@bender@twtxt.net A renewed vision test might be a good idea for some people. 😅 I mean, it is kind of curious that you get this license as a young person and then it lasts a lifetime, without any further tests. As long as you don’t screw up really bad, it remains valid …

The driver’s license documents in Germany now have an expiration date. You have to renew them every 15 years. (Not the license itself, just the documents.)

I just got my renewed documents. Their expiration date says something like 01.09.40. Huh? That looks super weird to me, like an error. But no, it’s 2040 … Just 15 years away.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

On my blog: Open Source Characters https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/08/11/open-source-characters.html #freeculture #licenses #rant

On my blog: The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Anti-AI Licenses https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/03/03/ai-licenses.html #art #harm #rant #technology

GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided.

This is a fucked up detail:

The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs’ counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something’s fishy there.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’ve become that guy: the guy who rents a car with a fancy touchscreen center console and immediately goes to the “About” page in the console settings to look at the open source licenses.

@prologic@twtxt.net @jlj@twt.nfld.uk @movq@www.uninformativ.de

 /p/tmp > git clone https://www.uninformativ.de/git/lariza.git                                                                                                    Mon May 24 23:48:18 2021
Cloning into 'lariza'...
 /p/tmp > tree lariza/                                                                                                                                    12.5s  Mon May 24 23:48:32 2021
lariza/
├── BUGS
├── CHANGES
├── LICENSE
├── Makefile
├── PATCHES
├── README
├── browser.c
├── man1
│   ├── lariza.1
│   └── lariza.usage.1
├── user-scripts
│   └── hints.js
└── we_adblock.c

2 directories, 11 files

Bell Labs has now transferred Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation, who has in turn re-released all releases under the MIT license. I am very excited about this. 🐇🎉

On the blog: Wanted — Ethical Media Consumption https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/08/02/ethmedia.html #media #license #ethics #rant

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: A Free Culture License Wish List https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/03/29/copyleft.html #license #meta #opensource #freesoftware #gpl #creativecommons #copyleft