From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
I would suggest that what you really learned was to ALWAYS "License" your contributions to any crowd-sourced project under CC-BY-SA, the #FSF#GPL or #AGPL, or some other #Creative_Commons or strong #Copyleft license.
Again: "License" your contributions - do not "ASSIGN" your copyright to any project. It's a common technique used by tricksters to steal your intellectual property for their own diabolical, ulterior motives like you just described
If you see the AGPL licenses on my free and open source work and you think “damn you, I can’t use this to enrich myself or my corporation without sharing back what I’ve built on top of what you’ve freely shared and thus contribute to cultivating a healthy commons where others might enjoy the same benefits from my work that I want to obtain from yours” (a) you really have long-winded thoughts and (b) well, you already see the flaw in your reasoning.
(Remember this whenever anyone complains about ‘the viral nature of GPL’ or sings praises for (neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others and enclose the commons.)
The #Matrix project is re-licensing its servers (synapse, dendrite, ..) from #Apache to #AGPL, following the spate of similar measures by many other projects. Good that they didn't choose a non-FOSS license.
But they're also changing the sign-off from #DCO to #CLA. That is very disappointing.
PS: If you are starting a FOSS project, consider adopting a #copyleft license. It should be abundantly clear by now that the push for permissive licenses is an attempt to extract free labour.
"Debates continue, even today, in copyleft expert circles, whether this model itself violates GPL. There is, however, no doubt that this provision is not in the spirit of the GPL agreements. The RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] business model is unfriendly, captious, capricious, and cringe-worthy."
15.02.2024, 11:00–17:00
Ventilator Bar (OT301, Amsterdam)
Free / on donation (~10€)
Next week, Thursday 15th Feb, I'm giving a small workshop about licenses and alternative copyright statements in collab with Spookstad, an experimental publishing platform focused on radical politics. We will dive into the incredibly messed-up world of copyright alternatives, from forgotten underground publishing trivia to FLOSS and the more recent post-open source/post-free culture practices. Then in the afternoon we make zines.
Yeah, you're really gonna see which companies are just gonna allow the AI to scrape all their stuff now. I'm a copyleft/creative commons kinda guy. But if you have art that you don't want stolen, the answer is simple.
MAKE YOUR OWN WEBSITE and put your art there (edit: and use that Glaze type of stuff on your art that wrecks AI, just to be sure)! Neocities is SO easy to set up! Or your own domain and hosting via porkbun, GoDaddy (non-WordPress) - anything at all other than proprietary/walled stuff!
> Dans le cadre de la collection C’était Mieux Demain, nous organisons un nouvel appel à textes ! Pour rappel, cette collection est composée de recueils de nouvelles d’anticipation se voulant optimistes quant à l’avenir, mais sans pour autant se voiler la face sur les problématiques sociales et climatiques que nous traversons.
(neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others
implying that the #GPL / #AGPL doesn't let corps partake in the free labor of others too> and enclose the commons
Your "open commons" is worthless if it's effectively still proprietary. Case in point: #Mastodon's #ActivityPub extensions that pretty much everybody else have to support (Mastodon is AGPL, and it's not realistic to implement ActivityPub strictly to the spec and expect it to be compatible with Mastodon). Or GNUisms (implemented by #GNU software which are GPL) that #BSD userlands are forced to support. Or #Matrix where there's basically only one server implementation that is usable (#Synapse whichis AGPL). I could go on and on.
It'll very ironic for FOSS advocates to start supporting big corporate copyrights just because they have a beef with #AI. Very ironic indeed. For me at least, anything that undermines copyright law as it exists today is good because in its current form it only serves to consolidate the power of the likes of Disney while stifling the power and rights of creators. #copyright#copyleft
Appena approdati nel #fediverso e su #mastodon , iniziamo con una #presentazione . SubTerra è un'etichetta italiana di musica indipendente in ambito indie, pop, rock, prog, post e affini. Dal 2006 diffondiamo la musica dei nostri artisti con licenze #copyleft e uno spirito assolutamente anarchico. Crediamo infatti nel valore assoluto dell'autoproduzione e dell'autodistribuzione. Tra tutte le istanze esplorate finora #stereodon ci sembrava quella più in linea con la nostra filosofia. Eccoci qui!
Just had a #DogWalkFlashBack to '94, the week I first arrived in Aotearoa. I installed Linux for the first time, on my desktop computer (486 dx2 66MHz, 32MB RAM, monitor was 800x600 pixels, common at the time). I remember the giddy feeling of realising that I had actual real multi-tasking, and I could log into my system from outside the Lincoln Uni campus. Plus I could log into my old account at UW (Seattle) & from it back into my desktop. Heady days. People came from all over campus to see it.
30 years later, I still feel fortunate every day to have this embarrassment of riches that is #libre | #FOSS | #openSource (I vastly prefer #Copyleft) software, & that I've been been able make it a viable, even prosperous careers. Because I know that if I can do it, others can too! More details: https://davelane.nz/my-open-history