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Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.

I think if people want a revshare on things then perhaps they should release under a revshare license. Providing things under open licenses and then pulling a bait-and-switch saying "oh the license isn't actually that you're not supposed to be doing that" doesn't sit right with me. Just be upfront and open with things.

The point of the Free Software licenses is that you can go profit off the software, you just have certain obligations back. I think those are pretty good standards. And, in fact, given the tendency towards The Revshare License that everyone seems to learn towards, I think that coming up with the GPL or MIT must have taken some exceptional people. Good for them.

> A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.

Did you respond by asking them how Reddit makes money?

The anti-corporate mentality isn't new, but it does surface in different ways and communities over time. The Reddit hivemind leans very anti-corporate, albeit with a huge blind spot for corporations they actually like (Reddit itself, their chosen phone brand, the corporations that produce the shows they watch).

The Reddit style rebellion is largely symbolic, with a lot of shaming and snark, but it usually stops when it would require people to alter their own behavior. That's why you got dog-piled for doing something productive on a site where user-generated content is the money maker.

I've never publicly scolded someone for doing free work for tech monopolies but I do understand the impulse. The problem is that it's a completely one-sided relationship, and there are perfectly legitimate concerns about how the biggest tech companies are using their wealth and power. At this point I doubt much of anyone would expect a large tech company to go out of its way to lose money in order to support human communities. They take what they can, and ruthlessly kill products and services the minute they think it helps their bottom line.

Google and others don't need to rely on free volunteers, but it's certainly more profitable for them. Does Google making an extra $10B/year make the world a better place? Maybe, I don't know, but it's not crazy to think the answer is no.

> Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output?

I think it's simply due to the economy being in the shitter for the non-"Capital Ownership Class".

1977-2007 was generally a good time in the US if you survived by trading your time/knowledge/expertise for a wage as most people do. This is also the time in which F/OSS came into existence.

If you had a decent job during that time, then the future looked bright and you didn't think twice about giving some of your leisure time away for free.

MIT and BSD licenses are kind of obvious. They are academic licenses, named after universities.

The idea is that you have people paid to create something of potential value, but the value of the outputs has only a limited and indirect impact on their compensation. If someone finds the outputs valuable, they should mention it in public, to let the creators use it to demonstrate the value of their work to funders and other interested parties.

> I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

The problem is that the big tech companies aren't holding up their end of the traditional social contract.

I like to think of the wider open source community as one giant group project. Everyone contributes what they can, and in turn they can benefit from the work everyone else has done. The work you do goes towards making the world a better place. I have absolutely zero problem filing pull requests for bugs I encounter or submitting issues on OpenStreetMap, because I know that in return I get the Linux DE and reliable maps in other towns. If you want to make it political, it's a "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs".

The big tech companies operate completely differently. They see open source contributors primarily as a resource to exploit. Submit a single fix on Google Maps? You'll get zero credit, they'll never stop bothering you with popups about "making improvements", design their map around what is most profitable to show, and they will of course log your location history and sell it to the highest bidder. And they are getting filthy rich off of it as well.

I couldn't care less about getting monetary compensation for some odd work I do in my spare time, but there's no way in hell I'm going to do free labor for some millionaire who's going to reward me by spitting in my face.

This cultural shift exists and it will intensify as long as consumer prices and cost of living continue to rise at the same time corporate profit margins do. This is a simple, easy link to make, pretty much everyone's now aware and has stopped buying the excuses. Consolidation and an increase in straight up, unpunished criminal monopoly and cartel activity within corporate America have given rise to this new culture. Luigi Mangione will not be the last of his kind.
Because the ratio of developers who do it for money to developers who do it for love of developing has dramatically increased, as computer science became a subject people studied for economic reasons, not just for fun.
I would like to offer a similar, but somewhat different opinion on one aspect of what you talked about regarding "revshare":

If I notice and issue on my own, and it bothers me enough / I feel that other users would benefit from it, I have no issue providing that information to the source maintainer for free.

If however, I am contacted by the maintainer in anyway requesting feedback, suggestions, or input (i.e. "Rate us on the app store!", "Email us with any problems you have.", etc.) I except any feedback I provide to be worth more than an unprompted message, and in turn, I expect something like a lower bill, a discounted rate on their store front, a credit in their auth page, or some other kind of material gain from it.

Basically, if I am being solicited and prompted to do something, it wasn't my idea in the firsr place, so it ought to be worth my time to do so. They have already gone to the effort of asking, so they (presumably) find value in it. I ought be compensated for that value.

Using Google as an example: one of the few products of theirs I like is Opinion Rewards. They actually pay you (in store credit) for responding to their surveys. It's a fair trade off. They ask me basic habits related to shopping, etc. I get a 25 cents or so every time I respond.

I think we've all been burned by 20+ years of exploitation in the guise of "free product." Google more or less spearheaded that movement. I agree we should all be community-minded and have nice things, but when you look at how the rewards (social and monetary) are shared it's overwhelmingly disproportionate.
I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

In his follow-up post he talks about him open sourcing old games as a gift, and he doesn't much care how people receive that gift, just that they do.

He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not.

The original authors most of the time didn't write the software to profit. But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.

It's odd to me that he doesn't acknowledge this.

In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.

It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout.

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.

This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.
All due respect to Carmack but I think his take is probably influenced by his investment in his own AI company. There doesn’t seem to be many on this space who have any ethical or moral problems with profiting from the work of others and not contributing anything back to the commons. If we all intended our work in OSS the way he did maybe we’d all see it his way too.

Copy left licenses are generally intended, afaict, to protect the commons and ensure people have access to the source. AI systems seem to hide that. And they contribute nothing back.

Maybe they need updating, IANAL. But I’d be hesitant to believe that everyone should be as excited as Carmack is.

There's one elephant in the room that's not being addressed:

Training an AI on GPL code and then having it generate equivalent code that is released under a closed source license seems like a good way to destroy the copy-left FOSS ecosystem.

Most of FOSS is not a free gift, but asks for some form of repay.

MIT asks for credit. GPL asks or credit and GPL'ing of things built atop. Unlicense is a free gift, but it is a minority.

AI reproduces code while removing credit and copyleft from it and this is the problem.

I find it pretty simple:

- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence

- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

I have a secret fear about AI - that at one point when AI models get good enough, AI companies will no longer give you the source these tools generate - you'll get the artifacts (perhaps hosted on a subscription website), but you won't get the code.

Tools like CC already push a workflow where you're separated from the code and treat the model as a 'wishing well'. I think the fact that we get the source is just adminssion that these models are not good enough to really take our jobs (yet).

I wonder how much a gift AI companies think their models (and even outputs of their models) are, considering their weights are proprietary and their training methods even moreso.

I don't consider myself anti AI at all, but I find relicensing concrete solutions by supposed AI rewrites to be completely callous and an attack on human work. I don't think this can be just dismissed as being against using a particular technology.

From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft. If instead you want to simply make it public domain, and this for some reason becomes acceptable, then it becomes the end of code as IP. The end of potentially any IP, which by the way I know plenty of people who would be happy about - "IP is theft" crowd - but which I think is unfair on those who had no real opportunity to build any equity on their work.

Precisely because I strongly believe in the potential of generative AI to eventually carry out entire projects with little technical guidance, I think it's important to establish the property of both what exists and what is achieved by humans with AI augmentation. This is a much more immediate concern than "runaway AI" or any form of singularity. As is today, generative AI has proven capable to replicate the results established projects with improvements (establishing how much is just parroted from the very replicated project and similar ones is academic in practice).

everyone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous

meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class)

'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things

He's downplaying the "social change" aspect. For many, open source/free software has a political element, at least implicitly. That element is strongly opposed to aggressive centralization of capital and surveillance power. You can point out how different licenses were always written in a way that permitted monetization/for-profit use, but that's beside the point -- the people who chose those licenses never imagined that their code would be used at this scale for this kind of purpose.
I've been wondering, Stallman was driven to create free software after an incident trying to get the code for firmware on his office printer. I'm wondering if today, would he have just reverse engineered it with AI?

Edit: I'm also thinking of what he did rewriting all of Symbolics code for LISP machines

(similar to the person that accidentally hacked all vacuum of a certain manufacturer trying to gain access to his robot vacuum? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/acciden...)

I think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".
The foundation to which all of these licenses are tied to will likely be dissolved. Words/code had value in the old system. But now it's cheap to generate, way cheaper than hiring legions of writers/developers to write it. When it was a valuable asset lobbyists spent to protect it under law. I want you to think as you read this comment, do you think Disney would rather pay unionized workers or abolish copyright law and use other (trademark) mechanisms to protect their IP? A decade or so ago, this kind of thought would be crazy but things have changed.

So we have this foundation, this anchor which is copyright law that gives us any power to have a say about whether code should be accessible. Without that, the licenses are empty words, no weight. No remedy. My concern is less that opensource code gets used by commercial interests; I would rather they use libraries that are maintained especially in contexts of security... my concern is that we move toward only having devices we can keep as long as the company supports them and/or is solvent. If we lose the foundation that everything was built on (copyright law), it becomes impossible to audit or support things on our own. Everything is a rental/subscription.

I don't often just come out and make predictions, this is one I think we're moving toward though as the sea becomes more muddied by regurgitated works. The major AI companies are unabashedly pirating works, there are powerful rights-holders that could be sending armies of lawyers after them, like the big publishing houses... but is it happening? Or are they sitting back and letting the tech companies do R&D for what will be their new business models moving forward.

I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah
In a way, doesn't AI violate non-commercial open source licenses because it takes the code and then profits from it but in a way that is so opaque that nobody can prove it?
“My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world”

That’s great for John, but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use. That he cannot understand that others think differently than him is disappointing.

So, big tech takes the "gift" of passionate developers and: 1. Use them to threaten their jobs (and so many other jobs like lawyers, artists, tech writers...). 2. Hoard hardware, causing prices to raise to absurd levels and effectively making it harder for passionate developers to tinker at home. 3. Set up circular deals between themselves to raise stock prices, creating a bubble that will make 2008 seem like a joke. 4. Close the models and refuse to give credit to anyone or be transparent about training data. 5. Hire cheap labor to label training data in third world countries. 6. Use their models to gather data about the users and profile them, essentially paving the way for mass AI surveillance. 7. Fearmonger about how their models have the potential to wipe the human race. 8. And many other wonderful things.

But hey, we're failing to see how AI is magnifying the value of "our gift". See? Little Timmy can now build a website for his dog with 0 effort just by prompting ChatGPT! Isn't that mind blowing? I don't mind if he's Carmack or fucking Leonardo da Vinci, he's legit stupid.

Prople choosing MIT-0, BSD0 or some equivalently permissive licence do gift their code to the world without expecting anything in return.

Other FOSS developers, not so much. They are the ones who are exploited.

Many people who provided quality technical content on blogs, Stack Overflow, and other forums thought they were providing a public good and helping to create a lasting culture and community. Turns out they were making fuel pellets to power money machines for the richest tech oligarchs in the world.

Most of these communities are being destroyed before our eyes by AI. Anyone in the industry who pretends this isn't happening, or seems confused about why some people are upset about this, is being highly disingenuous.

IMO code generated by AI (which was trained on a lot of copyleft codebases) ought to be systematically on an open-source copyleft license.
Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.
Open sourcing old games is OSS corner case.

Being on the top of the Maslow's Pyramid and knowing there's a very little chance you'll slide down is another reason that change people's attitude to things. The side effect is becoming numb to the majority who isn't filthy rich but contribute way more to OSS.

I can maybe see this argument being valid for OSS - as Carmack says, by nature it should be "no strings attached".

I don't think that's all anti-AI activists care about though. Honestly, I would say most activists don't talk about the use of OSS? The most prominent anti-AI sentiment seems to come from creatives. Artists, musicians, designers, etc.

They didn't publish their works with the same notion as OSS developers, but it was scraped up by corporations all the same. In many cases, these works were protected by copyright law and used anyways.

To me that feels like the equivalent of training on "private repos", which Carmack would call a violation [1].

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2031769354401091988

Carmack can be enthusiastic about AI because it's no threat to him, he's already set. He's not going to be laid off, and if he is, he can just do coding as a hobby for the rest of his life. He doesn't need to worry about what blue collar job to retrain for in middle age to be able to pay his mortgage and clothe his kids.

And it is a form of cheating to take a gift and profit off of it, keeping all the profits for yourself, it goes against the spirit of it. Until now that was fine, because there was a sense that it made more things possible and created jobs, and these projects were improved through reciprocal contribution.

AI vacuumed everything up for itself and turned around and said now I'm going to replace you.

Not everybody means the same thing by open source, it's always been a rather bad umbrella phrase for a lot of different things (and I'm old enough to remember when it first became current).

Whether you agree with them or not the free software / copyleft advocates mean something very different from what Carmack is getting at and always have before or after AI. It has always been an anti-corporate position and it's not difficult to reconcile in my mind at all?

That said, I'm personally a free software advocate, and in favour of the GPL as a license but I use "AI" (LLMs) (critically). To help make [A]GPL software. I kinda feel by copylefting the output, in some sense I'm helping to right the wrong.

Who contributed their work to open source (as a gift) with the expectation that their contribution would eventually be ground into a paste, fully stripped of attribution, and sold as a service?

Maybe something has materially changed?

> My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world.

Says yet another person who's hilariously rich, financially invested in the success of AI and isn't materially affected by AI displacing them.

John Carmack already had his bag and reputation when he did the code dumps.
>If github trained models on the contents of your private repos, that would be a violation.

Really don't see why that should change anything. Surely you'd want your gift to the Microsoft corporation to appreciate in value! Why would we ever withold this boon from somebody on the basis that they gifted their source exclusively to microslop!?

>Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors,...

I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)

Surely we can all agree that there is a difference between:

- Sharing/working on something for free with the hopes that others like it and maybe co tribute back.

- Sharing something for free so that a giant corporation can make several trillion dollars and use my passion to train a machine for (including, but not limited to) drone striking a school.

> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift

I respect Carmack so much more now. I always scratched my head why he made Quake GPL. It was such a waste. Now it doesn't matter anymore. I so thankful copyleft is finally losing its teeth. It served its purpose 30 years ago, we don't need it anymore.

Let's say I put out a bag of candies for halloween or something for anyone to come and take without restrictions. A few of them take most of the candies, then go around the corner and sell it for a significant profit, so much that they are billionaires now, but I've only grown poorer.

Would I have any right to be pissed off? No. Once I shared the candies, I have surrendered all entitlements over them.

Furthermore, let's say I put some legal text on the candy wrapper that said "if you get sick from eating it, i'm not responsible. if you sell it, you have to pay me 10%. If you cook something with the candy and resell that product, you have to share your new recipe with the world." and a bunch of other ridiculous things. But I put it out there for anyone to take, reading the wrapper and accepting the terms was not a condition the public needed to meet before being able to obtain the candy. Not only that, if you put out poisonous food for the public, what you put on the wrapper doesn't absolve you from responsiblity. Being able to offer things for free to others doesn't grant you rights to control their future commercial activity, unless they specifically agreed to that. It is also outlandish and ridiculous to claim you can have a say in someone's recipe's confidentiality simply because they modified your ingredient candy before using it as part of their recipe.

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> and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift.

I can understand his stance on AI given this perspective. I have a harder time empathizing his frustrations. Did he also have a hard time coming to terms with the need for AGPL?

Well, if Carmack wants to give gifts to AI companies then he's free to do it, but it doesn't mean that other people want it too.

I think this debate is mainly about the value of human labor. I guess when you're a millionaire, it's much easier to be excited about human labor losing value.

There's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software.

https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889

I find him speaking really soothing.

There is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar.

I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.