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Open Source License Comparison
rbb writes "Bryce Wilcox-O'Hearn, aka Zooko, has put together a simple chart that in just a few lines displays the characteristics of each of the most popular Open Source licenses. The table, which is currently in version 0.8.3, makes it easy to see in a glance how the licenses compare to one another." Easily digestible information - good for PHB [?] s.
Hi folks. The License Quick Ref is definitely a work in progress. I am no lawyer and there are a lot of question marks and probably a lot of inaccuracies or other bugs.
Please e-mail <zooko@zooko.com> with suggestions for improvement. Thanks!
If you send me flames, I may elect to post them to my web log. :-)
http://zooko.com/.
Regards,
Zooko
So kill me if you must -- thereby putting me out of my misery as slavishly devoted to a do-or-die AI Project, but first I would like to raise the perhaps feeble argument that we human beings have a right to know exactly what we are and how we function as both minds and bodies.
As for your lead-in statement that you don't believe this project will succeed, think again, because it is not the admittedly amateurish AI source code propelling the AI Mind to success (i.e., proliferation), but rather the SourceForge/ Mind/ Docs/ Theory of Cognition that will inexorably introduce True Good Old Fashained AI (GOFAI) unless stopped by a nefarious military/government/Microsoft/_whatever_, because the Mentifex AI theory is the free, public-domain distillate of thirteen years of slavish agonizing over all possible roads to its now uniquely magisterial Theory of Mind -- and you can't stop an idea whose time has come.
If the U.S. or other military does take over an Open Source AI Mind project, they are not going to announc it to the world here on Slashdot. They are going to pick a place like Los Alamos, New Mexico, and develope the End-Of-Humanity in secret. The only way to thwart the forces of evil is to let _them_ sweat a lot about who _else_ has the plans for the Superintelligence.
the only thing any license could do to protect you would be to make you not legally responsible for the damages he causes, which the GPL does not do, but is easily accomplished by a disclaimer saying you are not responsible for how your code is used by others and states that any one who uses your code accepts full responisbility for the results (at least I think thats how it works). Your desire to open source your code is great (IMO), but (and I'm going to get flamed here for this) if you feel very strongly that if someone who makes modifications to your code that cause harm, it makes you morally (not legally which can be taken care of) responsible for the harm they cause I would regretfully reccomend you do not open your code, as open code will be used (which is the point)and somebody may end up making harmful modifications to your code. I do not believe such a case would make you morally responsible for any disater that occurred from a persons misuse of your code, IMO it's like a carpenter putting a "Free" sign on an old hammer and putting it outside, if someone takes that and uses it to beat someone to death or accidently drops it on someones head...it is not your fault but everyone has different morals and yours may be stricter than mine.
So in conclusion, I think it is great to open your code, and as long as you put in a proper disclaimer it's legally safe, but if you wouldn't be able to emotionally handle some idiot messing up on modifying your code (even though IMO it's not your fault) then using it for a critical application and causing damage, you probably shouldn't do it. A side note is hopefully any program in which mistakes may cost lives would be rigorously tested before being put into use.
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...kind of like all those people who were protesting nuclear weapons in the U.S. while the U.S.S.R. was unashamedly preparing to destroy the West.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
...I must state my opinion that its goals are monstrous and evil.
An attempt to create a general purpose artificial intelligence -- and specifically one which is more intelligent than any human AND one intended to be loaded into robots! -- which acts from self-interest, rather than to fulfill some specific function, is nothing less than an attempt to destroy humanity.
People who make this attempt should be killed, and their work destroyed. Collaborators should be killed, sympathizers should be killed. It is unclear whether it is wiser to do it publicly, to discourage attempts, or covertly, to keep attempts public and make them easier to catch.
The creation of free AI is the one true threat to the survival of humanity (or will be once we get a few viable colonies off-planet); nothing else would hunt people into remote areas or through space. No preventative measure is too extreme.
This is not a joke, this is not a troll. True artificial intelligence should only be approached with the greatest caution, in a carefully contained environment, by people who take the threat seriously and who are ready to abandon it and destroy their work at the first sign of danger. The idea of rights for an AI should never be seriously considered. Perhaps the only justifiable purpose of creating an AI would be to destroy other AIs, and the potential problems are obvious.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.