This is like the modern equivalent of the encyclopedia that added wrong “facts” to prove the makers of Trivial Pursuit infringed on their copyright.

Obviously I’m not referring to that, but to what large tech companies call AI. And they are in fact trying to convince people these AI systems they are developing will soon be clever enough to be considered general AI.

A much larger problem is that the energy consumption is several orders of magnitude larger than that of our brain. I’m not convinced that we have enough energy to make a standalone “AI”.

This is a major issue I have with basically anyone who talks about current “AI” systems - they’re clearly not even close to AI, as they require an extreme amount of energy and data to perform tasks which would be trivial to an actual brain. They seem to lack any ability to comprehend their input, only mimicking it through brute force, which is only feasible since computers got fast enough and we can currently keep up with the energy demands.

Network effect.

Using GitHub as an example, choosing any alternative (as a small project) will reduce the amount of contributions and will make the project less discoverable. Especially if you consider projects where the technical barrier for contribution is lower, it is much more likely for a potential contributor to have an account on a “mainstream” platform.

I used to think that this was less of an issue in more niche communities, but a recent post by an Emacs package developer (Protesilaos Stavrou, won an FSF award a few years ago) changed my mind: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-04-30-re-emacs-github-freedom-microsoft/

Does it work well for you? I used cwm on X11 (fairly similar to Hikari), but last time I tried Hikari on Void I kept running into weird issues.

Why do they need to make a full time living from working on these projects?

I don’t understand why this is suddenly an issue - I use a 40 year old free program daily (Emacs), which has always been developed for free by volunteers (including me).

Think about the software you use - IME software created to make someone richer is usually worse than software written out of passion.

But this is contrary to what is actually happening - when ElasticSearch changed to a “fair code” license, Amazon forked the last version and now maintain OpenSearch.

If you created a new project from scratch which is uniquely useful then sure, companies will probably pay. But what happens if a free competitor pops up? Or if one already exists? I don’t see corporations paying for stuff they can get for free.

I dont expect to get paid because I use a certain license.

Then how are you expecting to get paid? It’s not like with these licenses you would automatically get paid when someone uses your code. You still need to do non-trivial and non-development related work to form some business relationship with these companies

With a free license I could get paid though (and the maintainer and project could, too), I would just have to do the work myself to make it happen (by starting a company offering enterprise support for businesses using the project, for example).

Don’t expect that just because you use a “fair code” license you will be paid - it’s likely that companies would just prefer to use a free software project instead (just like today when companies almost never use AGPL licensed code).

I feel like most people arguing against this stuff dont really play these scenarios through and always have the big scummy company in mind that coopts this honest idea.

In practice it has been scummy companies using these licenses so far.

If you use these licenses as a maintainer and don’t require a CLA, basically no one (including you) can profit off the code. This is obviously worse than the current situation IMO.

Requiring a CLA will reduce contributions (especially when using these licenses IMO), which will hurt your project.

In this fictional situation where you write noteworthy amounts of code for the software I maintain alone, which already gets used by revenue-producing entities and earns some money, you would rightfully ask to be taken on as maintainer and become part of the group profiting from the software, no?

I would rightfully ask, but you could just refuse. You will become (in this scenario) the company leeching off a developer. And if I’m passionate about the project, I’ll probably keep contributing, since I won’t be able to profit from a fork anyway.

There are many more issues with this idea - what if the maintainer disappears? (say someone forked the project and continued development - with these licenses the fork can’t be monetized)

What about the fact that once you sign a CLA you basically have to trust the maintainer/company to not just relicense the code under whatever terms they want (this is not theoretical, ElasticSearch used this method to change to a “fair code” license).

The licenses are legal and allow you to monetize code - but they place restrictions on how it can be done, by design.

A restriction common to all those licenses is that you must own the code to monetize it.

If you create a project with a license like this and require a CLA for contributions, why would I not look for a different to project to contribute to? You’re literally telling me only you are allowed to profit from the code I write. Some people will be okay with this, but many won’t (note that current FOSS licenses allow you to monetize the code even if you did sign a CLA).

OTOH, a company trying to get free cotributions while hampering their competition will greatly benefit from such a license.

So these licenses benefit scummy companies, and make the lives of independent maintainers harder, while lowering the potential for contribution. They are objectively worse than what we have now, and are clearly not free licenses

You missed my point - a fair code license doesn’t change copyright law, so if you’re not the sole developer you can’t easily commercialize your own code, by design.

This is in contrast to free software licenses, which allow anyone to commercialize the code.

I agree with you, but as long as many developers don’t the situation stays the same (since the law is technically on their side without a CLA or similar).

P.S.: a system where you can just relicense the work of contributors with a CLA and profit off of them is not an inch better than this.

Unless you’re a single developer, how are you supposed to profit off your own work without making contributors sign a CLA with these licenses? You only “own” the code you write personally, so AFAIU with these licenses making money off of your code becomes harder the more contributors you have (regardless of the amount they contributed).

Without every single contributor assigning copyright to a single entity for their code, the only way to commercialize a program distributed under such a license is to get every single contributor to agree to it separately (or not use their code).

If every single contributor assigns copyright to a single entity, the project is now controlled by it, and unless that entity was particularly nice with its contracts, those contributors are now powerless if (for example) this entity decides to change the license.

It will be fixed in GIMP 3, the current stable release uses GTK 2 (doesn’t supoort Wayland natively).

From the article:

Using blind quantum computing, clients can access remote quantum computers to process confidential data with secret algorithms and even verify the results are correct, without revealing any useful information

This is a breakthrough because this level of security is impossible currently (as you allude to in your comment).

Availability will still be an issue, of course.

My point is that the article is about making cloud quantum computing secure; the article doesn’t even mention quantum encryption.

That said, cloud-based quantum cryptography has a big hole in it: the connection to the cloud.

Read the article, the whole point is making the connection to the cloud actually secure.

However, delegating quantum computations to a server carries the same privacy and security concerns that bedevil classical cloud computing. Users are currently unable to hide their work from the server or to independently verify their results in the regime where classical simulations become intractable. Remarkably, the same phenomena that enable quantum computing can leave the server “blind” in a way that conceals the client’s input, output, and algorithm [6–8]; because quantum information cannot be copied and measurements irreversibly change the quantum state, information stored in these systems can be protected with information-theoretic security, and incorrect operation of the server or attempted attacks can be detected—a surprising possibility which has no equivalent in classical computing.

From the paper the article talks about

Why is it obvious? See https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571

Literally only the last comment gives any real data about how that money is being spent (and the annual report mentioned hasn’t been published yet).

I think the change is positive in general, but they really haven’t done a good job w.r.t transparency, and the Matrix ecosystem is still reliant on a for-profit company.