It is generally possible to download without uploading. You'll just likely get a dribble of data when you do.

AGPL is a plague. GPL, I tolerate, though I have a strong preference towards v2. But AGPL has no redeeming qualities. The hypothetical world where someone creates a closed-source fork of a web service, convinces everyone to use it, and then holds their data hostage just isn't particularly plausible.

Meanwhile, AGPL precludes any interesting integrations, custom in-house authentication systems, using custom database backends, and all sorts of other stuff that potentially is useful to keep company-proprietary, but that has no impact whatsoever on the hypothetical freedoms that the AGPL is intended to protect.

It's a license that is so toxic that even companies that are strong proponents of open source with large open source offerings have outright bans on letting AGPLed code anywhere on the premises.

As far as I can tell, the main benefit of AGPL is for companies that create code and want to release it to the public as "free software", because by requiring contributor agreements, they can keep their own branch proprietary while forcing everyone else in the world to comply with the AGPL, thus ensuring that the only company that can create their own proprietary features is them.

It's definitely an interesting case, but it doesn't fit the original description. The GPL didn't prevent Linksys from strangling the free version of anything. No free WiFi routers ever existed, and Linksys did not destroy demand for the Linux kernel or the GNU C library.

Also, nothing in that case forced Linksys to open anything. They could have switched to a BSD kernel and C library, and they would have been in compliance. They chose to open it because they figured it was an easy way to make the case go away, and it could produce good will in the community. And it ended up being a minor windfall for Linksys.

Technically, search engines have degraded enormously since the naughties. All the things that we've known were distracting and bad and misleading have been added. Search words aren't honoured any more. Websites are censored. Ordering is based on payola.

I'm surprised that search engines are even still around as almost anything works better.

Is it because American teenage males have too much blood sloshing in the brain, it interferes with learning?

Hyperbole. I like it. But it's not convincing :(

You're right. What are you going to DO about it, hmm?

I'm not surprised by this. Linus was highly influential in attacking the GPLv3 way back when it still mattered. He has a pro-corporate viewpoint and likes to bully people.

The bubble is propped up by the illusion that AI technology is inherently expensive to make and use, so that the big model houses like OpenAI and Anthropic cannot be beaten unless a new player invests comparable amounts of money and uses comparable numbers of compute. Open weights Chinese companies are leading the way to attack that illusion head-on.

I agree that you shouldn't compete. You should worry about getting rid of Trump and his family instead. Priorities people.

They made a political calculation to ask under oath about an affair that was nobody's business, hoping to catch him in a lie. I believe the word here is "entrapment". So the GP is right about when it started; he/she just incorrectly understood which party started it.

It was always the Republicans.

Nixon tried to start it back in the 1970s. He just found out the hard way that there were still too many Republicans with morals and ethics remaining in the party. So they spent the next four decades driving them out. What remains is the shell of the former Republican Party, surrounding a core of rot and disease. And that is why "President" Trump is still in office.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

I think they should take all existing episodes from all seasons in reverse chronological order, run them backwards including sound, and let AI reinterpret the dialogue into regular English with subtitles. They can call it Stargate: The Mirror Universe.

3. Download it off a torrent site, wait to get threatened by the copyright owner, show them proof that you purchased the product. If they sue you anyway, counter-sue both the copyright owner and Sony for conspiracy to defraud. Ask for seven figures on account of their vexatious litigation.

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.