Mastodawn

ok genuine crisis of faith here. I've got two games I've been working on, both are intended to be fully open source. One is nearly ready for a public release, the other is probably realistically a year or two out. I feel it is important for the source to be available for the former, and it might not yet be part of any training sets because it only has 17 stars on github, but I'm assuming it probably is already.

The latter is largely not online at all, because I simply haven't built it yet...

I was ambivalent about my code going into training sets, but now for a variety of exciting reasons I am no longer ambivalent. So here's the conflict: the only way I can think of to realistically prevent it from ever going into the plagiarism machine is to simply never make the source available. There we go. That's the crisis of faith.

This is all possible because we had a healthy commons and so that's the reward for building a healthy commons: enclosure by billionaires who are promising the end of everyone's ability to make a living in a creative field. If that really will come to pass, we'd have been better off if we never shared anything on the internet and that really hurts.

right now my best answer is just... not open source anything. or at least, hang on to it for a few years, see what happens with this bubble. if it pops and takes down half the west coast tech industry, nothing was lost and source code can go online again. if it doesn't though, well, i guess go ask the god mommy machine to hallucinate an interactive video for you or something i'm sure it'll be just as good 🙄

Evie 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 11

@aeva make all source request be made in writing and physically mailed to a po box and then be printed into punch cards and mailed back in 20lb blocks

@pupxel why bother making the source available at that point?

Ratsnake Games 🔞Mar 11

@aeva @pupxel make the source available in electronic form but only under NDA

@ratsnakegames @aeva @pupxel litigation is expensive and uncertain even when it’s technically a control

Ratsnake Games 🔞Mar 11

@owen @aeva @pupxel "litigation is uncertain" goes both ways. If you only give the code to private citizens, and hold *them* liable if they leak the code to AI scrapers, most people will think twice before doing it

@ratsnakegames @owen @pupxel I'm not interested in being a copyright troll

Ratsnake Games 🔞Mar 11

@aeva @owen @pupxel i think this is protecting legitimate interests

Ratsnake Games 🔞Mar 11

@aeva @owen @pupxel i'm not even saying that you should actively sue people to shake money out of them - but sometimes you need to keep that option open as a deterrent

@ratsnakegames @owen @pupxel yeah the most i'm willing to do is the LICENSE.txt equivalent to a sign that says "if you can read this you're in range" which only works until people discover it doesn't have teeth

@aeva @ratsnakegames @pupxel threatening your customers because you’re concerned about some third party (here, the collection of AI scrapers) is also pretty hostile

Ratsnake Games 🔞Mar 11

@owen @aeva @pupxel every single contract in the world has negative consequences if you violate it.

Ratsnake Games 🔞

@owen @aeva @pupxel also, if you give people something for free, they're not customers. Asking them to keep stuff reasonably confidential in return for something you are voluntarily granting them with no benefit to yourself is perfectly reasonable.