riskable

I was going to say... Sure would be nice to have this feature in all the open source AI image generator tools but you're absolutely right 😩

The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.

The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.

For fuck's sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!

Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not "IP". Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).

Then let's talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It's nothing but trouble for them.

I'd also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They're idiots. They opened a can of worms that's kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they've doubled down on their decision.

Software existed for decades without (software) patents and has innovated and evolved vastly more quickly than any other science. Then we created software patents and things actually started to slow down (because lawsuits take time and threaten to end great software before it even exists).

Software is already covered by copyright which is all that was necessary for some of the richest companies in the world to come into existence (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle). Software patents shouldn't exist!

Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.

I mean, I also don't think patents should exist in general but there's a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is "just math". And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could--in theory--perform with a pencil and paper.

There's a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn't exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.

Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.

You're describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.

Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.

Furthermore, "back in the day" manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of "shared engineering knowledge". Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That's why patents were necessary: Disclosure

These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.

Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?

Software patents shouldn't exist!

The article sucks. The FTC isn't going after Microsoft's cloud services because they're good/bad. They're going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

They already do this with regular Windows--you have to use AD if you're a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems--but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

With Azure Windows servers though you're forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can't host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they'll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

There's probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that's the one big one I know off the top of my head.

After replacing writers and artists it is now replacing the entire category of, "old people". AI has reached the, "final solution" faster than I thought possible!

Because a lack of rest always moves projects forwards with absolutely no problems at all!

Exactly! I love how AI image generation can come up with funny surprises like that 🤣

I hope the hilarity never ends!

I use it for the hilarity!

I made a whole series of images representing the usual hair colors just for fun:

I have so much fun with images like this in Discord/Matrix and the occasional Lemmy post 🤣

That's a lot of dough