Be an Open Source Absolutist

Nearly every comment is missing his take given the title here.<p>He&#x27;s not saying <i>everything</i> should be open source.<p>He&#x27;s saying that the right to have an open source version of anything is what we should be absolutists about.<p>So not that every OS, or encryption, or AI model should be open - but that people should fight and stand up for the right to have access to open OSes, encryption, or AI models if produced.<p>Windows can exist, but shouldn&#x27;t be able to prevent Linux from existing basically.<p>That&#x27;s the absolutism. He hasn&#x27;t suddenly turned into Stallman.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;ID_AA_Carmack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1711737838889242880" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;ID_AA_Carmack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1711737838889242880</a>

Speaking of which, doom being released as free software has led, indirectly, to this being nanoWADmo, national wad creating month, where people make doom maps. The community is thriving all these years later, you should see modern doom mega wads by people like skillsaw. There are hundreds of these projects

How much open source neural network code or models or research has John Carmack&#x27;s Keen Technologies (&gt;1y, +$20m raised) released?

<i>Back in the 90s, there were legal battles in the US over software capable of strong encryption. There were scare stories about how terrorists and child pornographers would use the technology to evade justice, but people were also wearing T-shirts printed with forbidden code to mock the idea of algorithms too dangerous to share.<p>It was stupid, and I was ashamed of the regulatory state, but we got better.</i><p>we have not gotten any better. our t-shirt snark has, regrettably, faded.

I especially would like formats and protocols to be open source and freely available. Do you remember the state of digital video in the 90s, 2000s? Absolute clusterfuck of codecs, players, really ugly software being pushed upon users because they were the only way to play a specific piece of media. The UX sucked, people hated it, so codec pack installers, and then free players that bundled codecs became popular, VLC became popular, then streaming video became popular, and now we were back to square one, because no two browser supported the same video formats. But in the meantime Matroska came along, then Google bought a company with a good codec and open sourced it, and a bunch of streaming providers banded together to work on future formats, and the very similar audio advancements were bundled in the mix. And so, now we have a great, open source, royalty-free video container, a bunch of great video formats, audio formats. Browsers support it, smart appliances support it, hardware can have decoders for it, and everyone is better off because of this. It&#x27;s a huge investment to iron out the details, but the pipes are infrastructure. Private ownership, and rent extraction only makes it worse, but if they are free &#x2F; belong to the commons, then a lot of great things can be built on top of that.

I remember him being very pro Windows. If so then this is a welcome change of spirit. I hope he is daily driving a Linux system at home and I hope everyone else here does as well.

Kind of tangential, but I&#x27;m really saddened by Id not releasing the source code to their engines since Doom 3 BFG-ish. I know he doesn&#x27;t work there anymore, but I got reminded earlier today when Linus (of techtips fame) lamented the fact that there&#x27;s only a single game that runs on the fantastic Id tech 7 engine.<p>At least Demonware will get direct unlicensed access to their netcode when Microsoft finally buys them.

There&#x27;s a certain level of irony about this being posted on Twitter.

&gt; In the spirit of the first amendment, congress should make no law abridging the freedom to release open source software.<p>This is an odd twist at the end. What’s it referencing?

Absolutism includes the right to repair (our software) which extends to the right to reverse engineer. Unfortunately those are both untenable at the moment as there is no legal mechanism to support or fight for those rights<p>To create such a mechanism there needs to be an open source union that doesn&#x27;t just help people with x y or z license.<p>Just like how the unions fought for workers rights, this OSS union would fight for digital and coder&#x27;s rights.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but did he take this position also when meta made occulus as closed as possible? Running any opensource stuff on it? Connecting it to an free operating system? You could not even buy one here, at least not without selling your personal data.<p>I have a unpleasant feeling that this well intended talk is only a move to protect his future work and foremost business.<p>(but I do hope that I am wrong)

I am a firm believer in open source, with the caveat that authors should always and everywhere have ultimate say over how to release their own work, never legislators or courts. FOSS may be the morally and technically preferable choice for many projects but is not inherently superior, and there are several advantages to going proprietary - plenty of examples where paid software is actually higher quality, regardless of whether it is developed in the open. This is also likely to be the case with ML software. If you want nice things then pay for them, but ultimately authors should be able to retain full creative freedom and executive control over their own software and let the marketplace decide.

Tangental, but twitter is really nice for thoughts like this.<p>It loads (fast). There&#x27;s no obnoxious modals or even ads. The whole article&#x27;s available in plain text. It gives a view&#x2F;like count. Commenting is frictionless and via a well-established method, and authors often follow up answering questions.<p>It&#x27;s my preferred way of reading text on the web. Maybe 2nd to old school personal websites (since they&#x27;re less likely to get deleted - I don&#x27;t quite trust twitter to not do that).

The most critical step here is to print a completely functional, with model, llm algorithm on a t-shirt.

Maybe not a great choice to tell this on closed source, politically captured twitter.

He says, in the twitverse...

Open source kamikaze drones? Open source house location finder via twitter handle?