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How is that a problem? All software that competes with other software boils down to "plagiarism" under that criterion. We've been doing that artisenally for ages.
What's changed since then is that back then you couldn't use it to compete with mainstream industry. Now you can.
This is absurd. The reason you would want a clone is because you want something similar, but changed in some key ways to better fit your use case. Or because you want an older version of something that you were very happy with, but the provider refuses to support it anymore, or because you want to increase it's performance, or use it on hardware that was not intended by the original creator, or, or, or...
What if it's a clone of a an open source program, where's the IP evasion then? How does the entire entertainment industry not fall under your definition of "gimmickry"
Photoshop was a triumph of compounded design inputs over the course of its existence, which were very costly to work out and optimize. The purpose of IP law at least ideally is to encourage creative design by allowing designers to monopolize their abstract goods for some period of years and thus secure remuneration for their efforts. It is not equivalent to have prediction software clone a finished design-based good in order to avoid paying a fee or to alter minor aspects of it. It is not equivalent because it does not create the same utility as encouraging people to pour large amounts of creative effort into designing new products in the first place. What you are doing is trying to build a false equivalency between using know-how and techniques to build something from a principled standpoint of design and using predictive software to perform something more akin to a copy-paste function. AI does not put very good design thought into its outputs, that much is observable from said outputs (however opaque its internal workings may be).
You can't copyright an idea, this is basic fundamental IP law. You can protect designs yes, but only for a few years. Copyright over software only covers the exact source code itself and as the claimant you must prove the defendant copied from your source code to hold them liable. If they take 100% of the functionality of your code and make their own copy from observing just the functionality itself that's completely fine and you can't do a single iota of stuff about it.
From Pumfrey J back in the day:
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IP protection was never as broad as you're claiming it to be. If it was, all the Open Source clones of mainstream software would be illegal, and yet we have Gimp, Libre Office, and 7 zillion open source browsers that actually outcompeted their proprietary counterparts. What you are calling for is a complete abolition of all competition. Also, I will note, you never answered where is the "IP evasion" is taking place when the program being clones is open source to begin with.
I'm doing no such thing. First of all, I made no claim about whether AI is "building something from a principled standpoint", the only argument was about whether it can be used quickly and cheaply to catch up to the industry standard. Even if the underlying mechanism is akin to copy-pasting, the technology will have a massive disruptive impact on the industry.
Secondly, if you read my "Aldea" link, you'd see that I actually share many of your concerns about AI and the effects it will have on innovative thinking, or even thinking in general. It's definitely something I believe we'll need to address and mitigate, but the one thing that will do worse than nothing to address this problem is pretending that nothing changed since 2023.
I can agree with the former, I don't think it's putting thoughts into it at all. But if your argument was correct "not putting good thoughts into outputs" would mean that the outputs are of inferior quality, which in turn would mean they are of no threat the artisenally created software. Since they are, something in the logical chain between the first and second part of your sentence is broken.
I only want to contest part of your first point here. Maybe we just disagree on this or have radically different experiences but a lot of FOSS that I’ve used over the years is straight dogshit. Granted not all of it but a damn good amount of it. Libre Office in contrast with Microsoft? Yeah, you’ve lost me there. Both are adequate to the task for an ordinary dude who wants to quickly type up a document and get it printed. Building a resume? Creating something decorative? When I’m really stuck with the suite of tools I’m going to be forced to use, a lot of propriety software still hands down beats a lot of the comparable competitors you find in the open source community. Try going to the GrapheneOS support forums when you experience a boot error or compatibility issue or an update that breaks basic functionality of the device. It’s every bit as bad and dismissive as anything you’d find in customer support forum of a public tech company.
The office suite is an interesting example because for non-programmer computer users it's probably the main point of doing work on the computer, while programmers can go for years without touching it at all, and FOSS builders are all programmers. Need a document? Markdown and Pandoc so you don't need to worry about the janky wysiwyg editor. Need to calculate something complex? Spreadsheets are a fragile mess, anything more complex than a shopping list might as well be a quick Python program and anything with a whole bunch of data should go in an actual database. LibreOffice specifically is going to stay bad because the people who could improve it don't care about office suites and won't dogfood one.
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But my first point is that from a single glance at any of these programs is that they're obviously copying the design and functionality of commercial software. If his argument regarding IP was correct that would be straight up illegal, but it's perfectly allowed.
The second part of your point is part of what I'm driving at: it took the FOSS people years, sometimes literal decades, to come up with a version of the software that is a lot more cumbersome to use than the original. The fact that With AI someone has now been able produce superior work within a month, and do so for multiple programs in a suite is nuts. The original crappy FOSS was not done by dumb people, quite the opposite, so anyone trying to dismiss the recent clones as a nothingburger is high on copium.
Well all cars have steering wheels but nobody ever tries to go out and claim that the steering wheel was their invention. I haven’t been using software clones made with AI, in that sense I continue to reliably use what’s stuck with me and remained updated and supported to the present day, for the better part of 20 years. Almost every time I’ve tried to pivot to FOSS, I almost always end up coming back. The problem I have with it is it struggles to do the more advanced things proprietary software does with ease; the 1% of time I need it to do something absolutely crucial, it is the worst pain in the ass I’ve ever experienced to try and do it; and lastly where it fails between the cracks, it’s almost no better than the worst parts of using closed source software anyway.
I mean there’s a reason I use open source software like Organic Maps on my phone, but I still need Google Maps installed. Almost none of the residential addresses I’ve tried using the former for, exist. It doesn’t show up. UI design is often horrible and confused as hell. Despite trying to follow recommendations to add and plot the coordinates for something like the OpenStreetMaps community, following their process doesn’t work. The maps blur out when I try to zoom in, clicking the buttons doesn’t do anything, and the guidelines don’t correspond to the click through visuals to add something. 3 hours… later… I’m still trying to figure out how to add a goddamn address to their own database, and it will not let me. Never had a problem remotely like this with Google Maps.
For what it's worth, I've had way better luck with OsmAnd. UI is eye-bleeding in comparison, but I did get used to it. I mostly use it as an offline backup, though. It's hard to beat Google Maps, if not for navigation, for real-time traffic and alerts.
I built the full version, and don't travel without grabbing the offline map for the region ahead of time now. I've been burned one too many times by Google deciding now is the time to drop its offline cache, or random airport SIMs dropping out in the middle of nowhere. I have considered paying for it just to support continued development.
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Cut me some slack, I was responding to a point that all these AI clones are somehow plagiarism.
Ok great, but how is that relevant to anything I'm saying? My argument wasn't "FOSS is great!" it's "FOSS is hard to make", and that it's absolutely insane that someone was able to BTFO it in less then a month, to the point that these clones may actually be comparable to their commercial counterparts. I'm less confident on the second part, since I'm frustration-tolerant enough daily drive FOSS, and don't know how it is to use actual Photoshop, but I can already tell you I have no reason to every look at Gimp ever again.
No I know what your argument was, which is why I only singled out a part of it to comment on. My point here is that FOSS isn’t at all hard to make if you have no regard whatsoever for producing crap. Which is often why closed, paid software or ecosystems succeed, because there’s institutional money behind it. GIMP for instance in no way is comparable to someone that makes truly complete use of Adobe Photoshop (that doesn’t mean I have to agree entirely with the latter’s business practices). That’s why I said as far as the simplest and most basic uses go (what, 10% of its use cases?), FOSS and AI assisted or developed open source projects may turn out decent. Beyond that, there’s still a question as to whether it’s at all comparable to their proprietary counterparts.
Then I think you forgot to make the "not hard" part of the argument. Just because it's crap compared to commercial software, doesn't mean it's easy to make.
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Software is protected by copyright, not patent, which means that while the term is longer, the protections aren't as strong. Copyright doesn't cover the software itself but the source code, which means you could develop a program with identical functionality to an existing program as long as you use different code. What this means in practice, however, is that you have to develop the product independent of the existing product, i.e. you can't just take the existing code base and make superficial changes. Courts generally require that the code itself be developed entirely independently. All the programs you listed (Gimp especially) aren't even clones of existing products, just products with similar functionality. Gimp wasn't developed by someone taking Photoshop's code base and modifying it. If what the AI is doing is taking the existing product and reverse-engineering or reverse-compiling or whatever it is to figure out what the code is, then as far as the law is concerned it's no different than if they copied and pasted the executable file. And no, it's not a strong defense that their versions don't have the account control features that verify that the user is a paying customer.
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