Comment Re: Meanwhile (Score 1) 181
Or maybe he just isn't a small minded jerk who think the county he grew up in is that only part of the world that matters.
Or maybe he just isn't a small minded jerk who think the county he grew up in is that only part of the world that matters.
The weird confusion of ideas in your head must be hard to live with.
Education is better in Europe.
Yes, they have the most comprehensive manual around on how not the build a car.
In that case, they could indeed be walking on dangerous ground here if they haven't removed/replaced those parts of the code. Do you know what licence the Eclipse-derived code was used under? Someone mentioned AGPL above but Eclipse also has its own licence that isn't obviously compatible with the AGPL terms.
I did read what you actually wrote. Perhaps it doesn't come across the way you were hoping.
You appear to be insinuating some correlation between developers who choose to use safer languages and developers who have low skills and don't care about the quality of their work. Frankly, that looks like a straw man you've invented to try to create some controversy here, because IME conscientious developers tend to be the quickest and most enthusiastic adopters of safer tools. They'd probably still be safer than average developers using any other language, but they choose tools that make them even safer where they have that option.
What is at issue is that the license terms (contract) that they agreed to requires them to provide source code to the customers.
No, it doesn't. You have misunderstood how these licences work.
Before you dig the hole any deeper, perhaps you would like to review what the relevant licences actually say? I linked to the GPL v2 in an earlier comment, but the provisions in other FOSS licences typically work on the same basis as well.
Then perhaps you would like to post a reply citing the specific wording from any of those licences and the contractual relationship you believe exists between the copyright holder and any licensee that would impose any obligations of the kind we're discussing on the copyright holder?
But the copyright holder isn't themselves subject to the kinds of terms we're talking about in a FOSS licence, because they don't require a licence to copy or distribute the content in the first place.
For example, GPLv2 says:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Obviously that doesn't apply to the copyright holder, who by definition does have the right to modify or distribute without needing the licence.
This is simply not how either copyright or contract law works in any jurisdiction with which I am familiar. You are exactly the hypothetical person in FOSS community I was describing.
Going after people who already have a freely licensed copy seems like a step too far. Stranger things have happened in the legal world of IP rights based on obscure technicalities or novel arguments, but it's clearly against the spirit and intent of the earlier licence.
In general, there wouldn't be anything that required the copyright owner themselves to continue providing access to the source code for those versions, though, because they can licence their works on whatever terms they want and aren't subject to any related restrictions themselves as the rights holder. Sometimes people in the FOSS community don't understand how copyright works and get on their high horses about rights they don't in fact have or obligations that others don't in fact have, and based on TFS it looks like there might be a bit of that going on here.
Do they own all of the copyright themselves? If they do then the licensing probably means nothing as they have no obligation to anyone. But if they're using code to which other parties hold the copyright, under one of the relevant FOSS licences, that is a completely different situation, legally speaking.
Reddit's usefulness and quality varies greatly depending on which subreddits you read. The main/default ones are crowded and mostly terrible. Some of the specialist ones are actually very good and have real experts contributing. I prefer not to look too closely myself, but I've certainly heard of other niche ones about controversial or just plain nasty subjects that I'm surprised are even legal and allowed to continue at all.
The problem is that without employing experts in each field to identify the best content and filter out the dross -- that is, manual intervention, which of course doesn't magically scale -- there's no way for general purpose unsupervised learning to train on the overall body of work selectively. Instead it's likely to end up learning to mimic the (probably very low) average quality of Reddit contributions, which is why I suspect this might be the example that shatters the current AI/ML/LLM illusion.
I wouldn't 100% bet on this, but I wonder if Reddit will be the needle that pierces the AI/ML/LLM hype bubble. It could become a perfect demonstration that fundamentally the results produced by these models can only be as good as the data they were trained on. Garbage in, garbage out, but more realistically if you feed them large volumes of mediocre data unsupervised then you'll get a mediocre answerbot in return. See also all the coding bots that can generate plausible code from a prompt: if you review that code the same way you would review code written by a human, it's often full of problems that juniors might have but seniors probably wouldn't.
People who are writing or drawing or coding just by mixing and matching material copied from online sources and phoning it in probably should be worried, because they probably are about to be automated out of a job. However I doubt people with the knowledge, skill and creativity to be significantly better than average will have much to fear from this kind of ML "competitor" for a long time. And that makes all these sky high valuations for companies that are driven by the current AI hype look very bubbly.
Rust will help to make your own code safer and more predictable. It obviously can't help with code someone else wrote in a different language. The benefit to using Rust is the former and it's still there regardless of the latter. I don't know how much clearer I can say this, and to be honest, I've been replying in good faith but at this point I think you're just trolling so I'll be leaving the discussion now.
Yes, you are. Obviously if you depend on code written by other people then you are trusting that their code is good and if it isn't then you might have a problem. This doesn't seem a particularly novel or interesting argument if we're discussing how to make sure your code is as good as possible and avoid your mistakes becoming serious problems in production.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth