If I earn my living from a company that doesn't make Linux versions, should i still switch?
Should my customers?
It's a great idea, and my work does not touch the internet, but the confusing variations of linux do not a happy workfoce make.
Your 'lord and saviour' can fuck off, with all the others, I prefer science.
Then test Omarchy.
Shane's mental models books are packed with a lot of random/disparate domains/insights -- He's a good aggregator there.
Thinking in Systems by Meadows.
Really, once you go down the rabbit hole, you find new threads to pull. That's kind of the fun of it
Will always be grateful to Shane for that!
Have you heard of our lord and savior, Linux?
The ONLY things that matter when determining whether copyright was infringed are "access" and "substantial similarity". The first refers to whether the alleged infringer did, or had a reasonable opportunity to, view the copyrighted work. The second is more vague and open-ended. But if these two, alone, can be established in court, then absent a fair use or other defense (for example, all of the ways in which your work is "substantially similar" to the infringed work are public domain), you are infringing. Period. End of story.
The Tetris Company, for example, owns the idea of falling-tetromino puzzle video games. If you develop and release such a game, they will sue you and they will win. They have won in the past and they can retain Boies-tier lawyers to litigate a small crater where you once stood if need be. In fact, the ruling in the Tetris vs. Xio case means that look-and-feel copyrights, thought dead after Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland, are now back on the table.
It's not like this is even terribly new. Atari, license holders to Pac-Man on game consoles at the time, sued Philips over the release of K.C. Munchkin! on their rival console, the Magnavox Odyssey 2. Munchkin didn't look like Pac-Man. The monsters didn't look like the ghosts from Pac-Man. The mazes and some of the game mechanics were significantly different. Yet, the judge ruled that because it featured an "eater" who ate dots and avoided enemies in a maze, and sometimes had the opportunity to eat the enemies, K.C. Munchkin! infringed on the copyrights to Pac-Man. The ideas used in Pac-Man were novel enough to be eligible for copyright protection.
It's a foundational principle of copyright law, codified in 17 U.S.C. § 102(b): "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery"
Now, we can quibble over what qualifies there, but the dichotomy itself is pretty clear.
This goes back to Baker v. Selden (1879) and remains bedrock copyright doctrine.
The Tetris case is overstated. Tetris v. Xio did not establish that The Tetris Company "owns the idea of falling-tetromino puzzle video games." The court explicitly applied the idea-expression dichotomy and found Xio copied specific expressive choices (exact dimensions, specific visual style, particular piece colors). Many Tetris-like games exist legally, and it is the specific expressive elements that were considered in the Xio case.
K.C. Munchkin is old and criticized. That 1982 ruling predates major developments like Computer Associates v. Altai, which established more rigorous methods for filtering out unprotectable elements. The Munchkin decision continues to be debated.
"Substantial similarity" analysis itself incorporates idea-expression filtering. Courts use tests specifically designed to separate protectable expression from unprotectable ideas, especially when considering the four factors of fair use (when applied as a defense.)
Copyright was predicated on the notion that ideas and styles can not be protected, but that explicit expressive works can. For example, a recipe can't be protected, but the story you wrap around it that tells how your grandma used to make it would be.
LLMs are particularly challenging to wrangle with because they perform language alchemy. They can (and do) re-express the core ideas, styles, themes, etc. without violating copyright.
People deem this 'theft' and 'stealing' because they are trying to reconcile the myth of intellectual property with reality, and are also simultaneously sensing the economic ladder being pulled up by elites who are watching and gaming the geopolitical world disorder.
There will be a new system of value capture that content creators need to position for, which is to be seen as a more valuable source of high quality materials than an LLM, serving a specific market, and effectively acquiring attention to owned properties and products.
It will not be pay-per-crawl. Or pay-per-use. It will be an attention game, just like everything in the modern economy.
Attention is the only way you can monetize information.
The unspoken part -- This holds true so long as revenue is at least equal to costs, and speaks nothing about whether user trust and user experience is optimized over profit.