. It's too bad that he was changed after 10 years.
So I don't know how to square it with this recent info, but I would say Eric's recent interview is a creative re-interpretation of the circumstances. As execs tend to do.
The same forces are at play when companies decided to make "company towns" and do things like "shoot all the workers who stood up for better pay".
Later Edit: apparently there is already a plus.ai start-up with some self-driving technology, just buy them out for the name.
SaaS is the least free model for software. Closed source commercial is far more open and free than SaaS.
However, it should be noted that it applies only to open-source projects that were created by billion-dollar startups like Mongo or Elastic. Using software like Apache, Linux or Postgres is totally fine because it doesn't deprive SV startups (that are so precious to HN) of additional profits.
I don’t agree with this. I’m not a huge open source contributor but I’ve made some contribs over the year and I explicitly checked out the license before sending my change knowing that it could be used within commercial software.
I don’t care. I’d rather companies spend money and build something else than have to recreate the OSS stuff they use.
I want anyone to be able to use my software for any purpose. I certainly don’t think it’s immoral. And I don’t think the authors and users of BSD, MIT, Apache and other licenses think it’s immoral.