Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.
Transcript
2003:
[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]
Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we’re building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.
2010:
Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they’re DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?
[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]
Bearded Fellow: It’s the world’s tiniest open-source violin.
I have a great idea for a program! I should describe it in agonizing detail to an AI owned by some company so it will spit out working source code. Nothing can go wrong with my plan!
This is a flawless plan, especially since they pinky swore that they wouldn’t keep around the information you put into the black box AI. So we’re all safe!
If you make it open source they can’t steal your idea
I mean, they can still steal your idea, fork it, repackage it and charge for it while refusing to upstream their development. But now it’s a licensing discussion and not a personal attack.
Apple and Google have stolen plenty of ideas. They don’t care if it’s closed or open.
If they can’t prevent others from using it, seems fine to me.
If AI will stop people from telling me their “amazing” app ideas when they find out I’m a programmer then I’m all for it.