John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

I think if you've been set for life since the late 90s/early 2000s and didn't really have to work another day in your life if you didn't want to, it's a lot easier to be cavalier about giving away some of your output from way back when.

He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.

But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.

In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.

It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout.

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.

I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

In his follow-up post he talks about him open sourcing old games as a gift, and he doesn't much care how people receive that gift, just that they do.

He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not.

The original authors most of the time didn't write the software to profit. But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.

It's odd to me that he doesn't acknowledge this.

I find it pretty simple:

- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence

- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

I feel similarly to Carmack, and have felt this way since the late 1990s when I was in college.

Open sourcing code is a form of power, power to influence, inspire, and propagate one's worldview on whomever reads that code. Thank you OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, thank you for amplifying the voices of all us open source contributors!

Surely we can all agree that there is a difference between:

- Sharing/working on something for free with the hopes that others like it and maybe co tribute back.

- Sharing something for free so that a giant corporation can make several trillion dollars and use my passion to train a machine for (including, but not limited to) drone striking a school.

I imagine you would be enthusiastic about this if you’re running an AI startup/lab, yeah

There's a nice interview with Stallman where he's asked about this: what are people's motivation for contributing to Free software.

https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=1889

I find him speaking really soothing.

> those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift

I respect Carmack so much more now. I always scratched my head why he made Quake GPL. It was such a waste. Now it doesn't matter anymore. I so thankful copyleft is finally losing its teeth. It served its purpose 30 years ago, we don't need it anymore.

Personally for me I don't see it as gift, he licensed out the engine but didn't want to be in the engine business, after selling enough it feels he just put it out there so it's his stamp forever with the GPL infection. I think he already felt the diminishing returns at the time. He knew about the sharing of floppy discs and hacker scene and eventually someone would've done it and I think he felt cornered and said fuck it might as well put it out there to beat them to it.

There is code I gift to the world that I license as MIT or similar and there is code I publish as a means for furthering what I perceive as a advanced society which I license as GPL or similar.

I don't ask anyone to share my ideals but conflating these two is dishonest.

I've been wondering, Stallman was driven to create free software after an incident trying to get the code for firmware on his office printer. I'm wondering if today, would he have just reverse engineered it with AI?

Edit: I'm also thinking of what he did rewriting all of Symbolics code for LISP machines

(similar to the person that accidentally hacked all vacuum of a certain manufacturer trying to gain access to his robot vacuum? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/acciden...)

John Carmack seems to think isomorphic plagiarism and piracy bleed though is good for FOSS.

This is demonstrably incorrect given how LLM are built, and he should retire instead of trolling people that still care about workmanship. =3

"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

As I understand it, the anti-AI stance of open source software people in particular has nothing to do with AI learning from code bases, and everything to do with AI slop clogging all unrestricted community feedback channels.

Model distillation is gift sharing then. It's settled, Carmack said it.

This fellow Shawnee Mission East alum gets it.

TL;DR: I really wanted to use a more permissive license so I don't mind AI scraping my code.

Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.