lime!

it’s a tsunami. uncontrollable, started far away from any normal humans, sweeps up everyone in its wake, and will cause massive damage when it inevitably crashes into a place with lots of people.

ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.

seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.

you’re absolutely right! substituting pigeons.

funny you should use that example in particular because i recently had the displeasure of using microsoft’s phone tree. i was trying to a dead relative’s account and the info on the website was wrong.

they built a phone tree that remembers you. if you try to call in multiple times during some time period (at least several hours) it will just assume you have the same question and skip to your last choice.

“for financial services, press one. for technical support, press two. for goblins, press three. for repairs, press four.”

considering the massive accidents of models deleting codebases and production db’s, the fact that the tool may be open source doesn’t really help.

besides, i don’t know any open source models. i know of open-weight models, but i’ve yet to see anyone share the training regime and source data for an even vaguely effective model.

steve jobs famously called the personal computer “a bicycle for the mind”, in that it’s a tool that makes you more efficient. calling language models “an automobile for the mind” in that it gets you there very quickly, without any expended effort, locks you into specific intrastructure, and is bad for the environment, seems pretty apt.

not if you’re the one selling oil and gas

i’ve had to deal with situations like that before, not specifically because of gpl but because of international regulations. one of my customers was a digital id provider, and they had one of those super-accurate timekeeping/cryptography servers they needed to move from lithuania to sweden. because of laws surrounding encryption of personal information, the server would count as compromised if there was ever a single second where it was left without supervision. so they had two of their people drive non-stop through poland, germany, denmark and half of sweden with the server on a ups in the back seat.

well then. my argument is moot.

sounds like it says that to me. “we can’t send you the source over the internet because of security reasons so you need to pay us for a plane ticket so one of our representatives can give you a cd directly” is evil and stupid but completely reasonable in a legal sense.

i’m using “on top” rather flippantly here, since orca is AGPL. but bambu may also have separate code running on the machines that is not agpl.

yeah, this is the interesting one. also this one and he ones below it.

basically, bambu has the right to refuse handing out gpled code. that’s part of their freedom to distribute as they see fit. however, they can only exercise that freedom on people they haven’t given the binaries. so if you decompile or download all the sources, and you don’t own one of their printers, you are also violating the license.

now if rossman owns a bambu printer, and he has gotten the sources from that printer or directly from bambu, they can’t do shit. otherwise there is wiggle room.

the fsf is off the opinion that you explicitly can paywall the sources separately from the product. that’s why i find this interesting.

yeah, a lot of times. i had software licencing responsibilities for a product for a while, and they really didn’t want gpl stuff in there for the reasons stated in the thread.

the interesting wrinkle in this situation is: if rossman is distributing all of bambu’s code, including the account stuff that far as i can tell is another codebase, and he hasn’t gotten it from his own printer (which wouldn’t have the sources) then no “agreement” has taken place. if bambu is told to distribute sources and they say “no”, they’re in the wrong. but if they haven’t said anything, then technically rossman is stealing the code. it would most likely get thrown out, but the case can be made.

oh yeah i remember that. pretty sure that was gpl.

this is sort of a predecessor to that situation thus far: bambu is obviously in the wrong with regards to not handing out gpl’ed source, but they are in their full right to refuse handing out stuff they’ve built on top. so the question then is, is rossman in the clear for having taken their source code? if he has bought one of their printers (most likely) it’s pretty cut and dry, but if he took the code from somewhere else he has technically stolen it and the license does not apply. at least that’s my read.

what i’m reading from that is that both parties must agree that the work has been conveyed. with the risk of going all sovcit, if the conveyed item is a binary, and the producer does not send the source code to the consumer as instructed by the license, can the consumer really pull the source and distribute it? surely if the license is broken the work falls back on default permissions, e.g. all rights reserved?

are you sure about that first one? yes they have to give you the source, but what happens if they don’t? i’ve genuinely not thought about that before.

maybe my thinking is off then, but in my mind it’s mainly for first and second parties? as in, orca and bambu both have to share the source when sharing the binary, not necessarily immediately but on request. anything built on top of gpl code can be closed unless it’s agpl. as a third party to all this, can rossman share the code bambu has made on top of orca?

not really what the gpl means, but good for him i guess?