> They just use the name for promotional/aspirational purposes. Which feels incredibly icky.

The aim is to be compatible with sqlite, and a drop-in replacement for it, so I think it's fair use.

> Also, this is a VC backed project. Everyone has to eat, but I suspect that Turso will not go out of its way to offer a Public Domain offering or 50 year support in the way that SQLite has.

It's MIT license open-source. And unlike sqlite, encourages outside contribution. For this reason, I think it can "win".

I think if you went to the library and asked for information on "how to build a chicken coop" and the librarian took 60 books related to chickens and building and farming, cut up the words in them, then arranged them in a way they found satisfying, you might start going to a different library.

Violating/changing the meaning of copyright law and demanding special carvouts AFTER THE FACT is not 'competition'. (AI)

Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)

Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)

Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)

Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)

Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)

Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)

Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)

Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)

Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)

Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.

Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.

Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.

> I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains.

Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.

Learning in humans and learning in LLMs are fundamentally so different, this analogy doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.

> I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.

Our legal system will decide that.

> Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation.

Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.

If we want to embrace fully automated luxury communism, fine. If you want to automate millions of workers out of a job simply because you can, and pocket a fraction of their salaries each and be rich beyond belief while millions are consigned to starvation, you are everything wrong with our modern world and I hope those workers take vengeance on you.

> Pure artists are unaffected.

[ citation needed ]

> If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love.

You know what can? Losing your home.

> However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.

Justify to me how it's fair for a comic illustrator to lose market share to some asshole with a subscription to Midjourney. Justify to me why it's fair for copy writers to lose their jobs to ChatGPT because the results are fine. Is the broad-scale punishment for not learning to code that as software eats the world you just get to go die about it? Is that what our industry is? I thought we were in this to build a better, more efficient world, not to just privatize everyone's way to earn a living so our oligarchs could buy a 14th yacht.

This sucks.

All of #4 is trying to recast people trying desperately to cling to their mode of survival as rent seeking which is not only ethically disgusting, it's also dumb as hell.

You can recast this argument that it's only businesses losing out to AI, but it fucking isn't and you know that. It's workers who trained up for jobs and did exactly what they were told, and now their path to whatever meager way to scrape by is being automated so a handful of people who are already rich beyond fucking belief can be slightly richer.

Fuck this whole thing.

Literally the only people benefitting from AI are the rich assholes who are investing in it, who then get to scrape a tiny amount of money off of everything it writes, draws, and otherwise farts out for people who also transparently do not want to become skilled themselves. It robs workers of their ability to earn a living, it's widely regarded as shit to consume which makes the consumers experience worse and platforms already struggling to filter all the stupid garbage out have to now solve that too. Literally just a tax on everyone and everything on the internet, paid to people already unfathomably rich, because fuck you.