Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies.
I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now.
Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies.
You're reminding me of "mutual nuclear disarmament", and the related idea that being against anyone's having nukes doesn't necessarily mean immediately getting rid of one's own nukes.
While I am 100% with you that we've arrived at the place local GPUs can do real, good work and that it helps combat the energy arguments against certain LLM usage, Drew is not likely to agree with you. I can't find it on a quick search which tells me I'm probably remembering it from his prior Mastodon account, but I distinctly remember Drew once talking about how gaming GPUs were part of the (climate) problem and that we should all take notes from the Nintendo Switch in terms of gaming joy delivered per watt.
This is not to say I disagree with Drew's desire for efficiency, even in gaming. This is simply to say: from my recollection of that blog/toot thread/whatever it was, even home LLM usage won't meet what I recall his energy bar to be, until we've got planning and orchestrator models that fit on a non-flagship phone.
I wouldn't consider this particularly hypocritical for even most people opposed to computing at the gigawatt scale, but for someone who believes a 3060 is over the line it's another story.
To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying". It doesn't matter if you like or dislike what other people do with their copies. The act of copying simply does not harm you.
The only way people can "abuse copyright against you" is if someone claims you violated their copyright, and invokes a DMCA takedown request, or sues you. You using the GPL will not protect you from this in any situation I can imagine. In fact, what Drew is doing here (claiming violation of copyright) is literally the only way to abuse copyright.
To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying".
Not believing the (or an) idea of copyright is one form of being "against" "copyright". One can oppose copyright law while still desiring a form of social enforcement for copyright-law-like ideas. Just as there are many forms of emotional abuse that are not illegal or could not be enforced if made illegal, and just as there is such thing as "abusing one's trust", there are forms of copying behavior that deserve the label of "abuse" regardless of whether the law gives a label.
LLMs aid people in abusing copyright by stripping copyleft software of its freedoms and then making derivatives which the author then copyrights restrictively. It's simply not a level playing field when one party is allowed to restrictively copyright their work, it creates a competitive advantage. This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.
This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.
But, even in that case, you have lost nothing. Other people doing anything with the code you released, including making restrictively licensed derivative works, does not harm you, cost you anything, or deprive you of anything you already had.
Comments
Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies.
I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/
[2] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-cop...
You're reminding me of "mutual nuclear disarmament", and the related idea that being against anyone's having nukes doesn't necessarily mean immediately getting rid of one's own nukes.
While I am 100% with you that we've arrived at the place local GPUs can do real, good work and that it helps combat the energy arguments against certain LLM usage, Drew is not likely to agree with you. I can't find it on a quick search which tells me I'm probably remembering it from his prior Mastodon account, but I distinctly remember Drew once talking about how gaming GPUs were part of the (climate) problem and that we should all take notes from the Nintendo Switch in terms of gaming joy delivered per watt.
This is not to say I disagree with Drew's desire for efficiency, even in gaming. This is simply to say: from my recollection of that blog/toot thread/whatever it was, even home LLM usage won't meet what I recall his energy bar to be, until we've got planning and orchestrator models that fit on a non-flagship phone.
This seems really odd given that Drew chose to write and continues to maintain Sourcehut in a language that is one to two orders of magnitude less energy-efficient than C (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016764232...)
I wouldn't consider this particularly hypocritical for even most people opposed to computing at the gigawatt scale, but for someone who believes a 3060 is over the line it's another story.
As long as copyright exists, we need copyleft licenses to ensure that covered software can't be copyrighted.
That is to say, being against copyright doesn't mean you want to allow others to abuse it against you.
To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying". It doesn't matter if you like or dislike what other people do with their copies. The act of copying simply does not harm you.
The only way people can "abuse copyright against you" is if someone claims you violated their copyright, and invokes a DMCA takedown request, or sues you. You using the GPL will not protect you from this in any situation I can imagine. In fact, what Drew is doing here (claiming violation of copyright) is literally the only way to abuse copyright.
Not believing the (or an) idea of copyright is one form of being "against" "copyright". One can oppose copyright law while still desiring a form of social enforcement for copyright-law-like ideas. Just as there are many forms of emotional abuse that are not illegal or could not be enforced if made illegal, and just as there is such thing as "abusing one's trust", there are forms of copying behavior that deserve the label of "abuse" regardless of whether the law gives a label.
LLMs aid people in abusing copyright by stripping copyleft software of its freedoms and then making derivatives which the author then copyrights restrictively. It's simply not a level playing field when one party is allowed to restrictively copyright their work, it creates a competitive advantage. This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.
But, even in that case, you have lost nothing. Other people doing anything with the code you released, including making restrictively licensed derivative works, does not harm you, cost you anything, or deprive you of anything you already had.
Unless I have to interact with their software in which case I've lost the right to repair it.
The efficiency gains only make us use less resources if demand is fixed rather than elastic. Look up Jevons's paradox.